Sigmund Freud never wrote a single book about love, yet the subject runs through almost all of his work. In his writings on sexuality, narcissism, groups, mourning and therapy, he kept returning to the same questions: why do we fall in love with particular people, why does love so often repeat the past, and why can it bring as much pain as happiness? His answers became the starting point for every psychoanalytic theory of love that followed, whether later thinkers built on his ideas or argued against them.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains Freud's main ideas on love in clear terms, shows how they apply to adult relationships and psychotherapy, and looks at the main criticisms of his theory.
Libido: the energy behind love
Freud's view of love starts with the idea of libido, which he described as the energy of the sexual drive. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he used the word "sexual" in a much broader sense than we usually do today. For Freud, sexuality does not begin at puberty; it is present from infancy in the pleasure a baby takes in being fed, held and comforted.
From this point of view, love is libido directed towards another person. Freud believed that many different kinds of love share this same source: love for a partner, for parents and children, for friends, and even for ideas or causes. What differs is how directly the sexual aim is expressed. Tenderness and affection are not the opposite of sexuality, but softened forms of it.
Freud also described love as an investment of emotional energy in someone. Like any investment, it can be withdrawn, moved elsewhere or turned back towards oneself. This helps explain why, after a breakup, a person may feel empty, become absorbed in themselves for a while, or quickly attach to someone new. A broader introduction to his vocabulary can be found in the overview of Freudian terms and concepts.
Finding love as "refinding"
Perhaps the best-known sentence in Freud's writing on love is this: "The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it" (1905). In psychoanalysis, "object" simply means the person we love.
Freud's point was that our very first experiences of love come from being cared for, usually by a mother or another early caregiver. These early experiences become a kind of emotional blueprint. When we fall in love as adults, we are not starting from a blank page. Without realising it, we are drawn to people who give us a familiar feeling, a particular kind of attention, warmth, or even frustration that we have known before.
This does not mean that people simply look for copies of their parents. What is "refound" is a pattern rather than a person. Someone who grew up with a loving but often absent parent, for example, may find themselves strongly attracted to partners who are affectionate but hard to reach. The new partner is genuinely new, but the emotional situation may feel strangely familiar.
The Oedipus complex: the first love triangle
According to Freud, the pattern that later love repeats is shaped above all by the Oedipus complex, which he first described in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Between roughly the ages of three and five, he argued, children develop intense loving feelings towards one parent and feelings of rivalry towards the other. He later added that these feelings often run in both directions at once.
In The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), Freud described how these childhood wishes are normally given up, and how the parents' values become part of the child's own conscience (the superego). However, this process is never entirely complete. Traces of this first "love triangle" can appear in adult relationships as:
- an attraction to partners who are unavailable or already committed to someone else
- intense jealousy towards real or imagined rivals
- a feeling that love always involves a third person
- guilt connected with sexual pleasure
In a 1910 paper, Freud described men who could only fall in love with a woman who already belonged to another man, and who often imagined "rescuing" her. He traced this pattern back to the boy's early feelings towards his mother and his rivalry with his father.
Two ways of choosing a partner
In On Narcissism (1914), Freud described two broad ways in which people choose whom to love.
The first he called the anaclitic or attachment type. "Anaclitic" comes from a German word meaning "leaning on". Here, a person is drawn to someone who resembles the people who looked after them in childhood: in Freud's words, the woman who feeds or the man who protects. Love of this kind is closely linked to the wish to be cared for.
The second is the narcissistic type. Here, a person loves someone who reflects themselves: who they are, who they once were, who they would like to be, or someone who was once part of them, as a parent may love a child. Freud stressed that both paths are open to everyone, and that most real relationships contain something of both.
The same essay contains an observation that remains striking today. Freud wrote that "we must begin to love in order not to fall ill" (1914). He believed that people become unwell when they are unable to love, for example when disappointment makes them withdraw from others entirely. He also noticed that being in love lowers our self-regard, because so much of our attention flows towards the other person, and that being loved in return restores it.
Some parts of this essay have been widely criticised. Freud's claims about gender differences in love, and his linking of narcissistic love with homosexuality, reflect the assumptions of his time and are not accepted in contemporary psychoanalysis.
Falling in love and idealisation
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud compared being in love with hypnosis. When people fall deeply in love, the beloved can seem flawless and beyond criticism, while the lover becomes humble, eager to please and willing to make sacrifices.
Freud explained this by saying that "the object has been put in the place of the ego ideal" (1921). In simpler terms, we place on the other person the perfection we once hoped to reach ourselves. The partner becomes the ideal we could not become.
This helps explain why falling in love can feel so exhilarating, and also why it is so fragile. When the real person no longer matches the ideal, admiration can quickly turn into disappointment or even contempt. Later thinkers developed this idea further: Melanie Klein linked these swings to splitting (see Melanie Klein on Love), and Otto Kernberg saw the ability to keep some idealisation while seeing the partner realistically as a sign of mature love (see Kernberg on Love Relations).
When tenderness and desire do not meet
In a 1912 paper, Freud described two "currents" of love. The affectionate current begins in early childhood and is directed towards caregivers. The sensual current awakens strongly at puberty. Ideally, the two come together and are directed towards the same person.
When this does not happen, a person may feel tenderness and respect for one partner but sexual desire only for someone else. Freud summed up this problem in one of his most quoted sentences: "Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love" (1912).
Freud believed that some degree of this split was common. The paper remains one of the clearest early descriptions of a difficulty many couples still bring to therapy today: how to keep desire alive in a relationship that has become close, safe and familiar.
Transference love: love in the therapy room
In "Observations on Transference-Love" (1915), Freud wrote about clients who fall in love with their analyst. He saw this as common and predictable rather than unusual.
His position was carefully balanced. He did not dismiss these feelings as unreal; after all, he argued, every experience of falling in love repeats earlier attachments to some degree. At the same time, the analyst must never act on these feelings, and must not reject or ridicule them either. Instead, the feelings are explored and understood, so that their origins in earlier relationships can come to light.
This paper laid the foundations for the ethical framework of therapy and for the use of transference as a central therapeutic tool. It also suggests something important about love outside therapy: there too, our feelings are shaped by patterns from the past.
Love, loss and mourning
Freud also showed how closely love is connected to loss. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), he compared ordinary grief with melancholia, a condition close to what we would today call depression.
In mourning, a person slowly and painfully withdraws their emotional investment from someone they have lost. In melancholia, the loss is partly unconscious, and the feelings towards the lost person, which often include anger as well as love, are turned against the self. Freud described this with the image that "the shadow of the object fell upon the ego" (1917). He put the difference simply: in mourning the world feels poor and empty; in melancholia it is the self that feels empty.
This shows why mixed feelings can make both loving and letting go so difficult (see also basic concepts of grief). In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud summed up the vulnerability that love brings: "We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love."
Criticisms and later developments
Freud's theory of love has been challenged in several ways:
- Relationship rather than pleasure. Ronald Fairbairn argued that what people seek most deeply is not pleasure but relationship itself (see Fairbairn on Love).
- Attachment. John Bowlby showed that a baby's bond with its caregiver is a basic need in its own right, not simply a by-product of being fed (see Bowlby and Attachment).
- Gender. Feminist writers, starting with Karen Horney in the 1920s, criticised Freud for treating male experience as the norm. Others, such as Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), argued that his ideas could still help explain how gender roles are learned.
- Lack and the self-image. Jacques Lacan returned to Freud's texts to highlight the role of lack and of our own self-image in love (see Lacan on Love).
Critics have also pointed to the heterosexual framing of the Oedipus complex, the difficulty of testing many of Freud's claims scientifically, and the fact that his ideas were based on a small and culturally specific group of patients. Even so, his central observations about early relationships, idealisation, mixed feelings and repetition are still widely used, often in revised form.
Why Freud's ideas matter in therapy
Freud's ideas can help people make sense of patterns in their love lives that otherwise feel like bad luck or personal failure. For example:
- repeatedly choosing partners who are distant, critical or in need of rescue, which may be a way of "refinding" a familiar emotional situation
- feeling intense admiration at the start of a relationship that later turns into disappointment
- finding it hard to feel both tenderness and desire for the same partner
- relying on a partner's approval for one's own sense of worth
- finding it very hard to let go after a relationship ends
Material connected with Freud's broader clinical theory can be found in the article on Freudian perspectives on neurosis and hysteria. In each case, the aim of therapy is not to tell anyone how they should love. It is to bring unconscious patterns into view, so that they can be understood and changed rather than simply repeated.
Conclusion
Freud did not give love a single definition. Instead, he left a set of lasting questions: why we love particular people, why love repeats the past, why we idealise, why tenderness and desire can drift apart, and why loss hurts so much. Later psychoanalysts changed many of his answers, but they continued to work within the territory he mapped. When difficulties in love and intimacy keep returning, psychodynamic psychotherapy can offer a space to explore where they come from; online sessions can be arranged here.
References
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Hogarth Press.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Tavistock.
- Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, 4–5.
- Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, 7.
- Freud, S. (1910). A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I). Standard Edition, 11.
- Freud, S. (1912). On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love II). Standard Edition, 11.
- Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. Standard Edition, 14.
- Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love. Standard Edition, 12.
- Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition, 14.
- Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, 18.
- Freud, S. (1924). The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. Standard Edition, 19.
- Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21.
- Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Hogarth Press.
- Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Allen Lane.