Psychoanalysis doesn’t merely insist that we will marry someone like our parent. It also proposes that what we really want to do is to give the story with a parent-type figure a different ending.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent half a century before Baldwin admonished that “loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.”
How we meet that dangerous task may be a function of our fearlessness, but we only ever rise — or fall — to love’s responsibility in proportion to our wholeness, that most difficult of achievements for us fragile beings living in a world that constantly divides us into fragments of ourselves.
How to rediscover love from a place of wholeness, in a spirit of fearlessness, is what bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021) explores in her wonderful 2000 book All About Love (public library) — a field guide to “the practice of love in everyday life” and an impassioned manifesto for transforming our culture into one “where love’s sacred presence can be felt everywhere.”