It seems evident to me that if person A is stuck in the condition of powerlessness vis-à-vis person B, it is highly doubtful that A’s professions of 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 for B will carry much weight or substance. Such ‘love’ seems reducible to a kind of enslavement or dependency. Perhaps even A’s ability to forgive B for his/her harmful or negligent deeds is also prevented by this same powerlessness. We hear people speak in praise of “the 𝑝𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟 of love.” The ability to love – particularly when it comes to loving one’s “enemies” – has nothing of weakness or incapacity to it, especially where the enemy has available means of harming or killing us. Obviously then, this “power” that enables us to love is not merely legal or financial or physical power, so much as it is the intangible but effective moral resources and mental strength of the “lover.”
What the powerless A calls “love” for B is often a suspicious expression of flattery, accommodation, or “loyalty” to B – and its “value” is intimately bound up with its ability to check or forestall B’s abuse or neglect. A’s powerless enslavement or psychological dependence on B makes reciprocal or even unilateral love (from A) all but impossible, since the inner power or strength for such love, as we can see, is lacking.
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other” – this much cited quotation from Jung invites our careful analysis.
His depiction of love and power makes them look a bit like mutually exclusive, self-canceling factors, while the depiction I have offered is of interdependent, mutually supporting ones. How can our depictions be so different?
Perhaps the clue lies in the difference between the idea of “will to power” and that of “assurance of power.” Suggested in the phrase “will to power” is the idea of seeking or amassing power – which implies an initial lack that is remedied or compensated by the pursuit of power. Moreover, Nietzsche – from whom Jung borrows the concept – is sometimes referring to power over oneself, sometimes over others or some potentially rivaling external force or power. My use of the word in this context, however, chiefly pertains to an internal, self-sufficient strength that lends vitality, independence, confidence, and a kind of immunity to its possessor.
