WENDY BROWNdesire and explains an oscillation he associates with inherent ambivalence in love.^22 If eros
impels us toward closeness with another, this very closeness makes us terribly vulnerable
to injury and suffering. So we pull away, only to feel endangered by loneliness and fearful
isolation.^23
Explaining the phenomenon of the human group, then, necessitates explaining how
this oscillation between two unacceptable dangers—closeness, which produces terrible
vulnerability to another, and isolation, which produces a sense of unprotectedness—is
overcome in favor of prolonged closeness. How do we become continuously huddling
porcupines? The answer lies not in the dynamics of eros within the group but rather in
the fact that the group is constituted by something external to which we are each libidi-
nally bound—a leader or an ideal. A group is formed out of mutual identification in love
or idealization (they turn out to be the same) of something outside the group. But what
is the nature of this identification such that it actually binds those who share it? InGroup
Psychology, Freud specifies three types of identification in love:
First, identification is the original form of emotional ties with an object; secondly, in
a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie, as it were by means
of introjection of the object into the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with any new
perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not the object
of the sexual instinct. The more important this common quality is, the more success-
ful may this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the beginning
of a new tie.^24Freud hypothesizes that ‘‘the mutual tie between members of a group is in the nature of
this [third] kind,’’ meaning, we are bound to members of a group by virtue of a perceived
shared quality, in this case love for the leader or external ideal.^25 But this hypothesis in
turn calls for understanding the psychic phenomenon of ‘‘being in love’’ to appreciate
why identification with others in this state would produce a strong bond.
So, what is it to be in love? In the beginning, goes Freud’s oft-rehearsed tale, there is
only sexual desire. What we call love precipitates out of the inhibition of this desire.
Love—whether that of a child for its parents or an adult for a lover or friend—is aim-
inhibited eros. Aim inhibition entails a displacement or rerouting of libidinal energy; in
the case of love, this energy goes into idealization of the object. But idealization itself,
Freud explains, is more than reverence for the object. Rather, it is a way of satisfying one’s
own need to be loved by projecting one’s ideals of goodness onto another. Idealization
thus involves a circuitry of projection from the ego-ideal of the lover onto the love object,
which produces a feeling (being in love) that in turn gratifies the ego’s own desire for
love or self-idealization.^26
In short, the idealization of a loved one, in which the object is inevitably ‘‘sexually
overvalued’’ (only the lover sees the beloved’s bottomless charms) and rendered relatively
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