In her book « En cas d’amour : psychopathologie de la vie amoureuse » (2009), Anne Dufourmantelle invites us to think about a central theme in everyone’s life: love. Through case studies based on some of her patients’ lives, the author – who is a French psychoanalyst and philosopher – opens a reflection that leads us to consider love from a different point of view.
Dufourmantelle explains how the past can tint our vision of love. When she writes about the past, it is not only about what happened to us before, but also about what scarred our ancestors and might be written in our genes. For example, the author presents something that can influence our love relationship: repetition patterns. Those can be defined as behaviors that we repeat in an unconscious way. The origin of a repetition pattern is an original scene that hurts us and that we try to repair. Dufourmantelle illustrates this with the case of one of her patient, Mina, who came to her saying these words: “I want you to help me to get rid of love”.
This young woman was deeply in love with the love of her youth named Serguei, with whom she had had a love relationship twenty-five years ago. She was still in love with him, and that kept her from finding love. She had lost sight of him, but was still desperately waiting for him. This story helps us to consider repetition : the original scene of Mina could take root in her familial history. Indeed, Mina’s grandmother had seen her son go off to war. Unfortunately, she had died a few days before her son returned, miraculously safe. Thereafter, the son married a woman who brutally passed away because of tuberculosis, while the disease was not supposed to be mortal anymore at this period. Finally, Mina’s father, who had been very absent in her life, was born with a stillborn twin who’d been named Serguei. One more time, this story illustrates that Mina’s genealogy is full of missed rendez-vous.
Her story is all about waiting. Because of some unconscious loyalty towards her family, Mina kept herself from experiencing a fulfilling love life, as if she was afraid to break a promise she would have made to herself: the promise to keep waiting for the missing to return. According to Dufourmantelle, repetition patterns place people through the timeline in such way that they will afford to repair what defaulted in their life as in their ancestors’. They are meant to repeat indefinitely the same patterns, with the hope that things will be different this time. Then, maybe the sorrow they are facing today and that their forefathers faced before them will finally fly away. There is a logic of desire that leads us to smash at the same place over and over again.
As for Mina, she met the love of her youth again and asked him to go on a date. But in the end, she never went to meet him. She figured out that this man of whom she had just but a vague memory was now nothing but an alibi and a lie on which her balance depended. With this impossible love story, she was saving her family: her great grand-mother grieving her son, her grand-father who had lost the love of his life. She was even resurrecting her father’s brother whose name was the same as her first love. She waited until the last day to fill their expectations.
Our critical point of view is that this interpretative method is very subjective, so we have to be cautious. However, to our mind, the key point is that this interpretation helped the patient : in fact, Mina finally moved on.
Bibliography :
Dufourmantelle, A. (2009). En cas d’amour: psychopathologie de la vie amoureuse. Payot & Rivages.