Kierkegaard dwells (rather obsessively, one might say) on the "inconstancy" of love.
Like myriad other philosophers and theologians - who have attempted to reconcile their own personal experience of love as unstable, unfair, unforgiving, and unpleasurable with the repeated notion of love as perfect or of the perfect love God has for his flock - Kierkegaard contrasts the imperfections of man's earthly, carnal, corporeal love with God's spiritual love.
Love that is perfect is inhuman, in the sense that it is divine.
"The love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty does not know jealousy; it does not love only as it is loved, but it loves."
In other words, it transcends the tit-for-tat imaginary relationship in which one only loves as much as one is loved; indeed, it transcends the desire to be loved in return.
Kierkegaard clearly foreshadows Freud's notion that ordinary love for our beloved often involves a good deal of narcissism (which he calls "self-love") and selfishness (which Kierkegaard equates with sensuousness, or "the flesh," in Church doctrine; for him, the flesh is not the body per se, but rather selfishness and self-centeredness).
He views paganism - by which he means the Greek and Roman moralists and philosophers - as ostensibly disparaging self-love but nevertheless exalting erotic love and friendship as real love.
For Christianity, however, erotic love and friendship are forms of "passionate preferential love" and are thus just as self-centered as self-love: in loving in this way, giving preference to one person over another because of one's own likes and dislikes, one's own personal preferences regarding looks and personality, one simply wants to be loved and admired in return.
The command to love, your neighbor goes much further than this: it is not a command to love only those neighbors whom you happen to like, owing to your own tastes and distastes, and whose company you find enjoyable, interesting, or otherwise rewarding.
"It is very unrewarding to love the neighbor," Kierkegaard writes; indeed, "the neighbor is the ugly."
The neighbor is precisely he who is repulsive to us, or that which - in another - is repulsive to us, that which it is supremely difficult, if not virtually impossible to love!
Whereas Plato seems to celebrate the love of beauty, Kierkegaard celebrates love of the ugly - love of those who are ugly or of that which is ugly in our fellow beings
As much as Freud may have found the commandment to love thy neighbor impossible to obey, it is nevertheless fairly obvious that analysts must find something to love in patients, who are not always physically or spiritually beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, if they are to work effectively with them.
A patient requesting treatment could be viewed as one of the analyst's neighbors, and there is often a good deal of ugliness that analyst see in their patients - it may be only skin-deep or superficial (as in the case of the colleague, I mentioned in chapter 3, whose obese patient told him at the end of their last session together, "You've always found me repulsive, haven't you?"), or it may concern traits that the analyst finds morally or interpersonally objectionable in the patient (whether concerning the patient's job, pastimes, sexual practices, dissimulation [concealment of one's thoughts, feelings, or character; pretense] treatment of other people, politics, social style, snobbism, or what have you).
Granted, analyst may not be able to love such perceived moral ugliness, perhaps hoping to eliminate it through analysis, but if they are unable to find something to love in each patient, the analysis will almost certainly fail.
And the less they can find to love in a patient, the better they would do to refer the patient to another analyst who might not find so ugly what they find ugly.
(Like beauty, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.)
They need not be able to love all and sundry, but must be aware of dislikes on their part that goes so far as to impede the work.
Lacan suggest that what we often most object to or cannot bear in our partner is what our partner enjoys or gets off on, and this is clearly something that the analyst has to be able to bear in an analysis if it is to achieve anything.
Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference
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