The Lack of Self-Love is the Pathogenesis of Falling in Love
Why are we so attracted to love? It’s like a drug we usually hear.

The torments associated with the feeling of love, anchored in our culture, would seem to be amplified in our time.
It is a psychoanalyst who says it: “The psys do not like love”. And patients, often, confirm. Caroline, 39, in analytic psychotherapy for two years, remembers the angry look of her therapist when she told him in full session, with unbridled enthusiasm, that she have met “the man of her life”: “He looked at me, eyebrows in the air and wrinkled forehead, then asked me a series of questions like: what really seduces you at home? Have you taken the time to speak well together? Etc. He looked like a worried parent,” laughs the young woman. Although this suspicion was undoubtedly inspired by this patient’s family and emotional story, it seems generally that psychotherapists have many reasons to be wary of love
Forcibly painful?
Of this noble sentiment universally hoped for, venerated, fantasized, they see more often than the pangs: toxic couple installed in the dependence, obsession towards an inaccessible person, melancholy dive after a rupture, exacerbation of the feeling of abandonment, inability to leave an abusive partner, destructive jealousy …. The words about love reported in session seem to illustrate Freud’s thought that “We are never as badly protected against suffering as when we love.”
This vision of an inevitably painful love existed well before the invention of psychoanalysis, as the philosopher Olivia Gazalé aptly tells us in her essay ‘I love you at the philo’ (Editions Robert Laffont). She explores the subtle links between our affective lives and the thought of a Spinoza or Sartre, and answers in depth questions as essential as “the disenchantment is it inevitable?” Or “chooses to be love?”.
Son of Ares and Aphrodite
For her, this risk of “love-suffering” is based first and foremost, in each of us, on a “culture of passionate logic” that has been dominant for centuries: “In love, we suffer even before know it,” observes the philosopher. And to invoke the three great founding myths that haunt our unconscious: Eros, a god of love born of sensuality (Aphrodite) and war (Ares); the Passion of Christ, which mixes love and suffering; finally, the secular myth of Tristan and Yseult, which forever seal in our minds the image of lovers so excited by passion that they die.
The philosopher then joins the psychological approach of love when it describes the suffering to which it, in its very essence, constrains us: desire for fusion, lack of the other and jealousy, awareness of our ontological loneliness .
As part of a psychotherapy, the way of loving is also a red thread to clarify a diagnosis, such as “tell me how you like, I’ll tell you who you are”: “The narcissistic personalities do not know love nor experience it. They are unable to empathize, says Dr. Richard Meyer. Borderlines attract love but do not believe that another can love them; Dependent personalities accept anything from a loving partner as long as they are kept … “
We dream of being in love when everyday life catches up with us or when we are frustrated by the frequent dissatisfaction of our relationships. And when we are in love, the dopaminergic chemical cocktail transports us to the most radiant heavens where we feel wings; but that often make us fall into the underworld of lack or jealousy the next moment ..
As in the fairy tales, or the myth of Plato’s banquet where we seek our ‘complementary half’, to find this feeling of unity, once we touch it with a being, we find it difficult to distance ourselves even if a a reasonable little voice tells us that it is not the royal way, that we must first establish ourselves in self-love, before going to meet the other.
And for lovers of love, even after years of working on oneself, tragic experiences of failure that lead to a more precise understanding of the mechanisms of attachment, it does not take much to return to the trap of love and its consequences to curl the pathos, even if the states of suffering last less still.
But how can one be so fragile, so dependent, even after so many romantic relationships? What takes us so much time to run after love at first sight, the soul mate, the thrill of this love state?
A taste for living intensely? A simple shoot? A way of realizing that we are alive as if we do not feel it without it? A way to manage boredom? As if playing the role of a romantic character was a safe and rewarding achievement. It is well written everywhere that we are beings made to live the love, that it is the high value of our existence, as we say from the beginning?
And why do we say that if this flame is not maintained in the couple then the relationship is extinguished, the desire wears out and the problems begin.
So too much love kills love, not enough too?
Attachment is therefore painful, because to cling is to take the risk of separating or not really counting for the other, whereas we want more than what he can give often when we are in love. Once we meet someone that vibrates on our wavelength, we have only one desire is to own it, to keep it, and that is where the cycle of attachment suffering risk of appearing. For example with the famous love game so well known: “follow me I run away from you, flee me I follow you” If I show you how much I care about you, you can not in return respond to this desire to see you, you can instead feel overwhelmed by my oppressive demands, and distance yourself.
And at the same time realize that one who is in demand, borders on both the very unpleasant lack and at the same time enjoys the intensity of the love state that accompanies it. While the one who is colder is not affected or is cut off momentum.
So if you follow me, involuntarily one could say that despite the suffering of lack, the lover feels the tension of desire, and feels obsessively transported to the object of love coveted. The frustration of not having increases tension and obsession.
It is as if this archaic schema repeats itself: “if he is interested in me, I exist, if he does not deign to look at me, I believe that I do not exist” or while I am not someone interesting.
It may be the pathological or dramatic side of the story! As at the very beginning of our life, it is possible to return to this sensation of transparency, of non-existence if the gaze is not laid sufficiently on us.
This famous need of recognition, validation to allow us to distinguish ourselves from others, to have our place.
How to get out of this infernal schema? And that brings us back to the dependence of a little one in a big skin, which we judge moreover as unworthy of our greatness!
One track would be to feel at the moment when the appearance of the symptom “I am nothing” appears, but already recognize this symptom because in general, it is the lack that is felt and not the “I do not exist” more.
The people we live in virtual in our mental imagery, exist more than ourselves at this time.
There is to invest the field of attention on our feeling of existence, to feel to be an important person, already in our own eyes, to see to find others
“I love me.” Many of us find it hard to say I love myself. Some of us have easy to say I love you to someone else, but can at the same time pronounce I hate myself to themselves. Still, self-love according to more and more lecturers and researchers is the only way to achieve sustainable relations and sustainable health.
Most people who lecture on spiritual relationships, mean that if we do not love or at least accept ourselves, then the other will perceive us as demanding, suffocating, clumsy and emotionally unattractive. We usually perceive people who want one of us as emotional vampires, except if they are our children. An adult does not want to do your job of loving yourself.
Grate for self-love is meant to be the reason why so many of us feel abandoned or feel that we are not given priority. They are even those who believe that self-hatred can cause the body to die. If we look at what happens to the water and rice that I write about in my post To program water — then we can see how important self-love is — because our words and thoughts affect our health to such a great extent. (You can also see videos about the experiments here and here.)
How can we begin to love ourselves? Louise Hay recommends that we say I love me 300–400 times a day, especially the days we feel hungry or abandoned. She also believes that the day we really decide to start loving ourselves, every form of self-criticism must cease.






