Self-annihilation in love

Self-annihilation in love names a paradoxical ideal: a woman hopes to become fully herself by surrendering the self to a beloved or divine figure. The book presents this dream as a search for ecstatic union rather than a simple wish to suffer. Yet its promise of transcendence is shadowed by dependence: the woman seeks a sovereign existence through another, even as the surrender may require her to disavow herself.

The Ideal of Surrender

A woman studied by Pierre Janet describes a lifelong aspiration to an ideal love in which she can give herself entirely to someone she regards as superior. She longs for a person who will take responsibility for her life, guide her gently, and spare her the burden of directing herself. Her model is the relation between Mary Magdalene and Jesus: she imagines herself as an ardent disciple, devoted to an adored master and protected so completely that she would cease to exist as an independent self.

The account makes the fantasy’s internal contradiction explicit. The desire to disappear is also an avid desire to be: surrender promises not mere erasure but access to a perfected identity, secured through the beloved’s authority and care. The woman hopes that giving herself to an ideal figure will make her life meaningful and keep her from failure. Her imagined disappearance is therefore at once a renunciation of autonomy and a bid for a more complete existence.

Sexual Abandon and the Lover’s Gaze

The book distinguishes the woman’s experience of erotic surrender from a simple pursuit of pleasure. In the account it develops, sexual abandon can bring a temporary effacement of identity: the woman feels anonymous and passive, as though she has lost her ordinary self. When the moment passes and the man withdraws, however, she is returned to herself as a named person, but one who feels conquered and treated as an object. This sharp reversal helps explain why love becomes necessary to her: she seeks the lover’s gaze to restore a sense of wholeness after the experience of separation.

The lover’s admiration is presented as the bridge between bodily experience and a more enduring sense of value. If the man has promised lasting devotion, the woman can interpret the pleasure of the moment not as a humiliating defeat but as a gift whose meaning continues beyond it. Sensuality becomes memory and hope; she can regard her body not merely as an object but as something transfigured through the beloved’s regard. The pattern is not presented as a universal response: the discussion contrasts women who experience physical relations as degrading unless they feel deeply loved with those who can regard them more readily as an exchange of pleasure. Its central tension is that the lover’s gaze may restore the woman’s sense of being, while also making that restoration dependent on the man who supplies it.

Ecstatic Union, Not Masochism

The book cautions against treating the desire to disappear into a beloved as automatically masochistic. Masochism, in its account, involves turning back toward the self as an object for others; the woman in love may instead seek to exceed her limits and become infinite through another figure believed to have access to infinite reality. She first gives herself to love in the hope of being saved, but the paradox is that this attempted salvation can end in a thorough denial of self. The desired disappearance is therefore not simply acceptance of humiliation: it is imagined as a passage beyond the finite self into union.

The language of religious devotion makes this ambition especially clear. Mme d’Agoult says she would have liked to be a saint of love and envied the martyr in moments of exaltation and ascetic fervor. Georgette Leblanc gives the same longing another form, imagining herself as nourishment and flame for her beloved’s spirit. In both cases, the desired union abolishes the boundary between self and beloved. The book calls this a dream of ecstatic union: not merely suffering for another, but an effort to make existence sovereign by effacing oneself within the other.

Religious Ecstasy and the Effacement of Self

The book’s account of mystical devotion extends the same structure beyond romantic love. A declaration of total self-forgetfulness—loving, forgetting oneself, and annihilating oneself—becomes the devotee’s means of approaching a presence imagined as sovereign. Ecstasy is described as a bodily analogue of self-abolition: ordinary awareness recedes, and passivity becomes a way of registering the overwhelming force of the divine. Mme Guyon turns this passivity into a doctrine of quietism and spends long periods in a cataleptic state, described as sleeping while awake. Such examples show how the ideal can move from an intimate longing into a sustained religious practice.

The book also distinguishes passive surrender from deliberate self-denial. Women mystics may actively seek the destruction of the flesh, not simply to reject the body but to claim it through humiliation and suffering. The body’s meaning is transformed: what is treated as an instrument of pleasure may become a temple or an idol, while suffering associated with childbirth may be represented as producing heroes. In this framework, bodily abjection is made to serve spiritual exaltation and the hope of salvation. The mystic’s apparent renunciation thus repeats the central paradox of self-annihilation in love: she seeks to possess a perfected existence by relinquishing independent possession of herself.