Impossible Love, or Why The Heart Must Go Wrong

Jan Bauer

Vol. 19, No. 8, Spring 1994

(Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1993, 207 pages.)

In the closing pages of Impossible Love, or Why The Heart Must Go Wrong, Jan Bauer answers the questions posed by her title:

We need not only attainable ideals to work toward, but unattainable ones. We need to believe there is something beyond our horizon, and today horizons are less and less out there in new countries to conquer, and more and more in here, in our unexplored psyches.

In an age and culture which does not value the interior life, impossible love gives us the opportunity and the means for becoming aware of spiritual and emotional longings in ourselves. In Jungian terms, it may serve the process of individuation.

The doubt presented by the “may serve” of the last sentence is not an idle one. As the author, a Jungian analyst now practising in Montreal, makes clear, increased consciousness is by no means the only resolution of impossible love, or indeed any reversal of fortune. Yet until we can forego the self-pitying and other-blaming questions and ask in their place “Why now?” and “What for?,” we will not begin to entertain their meaning.

In answer to our question, “What are impossible loves?,” Bauer writes:

They happen at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and with the wrong person. They lead less to intimacy on earth than intimations of immortality somewhere between heaven and hell. No wonder they go by the name of “impossible love,” impossible to live, impossible to give up, impossible to understand ... They exalt and they humiliate, they promise and they disappoint, but they do not bring peace of mind. In addition to all this, they usually end badly.

Moreover, she continues, “(W)e go into these relationships knowing we shouldn’t … And once in, we stay in them long after we should, even when the impossibility is ‘proven’ beyond a reasonable doubt.”

These relationships are made impossible by outer taboos, such as violating the relationship between patient and therapist, or student and teacher, material concerns, inner inhibitions and psychological differences. Just how far-reaching the latter, the spiritual divide between the two, may be is illustrated by the twelfth-century story of star-crossed lovers, Abélard and Héloïse. It is their experience of impossible love, based on the evidence of their letters, that Bauer uses as a paradigm of her topic.

Of their failure to establish a real relationship, she writes, “(T)hey engaged more and more in what the French call a "dialogue de sourds," a dialogue of the deaf. Both idealized the image of the other in order to nourish another, deeper ideal.” Yet the significance they held for each other should not be measured only in terms of a failed relationship. Their separate truths “evolved, in fact, out of very deep previous belief systems that had been profoundly changed and colored by their passion together.”

What drew them apart grew out of a conflict between their idealization and love for one another.

[Heloïse] was willing to lose her reputation, but could not bear to make him lose his status of Great Philosopher and Scholar by marrying her. As for Abelard, needing to idealize Heloïse and keep her in the role of Perfect Woman-Mother-Saint, he could not acknowledge his own part in taking her off the pedestal in the first place.

As Bauer makes abundantly clear with contemporary examples from her own practice and literature, Abelard and Heloïse have not lost their power in today’s world. Indeed, in a society that no longer has traditional rites of passage, a passionate and impossible love provides the means of lacerating us “into initiation and, possibly transformation.” It is the obstacles—“the marriage, the professional reputation, the difference in age, or race, or class, or nationality”—that draw the lovers together and compel the idealization. Yet beyond the dynamics of the relationship, there are psychological dynamics within each participant that serve to determine the nature of the relationship and its outcome.

What are the characteristics of the impossible lover? In reply, Bauer writes:

More often than not, these are people who have set up their lives around a very specific inner image of what is right and what is wrong and who have tried very hard to conform to their own ideals. They are nearly always individuals of complexity who have not known how to espouse that complexity and so have tried to simplify it into a more acceptable image of apparent unity. Often, consciously or unconsciously, they have had to repress other parts of their personality in order to create this image of rightness and to fit in with the milieu they have chosen to join and function in.

Their adaptation is typical of what specialists in the field of developmental psychology have called the “False Self.” The False Self is the result of parenting which fails to mirror the child and forces it instead to adapt to parental needs and demands. This may lead to remarkable feats of accomplishment but at “the loss of genuine inner life. Whether we get caught,” Bauer continues, “in trying to be what our parents demanded or, just as bad, by our own inner ideal of being what the parents were not, we are unable to live the foolishness, risk-taking, openness and vulnerability that makes for a sense of creativity and fulfillment in life.”

To break through these defenses, a crisis—a major loss, a divorce, an illness, an impossible love—is needed. Yet the timing is not arbitrary. When love happens, we are ready to face the pain of the past. “Falling in love,” Bauer tells us, “has nothing to do with will power and everything to do with readiness. We are open to passion when we are open to change.” Should this love prove incapable of realization on an objective level, the change it brings will be within the person.

When the time is ripe then, impossible love, in conscious terms neither sought, nor desired, nor expected, breaks through. The archetypal energies which have been held in check by a restrictive ego, take possession of consciousness, bringing with them “intimations of immortality,” followed inevitably by despair. Both lovers experience themselves as living at a level of heightened awareness. As one woman quoted by Bauer expresses it:

I felt we could re-invent the world. We met on every level, emotionally, intellectually, sexually, totally, and so there seemed nothing we couldn’t have done together. The miracle of our passion seemed to justify all the pain and destruction it was wreaking in our lives and around us. It was like the ‘self-verifying’ experiences that the Church used to refer to.

In contrast to possible love where ideal is modified over time by reality, in impossible love enchantment with our vision leads us ever further from actuality. When disillusionment comes, as inevitably it does, we experience betrayal. Betrayal by the Other and more importantly, betrayal of self. We “need” this betrayal, Bauer asserts, “in order to transform our vision into something new.”

A part of the psychological work involves confrontation with the shadow, the shadow qualities we find in the Other, and those shadow qualities, such as envy, greed and possessiveness, that have been brought to light by the love relationship in ourselves. Experienced and acknowledged consciously, they gradually lose their power. Moreover, among those shadow qualities we have projected onto the Other, may be positive ones that serve to enhance our own consciousness.

Of the type of courage required of us so that we may ‘milk’ the experience of impossible love for its meaning to us, Bauer writes in the early pages of her book of a courage, “not necessarily of the active heroic kind,” that enables us to hold “the balance between the temptation to give up and the temptation to strike out.” A few lines later she acknowledges it isn’t easy. “We may be willing to read books and pay therapists but we want results. It is so much harder to let events take their course in our lives, to meet them, and to let their meaning unfold, without over-controlling or passively submitting.”

Towards the end of her book she returns to the same theme:

Lassitude, despair, simply running out of energy are all part of the return trip. The moments of joy are shorter and shorter, even the memories of joy pale beside the recall of humiliation, and all this signals the End. This happens naturally. We don’t have to generate it and we cannot stop it. There is just one thing we can do to help the process a little, and that is to let go, to make a sacrifice, not of our love, but of our control.

It is worth noting that Jan Bauer, although American born and holding a graduate degree in Adult Education from Boston University, has spent much of her adult life in a Gallic culture, in Europe, Tunisia and most recently, in Quebec. The effect of this has been to enhance her text with references to sources that are unknown and perhaps unavailable to most of us. Moreover, her background in education has meant a clarity and simplicity of expression that make her views accessible to readers without a grounding in Jungian psychology.

Impossible Love is a wise book, an informed book, on a topic of timeless significance. Not the least of its contributions is to offer us fresh insight into that aspect of impossible love found in the relationship between patient and analyst. Indeed, its author draws an analogy between Heloïse’s unquenchable love for Abelard and feelings expressed in a poem about psychoanalysis from Del McNeely’s book, Animus Aeternus (1991: Inner City Books, Toronto):

To touch, to reach beneath the armour, beneath the earth,

down among the roots of being,

To touch the buried moods, poems, dreams,

The seeds of soaring possibilities.

– —Alice Johnston