Love

"I wish to tell you the deepest words, but I dare not, for I fear your mockery. That's why I laugh at myself and turn my secret into jokes. I make fun of my pain, so you don't make fun of yourself. I wish to tell you the most sincere words, but I do not dare, for I am afraid that you will not believe me. That's why I disguise them as lies and say them contrary to what I think. I strive to make my pain seem absurd so that it doesn't seem absurd to you. I want to tell you the most valuable words, but I don't dare, because I fear not being reciprocated. That is why I name you harshly and take pride in my callousness. I want to sit silently by your side, but I dare not, for I fear that my lips will betray my heart. That is why I speak foolishly, hiding my heart behind my words. I treat my grief harshly, lest you do. I want to get away from you, but I don't dare, because I fear you will discover my cowardice. That is why I raise my head and approach you with an indifferent air. The constant provocation of our glances removes my pain without mercy."

• Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener

In the character structure of the Social 7, a kind of double level of reading the internal dynamism of the three loves—eros, agape, and filia, as described by Claudio Naranjo—can be identified. This subtype presents an intrapsychic and relational structure that is counter-characteristic: It is distinguished by a vocation for altruism and a devotional thirst that leads to deception regarding the development of the three loves.

On the surface, the Social 7 moves through the world with spontaneity and compassion, in constant tension toward spiritual elevation. He is a clean, good person, with a certain

tendency towards holiness, but this is only in his fervent imagination. His structure presents a lack of foundation, the integration of self-love.

A sense of unworthiness, the result of a lack of compassionate care, brings him frustration so deep that it transforms into a denied need. The intimate relationship becomes an inaccessible territory due to its dangerousness, linked to a destructive potential. It is as if, for fear of suffering the pangs of hunger for love again, the Social 7 prescribes a forced fast for himself, condemning him to an existential hunger that has the advantage of being controlled and self-sufficient. In mystical ideational madness, he believes that one day it will be satiated at the banquet of the gods. This is how the simple human hunger for maternal (oral) love becomes the passion of gluttony, later sublimated through sacrifice.

Compassionate Love

Phenomenologically, the Social 7 appears as a good person, attentive and lavish in attention. He is a keen observer of human relations, at the service of which he puts his strategic intelligence.

He is reserved, interested in people's emotional experiences, and appropriate in providing support, more through storytelling than affective acts.

A superficial examination would take him for being mature in the sphere of compassion, capable of empathy and genuinely open to loving exchange, gratuitously at the disposal of the common good. The empathic capacity is there, unlike the E5. The problem is that it is not a type of empathy that serves benevolence, seeking the best for the other unconditionally. Instead, it serves narcissism.

“As a theater director, I had a serious problem in getting artistic projects off the ground. When I started the rehearsal period with the actors, I had a hard time insulating myself from their problems as people. As we worked through the scenes, I saw their pain and need as people, putting aside the needs of the artistic production to focus on helping and comforting them with their wounds. I have the feeling that I see the other's wound, as I saw Mom's wound, and I feel an uncontrollable impulse to be that which heals it. It is a program that lights me up. I have rationalized it in various ways and actually believe that I have a detector that does not allow me to miss any opportunity to sanctify myself.” (Luis)

This interpersonal modality, which is the calling card of the Social 7 when it comes into relationship, is the main mode with which this subtype hides the typical seductivity of the E7. It is the way he enters into the parasitic form of love in order to gain admiration and nourishment for his narcissism.

The narcissistic nucleus of the Social 7 is nourished by the denial of a desire for admiration, which is played through false humility and reserve. This simplified scheme helps to read the adult Social 7 and see with different eyes his automatic exercise of self-interested compassion. This character is hardly mistaken in the mode of approximation. He has first observed at length, in great detail, the person by whom he wants to be chosen through subtle manipulation.

He simply makes himself available at the right moment, when the other is in a state of need, and in an instant, through his skill with words and gestures, gives him the opportune support. Being helpful satisfies his need for visibility. He doesn't need to be thanked; simply receiving a small sample of care will suffice. Thus, he connects with his crazy idealization of Christian identification: “I am the true savior,” which will allow him to be directly blessed by a higher entity within.

“Reviewing my relationships, I was surprised to see that they all had an absent, dead, or missing father. It's as if a part of me sensed that place to be filled in by the woman and was drawn to fill it. The other sad realization was that I had had many partners and I had abandoned all of them. In that act I see my revenge against the woman for needing her and my inability to navigate the deep conflicts that the relationship implies.” (Luis)

The relations of the Social 7 are interesting, based on the self-referential presumption of an accumulation of credit with humanity. Seemingly gratuitous and redolent of sanctity, the Social 7's sacrificial passion is a long-term investment, one that will pay off directly with God. This is the trap of the child who, deciding to be good, always postpones the satisfaction of his needs to the future and believes that he can feed himself with the rotten fruit of a false compassion, which in reality is a skillful use of sympathy, confused with empathy. Thus, the Social 7 adult seduces through a mimetic capacity, a pleasure with the emotional depth of the other that comes disguised as compassion, and with the intention of arousing admiration. In this sense, the other, although in a layer of reality it seems that he is being helped, is not really seen but used as an instrument to get a reflection of his ideal (holy) self.

The lack of authenticity in the exchange feeds the neurosis. The feeling of gratitude on the part of the needy other feeds the ideal of oneself, which is only a thought and does not deeply nourish the true self, isolated and unavailable for a genuine relationship. The profound difficulty in being in an authentic and intimate relational parity, where both feel present and worthy of love, condemns the Social 7 to repeatedly experience a moment of crisis that manifests itself in two ways. A first modality is that, if one does not feel useful enough, or if the other leaves the relationship of need, the alternative is to find oneself entangled in parasitic relationships where the other is experienced as too demanding.

The crisis of the relationship is a healthy alarm signal, which offers the possibility of evidencing the non-contractuality of the relationship built by the Social 7. The agreement, in fact, is unilateral and is based on the implicit demand for return and recognition, within entirely self-referential terms and linked to the need to preserve a dominant position in the relationship.

The accumulation of initial credit towards the other, through the seduction of compassionate kindness, is handled in intimate relationships as valid for life and is played as a bonus when disinvestment occurs. But how? After everything I've done for you, do you still ask me?

The disinvestment is, in fact, physiological, because the motivation is of a parasitic type and not based on the need here and now. The Social 7 condemns himself to torture in the relationship by exercising the defense mechanism of proflexion (doing to others what he would like them to do to him), which supports the ideal of himself and does not affectively nurture the true self.

The Social 7 feeds, through the grandiose ideation of himself, the denial of his own love fulfillment. He confuses being seen cognitively with being emotionally cared for. In this way, the basic need for genuinely compassionate maternal care is censored.

“When my therapist proposed that I curl up like a child in my partner's arms and surrender myself to care, it seemed like an impossible task. It's my denied scene: being lost, hurt, demanding in mom's arms. I am the one who hugs, never the one who is hugged. I am the one who gives, never the one who needs. Surrendering myself in that embrace continues to be a challenge because it symbolizes my existential failure.” (Luis)

The feeling of need of the other is transformed into the idea that the other needs him. Healthy affective dependence is denied and is transformed into a relationship of power and control through dependence on the other.

The Social 7 love market thus develops a trend compulsively plotting unfinished gestalts that will repeat themselves and create love relationships that will not be truly intimate, although yes deep and ambivalent.

We also know that anyone who falls into his trap of compassionate seduction will not be worthy of admiration because, in reality, he is positioning himself as the loser in the relationship. The search for admiration is then projected upwards (towards the father), and the path of the mystical Social 7 is paved with dejected teachers.

The introject of the paternal relationship involves an ambivalent identification with the father. He is a dominant figure, also the antagonist in the story; in short, an antihero.

Therefore, the search turns to bad parents to avoid and good parents to overcome, all while maintaining good manners.

The Social 7 tends to idealize the characters it encounters, emphasizing their stimulating aspects, creativity, preparation, and cultural level. This perspective stimulates a sense of deep unworthiness and leads to an initial withdrawal, representing the phase of studying the other. The Social 7 behaves like a pseudosocial personality; they are not openly competitive and show an apparent respect for the rules. They intuit the rules of the context and adapt to them strategically.

In a short amount of time, the Social 7 is capable of becoming the model disciple of a teacher whom they only recognize as such in the idealizing distance. The critical acuity of this character cognitively expresses a defensive form aimed primarily at immunizing themselves from the power of the other. When the teacher is seen up close (then known and observed in their inevitable incongruities), they are progressively and inexorably disqualified, devalued, trapped in their weaknesses, and ultimately drained of interest. The teacher is no longer an object of admiration and, therefore, not even a potential source of admiring love.

Once again, the Social 7 returns to the starting point, in search of a new stimulus, a new goal to achieve. In this path of implicit dissatisfaction, the Social 7 seeks parental recognition and then devalues it when it is obtained, much like a child who throws away the long-awaited food. In this way, the Social 7 feeds their orality in relation to admiring love.

The meaning of their life story develops neurotically, seeking a symbiotically admiring gaze from an authority that ceases to be once they grant recognition. Unable to overcome their ambivalence, this subtype can neither acknowledge nor openly oppose authority, thus creating, for the umpteenth time, the premises for a frustrating relationship. The way out of this frustration is, once again, to create a fantastic internal world where the relationship is directly with the source—where authority is embodied in a narcissistic and self-referential way.

“My relationship with Claudio Naranjo moves in terms of a strong ambivalence. On one hand, I feel a strong inspiration from him, like I have a privileged relationship with him, and I desire to dedicate myself more, to live it intimately as a Master. On the other hand, I feel a lot of fear of the pain that may come with that delivery, which ends up translating into a constant judgment of his person, where I search for reasons to behead him. And I find them. And then I am left alone, disoriented. And the sensations of gratitude return, of admiring love towards Claudio, the experience of being his disciple, the internal invitation: to explore surrender, admiration, guru yoga. Just thinking about it gives me honey. What if he hurts me? What if he really is a false teacher? Pray to doubt it as protection. And there I am stuck, blocked. Without being able to get closer or farther away. Without being able to express

all this that happens to me. Without being able to transition between the delivery and the abandonment.” (Luis)

On the concrete plane, the spiritual search of the Social 7 manifests itself in a mystical-type form. Since their emotional need is to reconstruct a symbiotic form of love that they shun, the relationship with the divine is also panicked, totalizing, and ecstatic. The divinity, whether spiritual or secular, is conceived directly, without being mediated by figures of reference such as a teacher, whose admiration is shunned. Similar tensions easily bring them closer to pseudo-religious and para-spiritual forms.

Mutual recognition implies, in fact, an assumption of responsibility that, due to grandiose projections, becomes a burden. It assumes a change in the position of control that the Social 7, in its unconscious counterdependence, cannot tolerate because it marks the passage toward relational adulthood, which frightens and oppresses. Therefore, in every relationship, the admiring period is followed by a devaluing phase.

It is a paradoxical position. The main driving force is the search for admiring love, but the goal is impossible to achieve because ambivalence forecasts two variants: either the encounter with the bad teacher, who is not recognized, and therefore results in a useless relationship; or the good teacher, who grants admiring and compassionate recognition that the Social 7 cannot accept.

In this way, the spiritual search reveals its triple reality: the rationalization of seductive gluttony, the pleasure of pleasing humanity as a recognition of one's own divine nature, and the compensation for a profound feeling of unworthiness.