Object dependency

Personal relationships carry the same danger of confusing the real facts of the physical world and the ideal images of spiritual realms. The romantic love “cosmology of two” may be an ingenious and creative attempt, but because it is still a continuation of the causa-sui project in this world, it is a lie that must fail. If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become a Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. One can be utterly dependent whether one needs the object as a source of strength, in a masochistic way, or whether one needs it to feel one’s own self-expansive strength, by manipulating it sadistically. In either case one’s self-development is restricted by the object, absorbed by it. It is too narrow a fetishization of meaning, and one comes to resent it and chafe at it. If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. As Rank put it, explaining the historical bankruptcy of romantic love: a “person no longer wanted to be used as another’s soul even with its attendant compensations.” When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, if it is real. As Rank so aptly says, this double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man. It is impossible to get blood from stone, to get spirituality from a physical being, and so one feels “inferior” that his life has somehow not succeeded, that has not realized his true gifts, and so on.

E. Becker, p. 165