Isabel Alfandari, philosopher. “Can we protect ourselves with love?”

Love usually breaks down the barriers that separate us from others. By bringing another into our intimacy, we share with them our lives, our daily lives, as well as our fragilities; we entrust ourselves to him without fear of being judged or betrayed. The one whom the subject chooses in love is an object of choice that has something unique and absolute. Romantic relationships imply a trusting trust in the other, a trust that reminds the subject of experiences “together” since childhood; experiences of maternal or parental love, most often encouraging and comforting, which allowed us to build and gain our self-confidence.

To love means to trust another. it also means enabling others to rely on us. Under these circumstances, how can we imagine that we should or could protect ourselves from it? Protection implies an expectation of danger, the possibility of a reversal, which does not always go well with the unrequited intensity of the feeling of love. To love, however, does not mean to rely on others to the point of disappearing, to melt into them to the point of relinquishing all autonomy. While parents’ love for their children can be said to be unconditional, romantic relationships vary in adulthood, punctuated by ambivalence and unpredictable fluctuations. It is never impossible for the other to disappoint, fail, or worse.

Inalienable boundaries

If not trusting others would make little sense in love, on the other hand it is more than desirable to maintain a sense of one’s own inalienable boundaries, which the other cannot violate without harming the relationship itself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that “self-love” (which has nothing to do with self-esteem, nor what we would call narcissism today) allows everyone to preserve themselves and provide the basic conditions necessary for life or even survival. If love proverbially blinds a person, then this blindness cannot lead to self-harm, whether psychological or physical. Even out of love, we cannot accept everything from others. For self love as well as love of others.

Isabelle Alfandari is a philosopher, a professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and a writer in particular Science and fiction in Freud. What epistemology for psychoanalysis?

(Ithaca ed.).

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