Joel Backström, 'Love, fear and the mind's moral dynamics: On how (not) to understand the "drive" and "ambivalence"'

Freud thought that a conflict between love and destructiveness, Eros and Death, structured human life with its difficulties, and that this conflict manifested itself in the pervasively ambivalent character of our emotions and relationships. I think Freud was right, but he confused his insight by trying to account for it in drive-terms. The idea of primordial drives has deep roots in our philosophical tradition, but it is nonetheless a fantasy, born as we unconsciously misrepresent our difficulties with love – which is not a drive, but the longing for opening oneself to others – in drive-terms. We fear the love we also long for; we flee from it, but subjectively we feel persecuted by others and ‘driven’ in all kinds of destructive directions. There is ambivalence because we cannot simply and definitely reject others, only deny and repress our longing for them – but the repressed always returns. My presentation will substantiate these suggestions through analyses of everyday responses. While my critique focuses on the drive-idea, I will also question the ability of standard ‘relational’ models to account for why the relatedness we need so much is also so terribly difficult for us.