#vii. lovesick

“Love melancholy is the most frequent and most dangerous disease that threatens mortals of both sexes”, French physician Jacques Ferrand wrote in 1610.

On the one hand, love can transform us and inspire us toward moral goodness but, on the other, leave us feeling helpless, irrational, and, at worst, sick. Today, where the pursuit of love and romantic intimacy is shaped by market based dating apps, paranoia towards romantic toxicity, and blurred boundaries between pornographic ideals and reality, love itself often appears to be a sick endeavor.

For this reason, Differens Magazine now invites submissions on the topic of Lovesick—a term that tries to capture both the overpowering forces of love that make us sick and helpless, and the cultural and societal sicknesses love itself can be thought to suffer from.   

From Plato’s Phaedrus to contemporary thought, love has been portrayed as both divine and destructive. But when does love cross the line from passion to pathology? We are interested in contributions exploring the darker sides of love—obsession, jealousy, control, and dependency. How can love sometimes be considered to erode selfhood, autonomy, or well-being?  How might romantic passion undermine our sense of self or destabilize our emotional worlds?

And on the other hand, as perhaps Eva Illouz most famously has discussed, how do we diagnose love itself? What does the concept and experience of love today suffer from? What cultural and societal forces could be imagined to play a role in how we understand and interpret love or the absence of love around us?

Alternative interpretations of the topic are also welcome. For instance, psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison asks in the epilogue to her memoir An Unquiet Mind whether, if given the choice, she would choose to have her bipolar disorder. The answer is affirmative. Because of her mental disposition, she has ”felt more things, more deeply; made more experiences, more intensely; loved more and been more loved”. What we see in this case is both love to sickness, and love through sickness.

As Jacques Ferrand set out to find a remedy for “love melancholy”, and was convinced that the primary cause of it was physical, so too did he imagine the cure. Hence, one of his treatments for women suffering from lovesickness was to prescribe “4 ounces of milk, 2 ounces of sea water and 1 ounce of honey, mix it into a clyster and insert it into the vagina.” For this issue, we also ask, are there better remedies?

winter 24/25

deadline 30th of december

contribute@differensmagazine.com

art

Maya Eizin Öijer

https://www.mayaeizinoijer.com/

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