Love is openness and vulnerability. And also, love is something that is difficult to hold on to. Just that you felt something in your soul, and take it and disappear! What is love, and what stands in its way? Openness is when we can open our feelings without fear of being rejected. Love does not seek guarantees of reciprocity. When we want to be liked, as a rule, we begin to portray, from our point of view, an attractive image for another. In essence, we put on a mask and protect ourselves, like medieval knights with the help of armor. What are we afraid of? - showing our “lack” - quoting Lacan: “to give what is not there to someone who does not need it.” We are afraid to experience the pain that we may not be accepted as we are. Love is when we stand on a “bush of thorns,” when we have an open chest, not knowing whether they will stick a thorn into us or not. We cannot say, like Xenia of Petersburg: “She was glad of her poverty and, coming somewhere, sometimes noticed: “I am all here.” Adam, having learned what sin is, was ashamed of his nakedness and covered himself with a fig leaf. Like him, we, having once known pain, try to cover the vulnerable spot with the same fig leaf, calling it love. Why, if we really love, are we afraid to say: “I’m all here!” The resistance to opening “turns on.” I think this is due not only to conscious experience, but also to repressed conflicts in the early stages of sexual development. Protecting himself from expected pain, a person simultaneously protects himself from the penetration into consciousness of pain experienced (locked), or, also, expected, but not allowed (repressed). According to the formed structure, everyone uses a certain set of “techniques” - defenses. In the psychoanalytic approach, psychotic disorders: schizophrenia, paranoia, MDP, melancholia, as well as phobias are considered as protective “techniques”. A person tries to cope with the conflict that arises between the desire to gain “mature dependence” on an object and the desire to maintain “infantile dependence” on it. In a neurotic disorder, external others are involved in resolving this conflict; in a psychotic disorder, others are integrated internally. A neurotic, like a snail, either protrudes from his shell or disappears into it, constantly comparing an internal object with an external other. Leaning out of his shell, he wants to find either those who love or those who will accept his love. This process begins in childhood. If a child finds both in the outside world, a “mature dependence” is formed; if not, he will continue to “carry a shell” with objects, projecting them onto others, looking for someone who will finally relieve him of early frustration. In fact, we can call all early conflicts conflicts of “lack” of love. Love, here, is of an objective nature: “when a normally developing child lives, as it were, in a world of actual hallucinations (“finds breasts where he imagines them”).” According to Klein, all external relationships are “externalizations of internal ones,” which were formed as a result of early interaction; we want, with all our might, to confirm our value in the eyes of the early object on which our security depended. When we defend ourselves from the “vicissitudes of love,” we try to preserve either our narcissistic object or our “mother’s breast,” perceiving everything new and unknown as a threat. The “libidinal goal” is aimed at the loved one, and in order to achieve this, the person will adapt to external conditions and requirements, thereby alienating himself and the real other. Love for another, here, will be partial in nature - to what extent he, the other, will correspond to the one who can give him self-pleasure, to what extent he will correspond to the satisfaction of the “primary drive”. People around, in this regard, according to Kernberg, are divided into “absolutely good” or “absolutely bad”; this assessment will depend on how this or that person sees him - what object he has externalized -!