‘What, after all, did Freud teach us about love?’ she asks: That it begins in dependency, that its first object is the more powerful but loving mother who has been the loving infant’s whole world, and who remains the source of nourishment, security and pleasure. The pathologies of love all develop from this initial situation of unequal dependency. Mother love, if it is to be good of its kind, has to avoid both exploitation of the mother’s immensely superior power and that total self-abnegation that turns the infant into a tyrant. Love between unequals in power is good of its kind when it
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