Unconscious Love: What Is It?

Love can transform us. He can turn us into someone else, to the point where we can’t even recognize ourselves. Love is such a difficult feeling to explain that it is then sometimes possible to speak of unconscious love.

Of course, we all have our own definition of love. The latter is based on our experience, on what we have read, heard …

Here we will focus on the love that goes beyond consciousness. Here you will find out what it is, what are the characteristics of this love and how to identify it.

What is it about ?

When we talk about unconscious love, we are referring to that love that flows through our dreams, desires, fears, impulses and emotions, and which goes along with our intuitions and impulses. Our consciousness has difficulty accessing this love, because its content is repressed, at least the vast majority.

Have you ever wondered why some people attract you so deeply, people who at the same time represent the essence of your frustrations? It is undoubtedly because some unconscious parameters lead you towards this person. This attraction can then turn into unconscious love.

So sometimes it happens that we do not know why we deeply love this person who is by our side. We just feel intense love. And it is precisely for this reason that we find ourselves by his side, whether we are happy or not.

In addition, the love that we are trying to describe here sometimes leads us to make choices that are beyond our awareness. And although this love seems impossible to understand, in reality it is possible, at least in part.

Unconscious love from the perspective of psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, suggested that the unconscious manifests itself through dreams, creativity, mistakes, and symptoms, among others. We could then recognize aspects of the unconscious by being attentive to this type of manifestation.

Moreover, through psychoanalysis, it is also possible to access the content of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis itself suggests that we make unconscious choices, and love is one of those choices. We make this choice based on the development of our personality, our experiences and the influence of culture.

Thanks to the role of unconscious mechanisms, we would seek a romantic relationship that satisfies our lacks, even those of which we are not aware and who find themselves isolated. This is why it is difficult to understand the reasons why we happen to make toxic choices for our well-being. And it is for this same reason that we choose a romantic relationship unconsciously.

But be careful, we must not confuse unconscious love and toxic love. Unconscious love can be like not being toxic. It will depend on the mechanisms and experiences of each. It can also be a blind love in which we do not really see the other as he is; it is even possible that we idealize the other by hoping that he meets all our expectations.

The characteristics of unconscious love

Let’s see together what are generally the characteristics of unconscious love:

• Idealization:  it can be a trait of unconscious love when we overestimate someone to assuage our torments. In short, we use it as a defense
• The replacement:  unconscious love can consist of a means to satisfy our needs, a construction which, as suggested by the French psychoanalyst Lacan ,  maintains a link with culture and language
• Pleasure:  it is an instinctual satisfaction, the crossing between symbolism and reality
• Instinct:  this love arises from the depths of our being, namely our instinct, our desire and our impulses, aspects that escape our consciousness
• The unconscious mental image: this image affects our choices: it is the result of our experiences, our desires, our intuitions, our fears and our heritage

Loving unconsciously goes beyond what we see in reality. Unconscious love circulates in our inner world and it puzzles us, because we do not know the mechanisms through which it circulates.

How to identify unconscious love in our life?

Although identifying unconscious love sounds complicated, there are tools that help bring it to light. However, we will never have absolute control over this love. Let’s see together what are the different tools to identify unconscious love:

• Self-Knowledge:  Being attentive to what is going on in our inner world can help us identify this love that goes beyond consciousness. Although it is impossible for us to access all of its content, we can see part of it thanks to the manifestations of the unconscious

• Psychotherapy:  the psychotherapist can help us see those aspects that we are unable to see, because he is a specialist in the field: he can identify the manifestations of our unconscious love. In addition, he is able to translate his manifestations into words understandable to us
• We do not know why we are with the person who shares our life:  if you find yourself wondering what you are doing with this person, it could be an unconscious love.
• We don’t know how to describe this love:  if you are not able to explain how it happened, nor to express how you feel for your partner, it may be unconscious love.
• Our tendency to idealize the other:  idealization can be a defense mechanism, a way to escape our anxieties

• Inexplicable Self-Harm:  If the relationship is toxic, if we allow each other everything, and if we don’t know how to escape the relationship because something is holding us back, it is unconscious love
• Our ideas of love do not represent love: this  is the case if the love we experience does not reflect our beliefs about love.

In short …

Unconscious love is beyond all logic. It is difficult to understand and difficult to describe. It is an intense feeling that arises without our really knowing how or why.

It is a love that comes from old wounds, from our desires, from our learning, from our fears, from our heritage and from our impulses… A love that can lead us to make choices that we would never think of making one day. It is a love that transforms because it is so foreign to us, even if, in reality, it is closely linked to our inner world.

Our thoughts

Do we love each other? Is love a need? This term is difficult to define. It would be better to start by defining what love doesn’t …