ABSTRACT
In an old film by Louis Malle entitled The Lovers (Les Amants), with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory, a bored middle-class housewife with an ill-matched husband is quite unexpectedly struck by an amour fou, thanks to a young man met while on her way back home. The rational structure of the sonata perfectly matches Brahms' typically intense lyrical style. The "Andante" draws on an elementary musical form much loved by Brahms, the theme with variations. Following in Plato's footsteps, S. Freud, too, argues that love is driven by the search for an earlier condition. Destructive and rejecting oedipal experiences create major obstacles to the capacity for enjoying satisfactory love investments, and for experimenting with passion in adult life. Oedipal relationships are developmentally vital for understanding union and separateness, subjectivity and objectivity. Resolving the oedipal conflict entails understanding that a daughter cannot become her father's lover, and this will set her free in the future to find a companion outside her family.
