Impossible Love
Looking for Meaning When Hope Is Gone
Jean Reynolds, Ph.D.
Copyright 2012 Jean Reynolds
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: What Is Impossible Love?
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Chapter 1
We've all been there: The excruciating and exhilarating obsession called Impossible Love. Although the adjective “impossible” could probably be applied to just about any love relationship since Adam and Eve, we're using it in a special way. “Impossible Love” is a fantasy relationship that clearly, right from the beginning, is headed nowhere—usually falling in love with someone we've never met (a rock star, TV personality, movie star, or public figure), or a person hopelessly out of reach (a happily married boss, therapist, or clergyperson).
If we could think rationally (out of the question right now), we’d realize that the beloved is a creation of our vivid imagination who (unpleasant truth) wouldn't be interested in us anyway. Or would be impossible to live with. Or would break our hearts. Rational thinking might also help us face the unpleasant reality that this fantasy romance could be threatening our marriage or a longstanding relationship with someone we care deeply about.
No matter. We're in love.
Or perhaps the beloved really does exist, and we know each other. We might even have embarked on an affair. But all the signs are there that this isn't going to work. The beloved has serious character flaws, such as substance abuse or a long history of infidelity. Or the beloved is already married, with no intention of leaving. Or we're caught up in what psychologists blandly call “a transference”—obsessive love for a therapist, teacher, doctor, or minister that shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s just a stage we’re growing through.
So why does this romantic fantasy seem so earth-shatteringly important, and why do we feel like we're dying inside?
Most important, what should we do about it?
That’s a tough question. Impossible Love always feels like we should do something—make a declaration of love, abandon everything so that we can live together in a beach house in Hawaii, or simply follow the beloved to the ends of the earth in worshipful devotion. What we don't want to do is go on with our regular lives—and yet that is exactly what is needed.
(I need to acknowledge that sometimes Impossible Love does turn into Possible Love and even Actual Love, complete with a storybook happy ending. But those instances are rare, and they are not what this book is about. Of course you, reading this book, want to pretend that yours is going to be one of the exceptions. You're allowed to do that: It's part of the experience. Just keep reading.)
Many great minds of the past and present have been just as fascinated by Impossible Love as you and I are. In the movie The Blue Angel, a dignified middle-aged professor makes a fool of himself over a cabaret performer (Emil Jennings and Marlene Dietrich). A contemporary story with a happier ending (though not a union of lover and beloved) is Allison Pearson's wonderful novel I Think I Love You (13-year-old Petra falls for David Cassidy and, years later, actually meets him).
Even Shakespeare was intrigued by Impossible Love. In Midsummer Night's Dream, a love potion causes Titania, queen of the fairies, to fall in love with an uncouth workingman named Nick Bottom. To underline the absurdity, Bottom has been magically outfitted with a donkey's head. When Titania declares her love to him, he responds with words that still resound today: “Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that: and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days….”
Exploring this painful, humiliating, and wondrous gap between “reason and love” is the purpose of this book. What does it mean, what can we learn, and what will we do when it’s over? Many encounters with Impossible Love (like teen-aged Petra’s adoration for David Cassidy, which evaporated six months later), eventually run their course. We look back in relief that we didn’t really jettison everything for a short-lived passion.
Sometimes, though, Impossible Love does not exit quietly: A hidden flame continues to burn years or even decades later. If you’ve ever read Gone with the Wind, you may remember Scarlett’s mother, Ellen, delirious with her final illness, calling for the mysterious “Philippe” on her deathbed (her husband's name was Gerald).
Whether it’s a short-lived adolescent thunderstorm or a lifelong secret obsession, we have to ask ourselves what it all means. Our love never finds its object, never reaches that rapturous finish line. Does all that suffering have a purpose?
The answer is yes. Behind all the pain, humiliation (and often guilt) lie the secret yearnings of the soul (also called the psyche)—the part of us that seeks connectedness and meaning. This little book proposes to talk about Impossible Love from the perspective of the deep mysteries and dark secrets of the soul. If you’ve ever felt empty, or emerged from a crushing experience wondering what it all meant, you have had a powerful encounter with the soul. And Impossible Love, as we will soon discover, is one of the most important ways that the soul communicates with us.
What Does It All Mean?
You, reading these words, are perhaps caught in the throes of a love bigger than you ever could have imagined. Your inner world (and possibly your outer world as well) is in chaos. You want one of two things to happen right now:
1. To be magically transported into the arms of your beloved
2. To let go of the internal hurricane and return to what you once were
Neither is likely.
What can happen, however, is a transformation so far-reaching and profound that you could scarcely have conceived of it. Impossible Love awakens our depths, energizes our imagination, and gets us in touch with our destinies in a way that no other experience can. As you go through this book, I think you will be surprised by the potential for growth that lies hidden inside an encounter with Impossible Love.
Think about all the people you know (including, perhaps, yourself) who yearn for the wisdom to discover who we truly are and all we are meant to be. We assume that the only path to that experience is to take a year off, climb a remote mountain, and become an acolyte of a guru who is in touch with the mysteries of the ages.
Here’s a surprise: Impossible Love can do all that for us, and often it’s as close as our heartbeat.
Falling Apart
It happens every year when February 14 rolls around: We’re surrounded by cards and candy boxes depicting the god of love as a fat baby with an arrow. That popular symbol reminds us that love often strikes us against our will, making us childish and foolish. “Falling in love again—never wanted to,” sings Lola Lola in The Blue Angel—a complaint we understand all too well.
But we often behave as if love was a choice, asking ourselves over and over again why we’re acting like moon-struck adolescents. Guilt and shame invariably follow, driving us to heroic efforts to banish them—a futile undertaking that only makes matters worse. Didn’t Jesus teach that wishing is the same as doing? (“But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her...” Matthew 5:28).
If we turn to popular psychology for help, we encounter still more reasons to feel ashamed and wrong: The “I create it all” philosophy, with its insistence that we’re choosing to be unhappy; the habit of labeling every strong feeling as an addiction; and the dubious practice of defining mental health as a kind of bland serenity, so that every strong emotion makes us fear for our sanity.
Fortunately there’s a better approach, rooted in both depth psychology and—surprisingly—our spiritual traditions, both of which value the experience of being out of control. Every 12-Step meeting begins with an admission of powerlessness (over alcohol, food, gambling, or a number of other things.). And every spiritual program begins by asking adherents to surrender the ego.
What can our out-of-control moments teach us? Here are four ways that we can be transformed:
1. Instead of presenting a super-competent facade to the outside world, we'll be more honest about who we really are, flaws and all.
2. We'll take a hard look at what isn't working in our lives and make some necessary changes.
3. We'll get in touch with complex mysteries that are often forgotten in the manic pace of modern life.
4. We'll be ready to give and receive love when the real thing comes along.
Losses
Impossible Love is always about loss—loss on a grand scale, overwhelming and meaningless, as we bleakly face an endless future without the beloved. Is there anything to be learned from all that humiliation and grief?
Spirituality provides an unexpected answer in its insistence on the necessity of loss. If you were to join a traditional religious community, you would be asked to relinquish everything: Not just your material possessions, but your name, your family, and your past. Jesus taught that we must be willing to lose our lives in order to save them (Matthew 10:39 and Luke 17:33). Jesus—and every other spiritual leader—is talking about losing the ego.
Some spiritual guides go astray here, emphasizing will power in a kind of spiritual Olympics competition: I can do without ice cream, or cigarettes, or booze, longer than you can. Truly relinquishing the ego is about something quite different: Letting go of the mistaken belief that we can do anything and be anything we choose.
Back in 1875 William Ernest Henley summarized the false confidence of the ego very nicely in a poem: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Although his “Invictus” is a lovely poem, Henley was wrong, as you can easily confirm by remembering a time when love drove you to make an idiot of yourself. Jettisoning this “captain of my soul” illusion is a necessary first step in personal growth.
Every spiritual tradition agrees on the necessity of this loss of ego: We must go down before we can go up. In olden times, when people relied on religion for self-transformation, there were spiritual masters charged with managing the task of breaking down the ego through public confessions and humiliating penances. Buddhism takes a different approach, guiding its followers to use meditation to confront their inner restlessness and dark thoughts, but the goal is the same.
What about people who aren’t religious and don’t have access to a spiritual master? Impossible Love can work almost as well as a teacher of humility and compassion. Suddenly I’m embarrassed about all the times I made fun of a friend who was caught up in a ridiculous love affair (“Why does she keep chasing him? Can’t she see that he’s all wrong for her?”). And I find myself reluctant to make pronouncements about other people’s immaturity and lack of self-control, remembering that I’ve been there, done that myself.
What’s most important about loss, of course, is what we find behind the clutter we’re discarding. The belief that we can master our thoughts and impulses and control every aspect of our lives gives way to a conviction that there is someone or something else inside. Funny that we never noticed it before—all the noise and bustle must have been drowning it out. There's a voice—a strong voice—with a mind of its own and a determination to plot its own course that we disobey at our peril.
Slowly we begin to realize that we need to reorient our lives. Instead of endlessly setting up New Worlds to Conquer so that we can impress family and friends, we try to find out what this inner force is asking us to do. We begin to write down our dreams and pay attention to the wispy images that float through our daydreams. More and more often we notice the inner vibrations that signal an idea or experience that demands our attention. We are beginning to discover the soul.
Creating a Space
Anyone who has ever experienced Impossible Love knows that figuring out what to do is the biggest issue. Our emotional energy keeps pushing outward as we look for ways to connect with a beloved who is frustratingly out of reach. And it’s not just our love that’s impossible: It’s the whole problem of finding an outlet for that pulsing, relentless energy.
Often the beloved is far away, or doesn’t even know we’re alive, so that we must bear the pain of an anonymous and apparently meaningless passion that looks foolish to everyone except us, the ones nursing the aching heart. Or the beloved may be close at hand but unavailable. We have to live with the sad truth that the consequences of a love declaration may be so destructive that we have no choice but to shroud our feelings in secrecy.
The only answer is to create an inner space where the energy can be contained, explored, and transformed. If we have an exceptional degree of self-awareness, we may already know that it was our imaginative faculty that invented the beloved in the first place. Love—even the real thing that culminates happily in a permanent relationship—is always heavily infused with imagination, at least in the early stages. It's only when the relationship matures that we begin to let go of the dreamy expectation that every wish, hope, and longing is going to be fulfilled.
Because Impossible Love never has this kind of encounter with reality, it must continue to find a home in the imagination. And it is there, in the fantasies and daydreams, that we can explore its hidden meanings and allow its transformative magic to happen.
In an interview about her book I Think I Love You, author Allison Pearson called teenaged Petra’s obsession with David Cassidy “a dress rehearsal for love.” We all need that initiation into the demands of real love, and Impossible Love can provide it for us: Today’s daydreams evolve into tomorrow’s reality.
But that’s only the beginning. In Pearson’s book, the grown-up Petra looks back on her younger self with scorn, telling a male friend that her love for Cassidy was fake, meaningless, and ridiculous. “No,” he tells her, “it was a wonderful love story, and you told it to yourself with all your heart, and you made it true.”
The opportunity to discover this kind of inner truth is one of many gifts that Impossible Love can bestow on us. In our fantasies about the beloved we discover what we truly want from life: Glamour, passion, intellect, fame, adventure, virtue, fun—perhaps the qualities we find so dazzling in our make-believe world can be transformed and incorporated in to our everyday reality.
And we are also discovering the potential hidden within us: What we love in others is what we can hope to be ourselves. Psychologists tell us that projections are mirrors—what we see in the other person is actually a reflection of a latent something hidden within ourselves. We will return to this idea in Chapter 7.
Discipline
Discipline may be the last word we associate with the wildly fluctuating moods of Impossible Love, but it is an important one. Amid the fantasies and unfilled yearnings of the fantasy romance, life must go on. Part of me longs to travel the beloved’s doorstep, certain that he will recognize me instantly as the life partner he is destined for. But another part of me knows that union is never going to happen and there’s no point in, say, saving up to buy a ticket to Hollywood. Even if the beloved is close at hand, I may still have to live with the miserable truth that there's no point in trying to lure him away from his wife and kids.
As time goes by with no easing of my pain, loneliness becomes an increasing problem. Friends soon tire of hearing about my obsession (unless, like Petra, everyone in my circle loves David Cassidy as much as I do). Or, if my beloved is real, I may know that I can trust no one with the guilty secret of my burning feelings. I have never felt so alone.
There seems no need to my suffering—but, cruelly, life still confronts me with a lengthy To Do list every day: School or work (or both), meals, shopping, cleaning, paying bills, childcare. Family and friends demand my attention; chores and obligations come and go on schedule. Much as I long to withdraw completely into my fantasy of love, I have to go on with my life.
The average person who either pities or laughs at lovesick adolescents (and the adults who act like them) has no idea of the discipline and grit that lie hidden from view when someone is suffering from Impossible Love. The entrapped person looks so foolish that no one is going to honor the determination and courage it takes just to keep on going, minute by minute, day by day.
And so Impossible Love goes underground, expressed only in secret and embarrassing rituals: Making a scrapbook, creating poems and stories, writing endless letters that never find their way to a mailbox. Do our creations—destined never to be seen by the beloved—have any value?
The ancient story of Eros and Psyche, by the Latin writer Apuleius, may have an answer for us. A beautiful young girl named Psyche lives in a magical castle with Eros, her handsome lover. All goes well until she disobeys his commands and is banished from his castle. His mother decides to punish the girl who treated her son so badly, and so poor Psyche is ordered to complete a number of impossible tasks, including sorting a mountain of tiny seeds by sundown that day. Luckily an army of ants takes pity on her, and Psyche is successful. (You can read more of this ancient story, which is full of insights about love, by clicking here.)
If we look inside ourselves, we can see that we all harbor both an Eros (burning love) and Psyche (living soul) inside. Eros lights the fire, and Psyche finds ways to express it. If either one is missing, something vital is lost: We slog through a life devoid of meaning and passion, or we flit aimlessly from relationship to relationship without a clue about how to keep our love alive. Psyche’s story—and ours—has meaning after all.
Now think of the little handmade gifts that we create in secret—all the energy and concentration we pour into the talismans of love that never reach their destination. Like Psyche in the story, we are learning concentration, persistence, and the giving of self. And we are doing it in the context of pressing matters that must be dealt with almost every day—household tasks, daily routines, paperwork or homework. Later we will be able to take what we have learned and apply it to the nurturing of a real relationship.
Suffering
The tale of Eros and Psyche centers around an unpleasant truth: Suffering is necessary. Here we will find ourselves harking back to the spiritual traditions that used to put so much emphasis on suffering that adherents routinely whipped and starved themselves. There are huge differences between a spiritual regimen and the pangs of Impossible Love, of course: No one chooses an encounter with Impossible Love, and it’s hard to find anything uplifting about a phenomenon so selfishly centered on my heartache and my unfulfilled longing.
And yet there are similarities. Impossible Love can often evoke the same selfless devotion we see in advanced spirituality. Unlike married love, which often refuses to make even the smallest sacrifice (“We’re not going to your mother’s for dinner, and don’t mention it again!”), Impossible Love finds joy in fulfilling the beloved’s tiniest whims and smallest wishes. That rock star will never know that some devoted follower 500 miles away just acquired an all-green wardrobe because he told an interviewer that it's his favorite color.
Back to the question of suffering. Why do we need to suffer for love? Why can’t it be simply a rose-scented escape into daydreams and longing?
There’s no simple answer (and that’s true of any experience related to the soul: What we think and feel is always infinitely richer than any words on a page could convey). One possibility is that suffering deepens our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. Impossible Love is most likely to strike in early adolescence, when we’re starting to develop an awareness of a destiny beyond familiar family life. And it’s also likely to strike when life becomes complacent or an intimate relationship is losing its luster. The emptiness of contemporary life is a problem we all hear about constantly—but it’s conspicuously missing in the lexicon of complaints from anyone who’s just been struck by Cupid’s arrow.
Another lesson we learn from this suffering is that we can contain it and bear it, often for unbelievably long periods of time. After we’ve moved past the adolescent crushes on media personalities, Impossible Love becomes increasingly risky: My marriage (or his), my career (or hers), might be destroyed if the truth about what I’m feeling comes out.
And so, all alone, I must make the decision to hide my yearnings. Amid the sighs that no one hears and the silent tears that no one wipes away, I am learning to choose a greater good. The inability to do without something I desperately want, and to go on with a life that is not what I want, is one of the most important lessons any human being can learn. Only when that brave choice is made can real transformation begin.
Chapter 7
Projections
Now we turn to the inner process that creates Impossible Love. Projections are the stuff Impossible Love is made of. Understanding this simple truth does not, alas, lessen our suffering in the slightest way, but it does allow us to take a few steps to the side and find a new vantage point. As long as we’re trapped inside the mountain of feelings that characterize Hopeless Love, change is impossible. But that small sidestep is a new beginning: Now the transformation can begin. First, though, we need to spend some time thinking about projections—what they are, how they happen, and the risks and rewards they can bring.
Let’s start with the familiar image of a film projector that’s showing a movie on a screen in a theater. The projector and film are behind us, out of sight in the darkened theater. Our attention is captured by the flickering images on the screen—so much, in fact, that we usually forget about the projector unless it malfunctions and interrupts our enjoyment of the film.
Psychological projections are films of a sort that we project (“throw”) onto someone else. Life with a teenager is a good example, for it often involves a daily struggle with projections. Adolescence is a turbulent time because teenagers are caught between love for their families and yearning for independence. To facilitate that transition, many teenagers endlessly replay a kind of film in which their parents are heartless creatures holding them back from the joys of life. The “screen” is their parents’ faces. And so it is that Mom may get a hostile reaction from her fifteen-year-old son when she makes the simple announcement that dinner is ready or she’s heading to the grocery store.
Projections—always unconscious and always believable— lie at the root of biases and prejudices, as well as the positive feelings we get when we meet someone who seems compatible with us. We believe that what we’re perceiving is the absolute truth, never realizing that we're creating the positive or negative image ourselves. (That’s why, when adolescence is coming to an end, we’re astonished to discover how nice and how wise our parents are after all: Another set of projections takes over—the belief that our parents are just like ourselves.)
Knowing where the projections of Impossible Love come from (the unknown parts of ourselves) doesn’t help us understand why they suddenly explode into our lives. No simple answer is possible (and we wouldn’t believe it anyway: Impossible Love, by definition, always seems absolutely real). We can suggest five possibilities, however:
1. The qualities we love represent hidden potential within ourselves. By obsessing about the beloved, we’re taking a sort of distance-learning course in how to develop those qualities in our own lives.
2. The loved person is a substitute for someone who was missing at a vital stage in our development (father, mother, big brother, grandma). Even if the relationship is mostly imaginary, we’ll have an opportunity to catch up on some nurturing that was missing back then.
3. We’re imagining that we’re in the presence of a mythical personage—Jesus, a war hero, Florence Nightingale, Martin Luther King. Charismatic leaders often use projections (consciously or unconsciously) to inspire and energize their followers.
4. We’re getting an intimate look at a future life partner. By imagining that I’m his wife or lover, I’m getting ready for an adult relationship that may not appear until years from now.
5. We’re drawn to something that’s been missing in our lives so far. The time and energy we invest in loving from afar helps the soul build a vivid picture of what we need. As that desire becomes more vivid and detailed, we can start looking for ways to incorporate it into our lives.
Here are some examples of how these scenarios might work in the actual lives of real people:
1. She is crazy about a figure skater who’s just won a gold medal; later she become a champion athlete herself.
2. She marries an older man who mentors her into the show business career she’s dreamed of.
3. He adores a community activist, becomes involved in politics, and eventually is elected to office.
4. The junior high English teacher he worships has many of the qualities he looks for in a wife ten years later.
5. Love for the glamorous life her handsome boss is leading awakens her dissatisfaction with her marriage: She revives her marriage and develops exciting new interests—or ends the marriage and embarks on a happier one (but not with that handsome boss, who remains oblivious to the whole episode).
Not all endings are happy. The mentoring relationship can end in a messy divorce when teaching is no longer needed (think of Sonny and Cher). Not all marriages can be mended, no matter how hard we try, and not all dreams come true. But the energy that Impossible Love awakens can be a powerful force for change if we are patient, persistent, and willing to make mistakes.
One question remains: Why is Impossible Love even necessary in these situations? Couldn’t we assess our lives, hopes, and dreams, and failures, and go on to seek what we want without all the trauma and turmoil of falling in love with someone hopelessly out of reach?
Depth psychology has several answers to this question. One is the mysterious nature of the soul, which has its own voice, timetable, and agenda. If you live long enough, you discover that it’s no use making detailed plans and setting elaborate goals: Your soul is going to resound with demands that have to be obeyed (unless you're willing to spend your life struggling with some form of emotional disorder).
A related answer is human stubbornness and unwillingness to change. We can ignore bad dreams, haunting images, and even—in some cases—anxiety and depression. But when love comes knocking at the door, life abruptly comes to a halt. Impossible Love, for all its pain, is one of the most powerful tools the soul can use to get our attention and motivate us to make changes in our lives.
And that brings us to literalism and our next chapter.
Literalism
Most of us confuse imagination with reality a lot of the time. That mistake—acting as if the things our soul imagines are literally true—is called (logically enough) literalism. Literalism is the reason people run away from 25 years of marriage to move in with someone they’ve known for only two or three days. Luckily that sort of impulsive behavior is rare—but literalism can take other forms as well. Even if we’re strong enough and smart enough to resist rushing into a new relationship, we might interpret our racing heartbeat as a sign that our often-annoying spouse and less-than-perfect lifestyle aren’t worth saving.
If Impossible Love is often a sign from the soul that we have work to do, wouldn't it be simpler if we just got, say, a curriculum and a workbook? Is all that trauma really necessary?
The answer to both questions is yes. If, say, a software program to growth were available, we could go through the process with finesse and dignity. Unfortunately most of us are so stubbornly set on our current path that it takes an earthquake to open us up to change. For many of us, Impossible Love provides that earthquake.
And within that experience lies a huge contradiction: In order to grow, we have to both surrender totally to the love experience and dispassionately observe it from a distance. Reconciling those contrary demands is so impossible that we are bound to fail. In our humiliation, we forget that learning is supposed to be a clumsy process: What did we look like when we were learning how to ride a bicycle? Part of the problem is that we expect all the untidy parts of our lives to be over by the time we reach our twenties or thirties.
Transformation
Ask a counselor what kinds of problems her clients talk about, and you'll find complaints about the emptiness and meaninglessness of life at the top of the list. Why, in a world so full of freedom and opportunity, do so many of us feel disengaged and lost? Perhaps one answer is that we have not fully given ourselves over to the experience of Impossible Love. Therapy, medication, and a frenetic lifestyle offer us tools to cut off that necessary foolishness before it has time to fully run its course and teach its important lessons.
If we're fortunate (although we certainly wouldn't use that word to describe what we've been through) Impossible Love refuses to release its grip until its work is done: The permanent shattering of the calm and component image we try to present to the outside world. Even if we've managed to hide the story of our futile search for love, we cannot conceal the changes it has wrought.
Impossible Love teaches that our willpower has limits, our feelings are stronger than we are, and we do not hold the keys to our own destinies. We begin to respect the secrets and mysteries of the universe and our own souls. When we finally emerge from the Tunnel of Impossible Love, we are sadder, humbler, and—paradoxically—more alive than ever before.
If we can see past our complaints and grief, we will notice a dignity and poise that we never had before: We are now the central characters in a love story as important as any tale in human history. For the first time we know that we are worthy of love (even if the fates decreed that it be withheld from us for now)—an explosive, dynamic passion totally different from the pale, obligatory niceness we so often receive from relatives and friends.
In the ancient tale of Eros and Psyche, the two lovers are eventually reunited in a permanent bond that culminates in the birth of a little girl named Pleasure. It is here that ancient wisdom dramatically departs from contemporary notions about mental health, with its goals of serenity, wisdom, and the creation of a higher and better self. (Remember the movie Eat, Pray, Love, when Liz Gilbert renounced her lover because he disturbed her balance?)
The bland contentment we associate with phrases like self-actualization and personal development has little in common with the rapturous bliss that Eros and Psyche find together. Which approach to happiness are we going to choose?
But all of this is perhaps too abstract and intellectual to help us face the real-life turmoil that Impossible Love unleashes when Cupid decides to fire one of his arrows. In our final chapter we will look at some actual examples of Impossible Love from life and literature.
Cupid's Arrow
Our first story is from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, a play about a professor of speech who takes on an unusual pupil—a dirty and impoverished flower girl—and vows to transform her into an upper-class exemplar of refinement and flawless English. Bernard Shaw called his play Pygmalion, harking back to a mythical tale about a creator who falls in love with the work of art he has made.
You may know the play as My Fair Lady, a wonderful musical that ends with a happy reunion between Professor Higgins and his pupil Eliza Doolittle. In his original play, though, Shaw insisted that Eliza instead married an unimpressive young suitor named Freddy Eynsford-Hill.
Was Shaw right? If we look at the story through the lens of what we know about Impossible Love, we may be able to hazard an answer. Act 5 of Shaw's original play makes it clear that Higgins and his pupil are in love with each other. She is deeply wounded by his offhanded disregard for everything she has learned; he falls apart when he discovers that she has moved out of his life.
In their final conversation, Higgins declares his feelings for her in words so awkwardly strung together that we know he has never been in love before: “I shall miss you, Eliza…I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.”
That is as far as Higgins can go. He projects (there’s that word again!) his own foolishness onto Eliza with his backhanded compliment about learning from her “idiotic notions.” He cannot yield to the torrent of vital energy trying to push its way up from his soul. Clamping down on his feelings, he loses Eliza to Freddy, who does not shrink from the passion he is feeling. The endless love letters he sends her finally win her over.
What will happen to Eliza? Shaw’s Epilogue has one tantalizing final comment about her: “Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up.” Higgins seems likely to play a lifelong role as her beloved in an Impossible Love story that her imagination will be spinning for years to come.
As she twists and turns the story in her own mind, Eliza will continue to grow into womanhood. Higgins, however, will remain stuck where he is now, an overgrown boy who never quite got over his attachment to his mother.
The “grow into womanhood” idea we just touched on is worth a moment’s reflection. If we look at the stories of true love that unfold around us every day, we can see that they often center on two types of women, both attractive to men in different ways. One type uses her sensuality to draw men to her; the other, seemingly oblivious to sex, is so caught up in her own interests that she scarcely notices the men who keep trying to capture her attention.
It’s easy to understand the allure of the first type of woman. But how do we explain the second? The answer is that she personifies soul—the rich inner life that must be united with the dramatic power of male sexuality.
This theme comes to life in our second story, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Eros and Psyche tale by C. S. Lewis. In his version, Psyche welcomes her sister to the beautiful castle where Eros has taken Psyche to live as his bride. Her sister, however, sees only a bare place in a forest. The meaning is clear: When love and soul are united, imagination transforms everything; when they’re missing, life presents us a barren landscape.
Our final story, taken from real life, is about ballet master George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, the young ballerina who inspired him to create some of his greatest ballets. In his book I Was a Dancer, Jacques D’Amboise (a member of Balanchine’s company, the New York City Ballet) tells the story of Balanchine’s hopeless love for Farrell. Despite their close friendship, she refused to embark on an affair with him.
Balanchine was at the height of his fame, creative genius, and power. He was widely considered the most important choreographer in the United States—some said the best in the world. He had absolute power over the fortunes of every dancer in his company, including—of course—Farrell. And yet, as D’Amboise recounts, Balanchine spent endless hours sitting patiently outside Farrell’s dressing room, waiting for permission to take her out to dinner or walk her home.
When Farrell married another dancer from the company, Balanchine’s jealousy erupted into rage: He fired her husband from the company, prompting the newlyweds to depart for a European ballet company. It is an absurd story of Impossible Love at its worst—until we look at the ballets that the lovesick Balanchine was inspired to create during his troubled relationship with Farrell.
These fragmented and unfulfilled love stories sum up much of what we have been trying to learn about Impossible Love. It is at once foolish and inspiring, frustrating and liberating. Impossible Love destroys our familiar selves in order to create a new identity for us that is both more childish and more wise than the person we thought we were. Above all, it is a mystery that we must yield to as it awakens the imagination, teaches us the rituals of love, and puts us in touch with the darkest secrets of our destinies and our souls.
If you belong to a book club, the topic of Impossible Love can generate some lively discussion. Here are some questions you might like to talk about:
1. What examples of Impossible Love can you recall from books, movies, and TV shows? What issues were explored? How did the characters handle the problems they encountered?
2. Impossible Love is common among teenagers, and it often appears again as people grow older. How is the experience of Impossible Love similar in both groups? What are the differences?
3. What are the dangers of Impossible Love? The benefits?
4. Do you think Impossible Love is more prevalent in men or women? Older people or younger people? Why?
5. Do you think there are any special features of the times we’re living in that make us especially prone to experience Impossible Love?
These two books deal with a number of psychological issues, including Impossible Love. Because they’re written from the perspective of depth psychology, they can make difficult reading. Be patient with yourself, and keep going back: The effort will reward you. (You can sample both free at http://books.google.com/books.)
James Hillman, “The Suffering of Impossible Love,” The Myth of Analysis (Northwestern University Press, 1960), pp. 92 – 106.
Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (Princeton University Press, 1956).
Visit www.SoulSpace.us to learn more about the mysteries of the soul.
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Gretel’s Story: Finding the Way Home
by Jean Reynolds, Ph.D.
Available for download in a variety of ebook and Apple formats from www.Smashwords.com ($1.99).
About Gretel’s Story:
This is a book about the secrets buried in the depths of our souls, where they often languish in darkness because we do not understand their perplexing language of images and feelings. Contemporary models of healing, despite the wealth of wisdom they offer, may not be able to speak to these depths and secrets. This modern-day retelling of Gretel’s journey away from home and back again offers a different way of looking at and thinking about the enigmas within us that have the power to transform our lives.
Chapter One
Emptiness
The two children had not been able to sleep for hunger, and heard what their stepmother said to their father.
from “Hansel and Gretel”
In the Grimm brothers’ tale, the immediate cause of Gretel’s homelessness is hunger. Unable to feed the two children, their parents make plans to abandon Gretel and her brother Hansel in the forest to die. Folklorists tell us that many children were abandoned in this way when the Grimm brothers first wrote down the story. Today, happily, food is abundantly available in developed countries, and such abandonments are rare. But many modern-day Gretels are still insatiably hungry—for love, validation, and meaning rather than food. If “home” is a place where our deepest hunger is fed, then many of us today are truly homeless.
Sometimes our cravings appear as romantic yearnings for a lover who will not or cannot return our passion. At other times the hunger is concretized as an eating disorder—bingeing to the point of nausea, or fasting into a dizzying, blissful high. Now and then a modern-day Gretel may find fulfillment through a brief flight into ecstasy—a tender look from a special man, a delicious culinary treat, or a burst of applause for a professional or artistic achievement. But the bliss never lasts long, and the yearnings soon return. Throughout our story we will be reminded of the many layers of meaning that food holds for us, especially in the witch’s cottage: The witch is surrounded by food but cannot eat it, Hansel’s growing plumpness brings him closer to death each day, and Gretel almost dies as she prepares the witch’s stove for cooking.
Back in her parents’ home, at the beginning of the story, Gretel is so tormented by her own emptiness that she fails to see that the world around her is just as hungry as she is. According to the Grimm brothers’ story, “there was a great dearth in the land.” Everyone lies awake late into the night, tormented by the pangs within. It is worth asking why everyone is so ravenous.
The Ravaged Forest
The original tale provides an important clue—the ravaged forest where the hungry family dwells. The children’s father is a hard-working woodcutter, but no one in this desolate place can afford to buy his wood. Ironically, his hard work has created this barren space. By cutting down the living trees, he has turned parts of the verdant forest into bare patches of dirt, until at last the land has turned against him. Hope has faded for the family, and the forest where the children live has become a place of death.
Modern-day Gretels may find it difficult to identify a ravaged “forest” in their own lives. But imagination suggests that we really do harbor such a place within us: the psyche. Like the woodcutter and his wife, who harvest the forest without honoring its lush vitality, we often take a utilitarian approach to our psychic riches. Clinicians have taught us how to translate the psyche’s subtle language of grief and pain, joy and hope, into an ugly taxonomy of symptoms that we attempt to eradicate through medication rather than tender care of the soul. If you shrink back in fear from changes that are looming in your life, you have an anxiety disorder; if you can’t forget an old love or overcome a hurt from long ago, you are obsessed; if you suffer deeply from a painful loss, you are clinically depressed and, by definition, malfunctioning in some significant way and in need of a cure.
Dreams, which used to be an important pathway to the psyche, are even more likely to be discounted and dismissed. If we listen to them at all, we are likely to decode and analyze them with little appreciation for their elegance and beauty. The powerful images and feelings that dance through our dreams are reduced to a lifeless set of symbols. We forsake the visitors from the realm of sleep instead of inviting them to play in our daylight world. Are we really surprised that a Gretel within us lies awake, hungry and hopeless, night after night?
The ravaging of our inner depths and hidden resources can take many forms. If today’s Gretel spends time in therapy, she may be encouraged to distance herself from the vital forces within by turning them into diagnoses: “my disease,” “my addiction,” “my depression”—or, more clinically, “my negative animus,” “my codependency,” “my mother complex.” Before long she may completely drop the direct and honest language of everyday speech: “I’m sad,” “I’m scared,” “I yearn,” “I hurt.” If the therapeutic process continues for a long time, the emotions desperately clamoring for Gretel’s attention may shrivel and disappear. Compassion will give way to cogitation as she begins to view herself as a conglomeration of symptoms and disorders. Ironically, rather than healing her, therapy may transform her into a self-alienated and self-rejecting individual.
The Divided Self
This detrimental habit of questioning and criticizing ourselves is deeply embedded in our Western way of thinking and living. Consider how our confidence is undermined by the familiar Freudian “id, ego, superego” construct. The “id,” we are told, is an undeveloped part of the psyche that seeks immediate fulfillment of our primitive impulses and drives. To control this negative energy we must develop a strong “superego”—an internal censor that gradually weakens the id and replaces it with a civilized self, the “ego.” Freud summed up this process in his famous statement: “Where id was, there shall ego be.”
It’s not difficult to detect the demoralizing effects of this construct. When an explosion of psychic energy disrupts our lives, we are warned that the superego is not doing its job and the ego is falling apart. It does not occur to us that this inner crisis might instead be what James Hillman calls “the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse.” Rather than listening to and learning from the messages of the soul, we fear them as symptoms of unknown destructive inner forces that must be brought under control at all cost. Cut off from the transforming and energizing forces swirling deep inside, it is hardly surprising that we so often find life empty and meaningless.
Freud’s fear of the id is actually a variation of a much older belief system that still pervades Western thought: The conviction that humans are stained by original sin and therefore innately displeasing to God. This kind of theology, like Freud’s “id” theory, urges us to suppress and deny the stirrings and rumblings deep inside; ultimately we become split into two armies waging a perpetual battle against iniquity. The same contradiction appears in some non-Christian Western spiritual traditions, which encourage us to become whole while telling us to fear the psychic depths where we are most powerfully alive.
Such dualisms—”either/or” thinking, in ordinary language—pervade our contemporary habits of thought. Anyone who has had a religious upbringing automatically categorizes events and actions as good or evil. Another dualism—spirit versus body—is the basis for many religious practices. Spiritual guides have long taught their followers to master their bodies by learning to bear pain and ignore their physical needs. Self-flagellation, wearing a hair shirt, and enduring extremes of hunger and thirst were considered the pathway to perfection.
Such practices seem bizarre today, but dualism has not really disappeared from our thinking: it has just changed its form. Today we seek detachment and self-denial not to please God, but to overcome our hang-ups and emotional problems. Happiness awaits, we are told, if we can just learn how to master our cravings and overcome the embarrassing impulses that get us into so much trouble. Mental health means serenity: no anger, no yearnings, no crises. Control is the answer. Overcoming this kind of programming can be extremely difficult because it is so prevalent today. It may take us a long time to learn that the human soul is too complex for a simple either/or, good/bad classification system. Learning to appreciate this complexity is one of our most important challenges in the journey homeward.
All of this does not mean, however, that Gretel needs to undertake a lengthy critique of theology or a study of ascetic religious practices or contemporary psychology. What might be more helpful is for her to simply take a fresh look at the forest that surrounds her family’s cottage. She has always seen it as her parents do—a malevolent place that needs to be cut down. But what if she took the time to get to know the trees and flowers, birds and other creatures that dwell there? It’s true that some of the creatures may be frightening and dangerous—but she might also learn much from their vital energy, their unique forms, and their natural beauty. And so it is with the shadowy inhabitants of Gretel’s—and our—inner world: Must we be so quick to label them good or bad?
Isolation
The lack of honor and respect for the forest is the first mistake of Gretel’s family—the “Cutters” as we shall call them. The second mistake is their lonely isolation. Their little cottage stands alone in a huge forest, for the Grimm brothers’ story never mentions relatives, neighbors, a church, a school, or a village. Hansel and Gretel’s parents never consider moving elsewhere or sending their children to live in a more hospitable environment until the “dearth” has passed. The Cutters bring disaster upon themselves by clinging to a lifestyle that long ago stopped sustaining them. Creativity and cooperation are unknown: Instead of reaching out for help, they withdraw further from the human community. Hints of new possibilities, symbolized by the two little children in the story, are rejected and abandoned. The Cutters are utterly alone in their suffering….
About Jean Reynolds
Jean Reynolds, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of English at Polk State College in Winter Haven, Florida and the author of eight books. She is an avid ballroom dancer. She has been married to garden writer Charles Reynolds since 1973. They enjoy reading and traveling.
