“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.” Count Vronsky
What are you willing to sacrifice for the experience of great happiness and love? Will you find true happiness and peace in living your life for self-fulfillment alone? Or, is there something greater than personal fulfillment alone for which you should be living? These are powerful questions that Leo Tolstoy asks us in his timeless masterpiece Anna Karenina.
Although Anna Karenina was first published in 1873 and portrays the life of the Russian elite in late nineteenth century Moscow, the story speaks to timeless psychological and spiritual concerns about being, existence, and the nature of happiness. Joe Wright’s more recent movie version of the tale starring Kiera Knightly and Jude Law (2012) marks the sixteenth production of this gorgeous, deeply stirring and troubling story.
Anna Oblonsky-Karenin, a Russian socialite is married to Alexei Karenin, a powerful man, much older than Anna, who is Cabinet Minister of the Russian government. They married for social standing, rather than for love. At first, their social life and the care of their son, whom she loves dearly, seems to be enough for Anna. But, her trip to Moscow to give counsel to her brother Stiva and his wife Dolly over Stiva’s affair will change her life forever. It is there that she meets the young, handsome and charming military officer Count Alexei Vronsky. Their attraction is so palpable that it is a certainty that they will have an affair. Even so, at first, Anna is able to deny her feelings for him, by reminding herself of her marital and social responsibilities.
Count Vronsky is so taken with Anna that he follows her back to St. Petersburg ignoring that he has a complication or two of his own with regard to his freedom. His wealthy, Countess mother expects him to marry for social standing. And, Vronsky is not short of young, beautiful women of high social standing who are lining up to become his wife. He has been courting the young Princess Kitty. She expects that any day soon Vronsky will ask her to marry him. Instead, he falls madly in love with the already married Anna. And, as you’ve anticipated correctly, Anna succumbs to Vronsky’s boyish, sensual charm.
From this point forward, sensual desire, happiness, and peace becomes Anna’s sole reason to be. The intensity of Anna’s feelings toward Vronsky are so intense that it doesn’t take long for her husband Alexei Karenin to find out. He is a man who is guided solely by morality, reason and social custom and who his friends call a saint. The closest Alexei Karenin ever gets to sensual feeling is a desire for revenge against the adulterous Anna and her lover. At first, he appeals to Anna’s propriety asking her to end the relationship. But, Anna will hear nothing of this. Eventually, Karenin forgives Anna and Vronsky. But, when Anna decides to end the marriage, Karenin orders her to leave without her son.
For a short time, Anna and Vronsky share life with each other and have a child. But, Anna becomes increasingly depressed over the loss of her child with Alexei, and her diminished social standing. She also fears that the young Vronsky is tiring of her. She begs Vronsky to “restore her happiness and peace“, to which he replies, “There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.” The immature, self-absorbed Vronsky leaves Anna forever. Now, faced with the weight of her grievous decisions, Anna commits suicide.
Dr. Deborah’s Wisdom
“One man just lives for his own needs,” questioning at every step of the way what it is that will bring the greatest happiness and peace. While “[Another] lives for the soul…and remembers God ” .
Anna Karenina is a tragic story about codependent love. This is when you love so selfishly, lustfully, and recklessly that the relationship becomes more important than your self-preservation. The intensity of the relationship connection has lifted many fictional and real-life couples into the stratosphere of the greatest happiness, and just as surely, the greatest misery. Codependency is exemplified in the love between great literary couples and historical figures, like Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, Romeo and Juliette, Heathcliff and Kathryn, Paris and Helene, and the great sculptor Augustus Rodin, and his lover, sculptress Camille Claudel. Thus, please, do not despair, if you have ever been or are currently involved in a codependent romance. You are not alone.
Everyone has a need to find true love. But some of you have unmet childhood needs that make you especially vulnerable to codependent relationships. Your past has set you up to yearn for a type of love comparable to the early nurturing a mother gives her newborn baby. You want to breathe the same air as your lover breathes, as did Anna with Count Vronsky, and to be so deeply connected together that the outside world ceases to exist. By all appearances, you seem like a thrill-seeker. But, you are really seeking a relationship connection that is highly sensual, boundaryless, and makes you feel extremely special.
There’s nothing better than an example to show you what I mean. I recall treating a fifty something couple. They came to therapy because the husband announced he wanted a divorce. He was having an affair with a much younger woman whom he wished to marry. There is nothing new in this story, right? It happens to people every day.
My patient had a very hard childhood that deprived him of guidance, safety, love and resources. He spent three decades trying to quench a deep yearning within for true happiness and peace. He married, established a successful business and family life, and went beyond the call of duty protecting his family, friends and employees. Life was generally good, as long as he was building a career and relationships. But, once these were set, it wasn’t long before he was searching for his greatest happiness once again.
He found it, or so he thought, which prompted his visit to me. She was a twenty-eight year old employee of his who had a nine-year-old son. She became his greatest happiness and reason to be. He pleaded with his wife to let him go. “I deserve to be happy.” I’m so tired of giving to other people. It is time for me,” he repeated.” He was a man in great despair and need. And, I was pleased to help him.
I don’t think I ever saw a man sob so deeply over the decision to divorce. His grief called into question his newfound happiness. He was mourning. This was understandable. My patient was about to give up thirty years of history with a spouse, children, and their mates and children, to realize great happiness and peace with another family.
He announced right away that he was coming to therapy to tell his wife that he was divorcing her. He wanted me to help her to understand his reasons for leaving. Perhaps, I could have done this, if I trusted that he himself really understood the source of his great unhappiness. My patient romanced everything he did. He built a business that was unlike any other in his industry, at the time. He collected special antique cars that very few could buy. Everything promised to lift him away from despair to a larger than life happiness.
Indeed, it was time for him to find peace. But, first, he had to understand the psychological basis to his lifelong unhappiness. My job is to make him conscious, so that he knows what he is doing and can accept the full consequences of any action that he takes. Thus, every step of the way, I challenged the meanings he gave to happiness and peace in life. “Who is depriving you of happiness?” “What is happiness to you, to any of us in life?” “What is tiring you?” My questions chiseled away at his defenses and pushed him to reflect on the meaning of his emptiness and desire, rather than quench it through compulsive, risky codependent actions.
Life is a journey of discovering the authentic happiness. You won’t find it in extraordinary experiences that lift you to states of great excitement. You’ll find it in the simple activities of everyday life.
If you have a tendency to quench your emptiness and desire through codependent relationships that have brought you more misery than happiness, please take a moment to reflect upon the following question. What drives you in life? What makes you happy? Is it satisfying sensual desire through relationship, like Anna? If so, remember, not once in the novel does Anna contemplate the meaning of life, her marriage, or of true happiness, despite having experiences that should have given her ample reason and chance to ask herself such questions.
Thus, don’t go through life sleeping. Wake up; examine the romantic relationships that you have chosen thus far, for their true happiness. Don’t go from one destructive, codependent relationship to another that depletes you of innocence, hope and the will to live. You will deprive yourself of the relationships and experiences in which simple happiness is found, like the care and nurturing of children, family and loved ones, tending to the suffering of others, relationship with God, nature or existence, and the relationship you have to yourself, psychologically and spiritually. This is the most authentic way to enrich your life with meaning and purpose, stability, depth of feelings that you’ve been craving, and the awe of being alive.
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