“What’s Love Got to do With It?”
But to borrow a phrase from legendary R&B singer Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?” And by “it,” Tina and I mean to ask what love has to do with helping us understand audiences and become better speakers. Returning to the views of Freud and his followers provides some helpful answers. In their view, all people are inherently separate. We all desire love (and connection, and recognition, and warm fuzzies) because at the most basic level, each of us is divided from everyone else. That is, each of us is a discrete animal with our own brain, blood type, body, and so on. According to Freud and others, at about the age of two or so we each realize this fact. We stop thinking that we’re the same as our mothers (or primary parent) and start to understand ourselves as individual persons, independent of our guardians. Once we realize that we are individuals, we experience mixed feelings: on the one hand, it’s great to be our own person; on the other hand, it’s scary! Freud and others suggest that we struggle with these mixed feelings — a desire for independence and a desire for connection — for most of our lives. For example, whether you came to college after leaving home for the first time or are returning to school after a period of work or military service, the transition will offer new freedoms along with change and separation from familiar people and routines. At every stage of life, becoming one’s own person entails a sense of loss, and the joys of independence often come at the expense of a feeling of togetherness. And in just about any speaking situation, you are revisiting this fundamental tension between independence and the desire for connection. This is why public speaking can be both exciting and terrifying!
