Beyond identification: The (im)possibility of loving thy neighbour

Abstract

In the fifth chapter of Civilization and its Discontents Freud broaches the directive that ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ (King James Bible: Leviticus 19: 18 and Matthew 19: 19) and responds to this with what we might, following Lacan, characterize as ‘horror’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 186). For Freud, love of one’s neighbour is something which would impose as an excess, an affront to the love that one would give to those closest, one’s partner, one’s friend, one’s community. Where the sexual relationship can be understood as being the paramount case of relating to another, for Freud, the love given therein cannot be extended beyond the pair involved to encompass a wider world of people: sexual love is a relationship between two people, in which a third party can only be superfluous or troublesome, whereas civilization rests on relations between quite large numbers of people. When a love relationship is at its height, the lovers no longer have any interest in the world around them; they are self-sufficient as a pair, and in order to be happy they do not even need the child they have in common. In no other case does Eros so clearly reveal what is at the core of his being, the aim of making one out of more than one; however, having achieved this proverbial goal by making two people fall in love, he refuses to go further. (Freud, 2002, p. 45)