Could one conceive of a love that would not be an encroachment on

the freedom of the other? If a person wanted in no way to exert an influence

on the person he loved and consequently refrained from choosing

on her behalf or advising her or influencing her in any way, he would act

on her precisely by that abstention, and would incline her all the more

strongly toward choosing in such a way as to please him. This apparent detachment,

this will to remain without responsibility arouses in the other

an even more lively desire to come closer. There is a paradox in accepting

love from a person without wanting to have any influence on her freedom.

If one loves, one finds one’s freedom precisely in the act of loving, and not

in a vain autonomy. To consent to love or to be loved is to consent also to

influence someone else to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.

To love is inevitably to enter into an undivided situation with another.

From the moment when one is joined with someone else, one suffers

from her suffering. If physical pain is involved, in which one can participate

only metaphorically, one strongly feels his inadequacy. One is not

what he would be without that love; the perspectives remain separate—

and yet they overlap. One can no longer say, “This is mine, this is yours”;

the roles cannot be absolutely separated. And to be joined with someone

else is, in the end, to live her life, at least in intention. To the very extent

that it is convincing and genuine, the experience of the other is necessarily

an alienating one, in the sense that it tears me away from my lone self

and creates instead a mixture of myself and the other.

As Alain has said, to love someone is to swear and affirm more than

one knows about what the other will be. In a certain measure, it is to relinquish

one’s freedom of judgment. The experience of the other does not

leave us at rest within ourselves, and this is why it can always be the occasion

for doubt. If I like, I can always be strict and put in doubt the reality

of the other’s feelings toward me; this is because such feelings are never

absolutely proved. This person who professes to love does not give every

instant of her life to her beloved, and her love may even die out if it is

constrained. Certain subjects react to this evidence as though it were a

refutation of love and refuse to be trusting and believe in an unlimited 

affirmation on the basis of an always finite number of professions. The ensnaring

love of the child is the love that never has enough proofs, and

ends by imprisoning and trapping the other in its immanence.

The normal, non-pathological attitude consists in having confidence

above and beyond what can be proved, in resolutely skirting these

doubts that can be raised about the reality of the other’s sentiments, by

means of the generosity of the praxis, by means of an action that proves itself

in being carried out.

But if these matters are as we have depicted them, all relations with

others, if deep enough, bring about a state of insecurity, since the doubt

we mentioned always remains possible and since love itself creates its own

proper truth and reality. The state of union with another, the dispossession

of me by the other, are thus not suppressed by the child’s arrival at the

age of three years. They remain in other zones of adult life. This is a particular

case of what Piaget has called displacement [décalage]. The same conduct,

acquired at a certain level, is not yet (and perhaps never will be) acquired

at a higher level. Transitivism, which has been surpassed in the

realm of immediate daily life, is never surpassed in the realm of feelings.

That is why, as the psychoanalysts have shown, syncretic sociability can be

found in the sick to the extent to which they regress in the direction of the

conduct of children and show themselves incapable of making the transition

to praxis, to the selfless, outgoing attitude of the adult.

We might ask what kind of relationship must be established between

the crisis at three years mentioned by Wallon and the Oedipal phase of development

which certain psychoanalysts locate at the same moment and

which accompanies the emergence of the superego, the true “objective”

relation, and the surpassing of narcissism.

Merleau-POnty, última pg T H E C H I L D ’ S R E L A T I O N S W I T H O T H E R S)