Reassessed: 'Hello, Limerence' by Momo Yamaguchi
The Check-In · 01
PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW
Patient
Author
Momo Yamaguchi
Referral
The Subtext Review
Presenting condition
Persistent preoccupation with desire, desirability, and the domestication of both.
I. PRESENTING SYMPTOMS
Select all that apply.
☒ preoccupation with being desired
☒ bodily self-surveillance
☒ projection
☒ romantic fixation
☒ compulsive categorization of self and others
☒ recurring fantasies
☒ confusion between agency and performance
☒ difficulty distinguishing desire from its interpretation
☐ tolerance for ambiguity
Primary observation:
The patient demonstrates an unusually intimate awareness of the body while remaining curiously detached from bodily experience. Desire is repeatedly converted into an act of looking, imagining, possessing, or aspiring to be possessed.
II. HISTORY OF PRESENTING CONDITION
When did the symptoms first become apparent?
Almost immediately. The patient begins with the body, which is manipulated and cracked back into shape. Touch appears to restore the body to itself, only for that body to become an object of scrutiny again.
Shortly thereafter, desire enters through the protagonist’s fantasies, which arrive as violent and frequently grotesque intrusions. Sexuality, disgust, aggression, and self-consciousness become difficult to separate.
Have they persisted?
☒ Yes
☐ No
☐ Intermittently
☒ They have changed form
Relevant history:
The patient’s early fixation on bodily spectacle gradually gives way to romantic obsession, workplace harassment, sexual frustration, and an increasingly elaborate concern with what constitutes desirability. By the later stages, questions of sexuality and gender begin to destabilize the categories through which the protagonist has previously understood herself.
III. BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS
self-surveillance
persistent · high
projection
frequent · high
desire for desire
persistent · high
categorization of others
frequent · high
reflection
intermittent · moderate
behavioral change following insight
limited · high concern
Notable behavior:
The patient repeatedly allows its protagonist to recognize the structures governing her behavior without necessarily altering her participation in them. Patriarchy, gender performance, beauty standards, and social expectations are identified as sources of distress while their transactional logic continues to inform her conduct.
IV. COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
The patient appears to believe:
That understanding the forces shaping the protagonist’s behavior is sufficient to distinguish her from them.
The evidence suggests:
Awareness does not necessarily produce freedom. The protagonist frequently identifies patriarchal expectations while continuing to desire the very forms of beauty, possession, scarcity, submissiveness, and validation that sustain them.
Does the patient recognize the discrepancy?
☐ Consistently
☒ Occasionally
☒ Only when convenient
☐ Not yet
Assessment:
The protagonist’s intellectual awareness repeatedly threatens to become self-knowledge before retreating into assertion. Concepts such as “patriarchy” and “the male gaze” sometimes function as ready-made explanations for discomfort rather than tools of inquiry, allowing the protagonist to name a mechanism without examining her own investment in it.
V. PROJECTION
What does the protagonist project onto others?
Possession
Desire is repeatedly understood through scarcity, withholding, and the wish to be chosen.
Gendered behavior
The protagonist recognizes masculine and feminine performances while continuing to reproduce their terms.
Objectification
Others are frequently reduced to their bodies, desirability, ethnicity, sexuality, or usefulness, even as the protagonist remains acutely conscious of being similarly observed.
Notable finding:
The protagonist’s attention to the gaze does not necessarily liberate her from it. She appears to have internalized its logic to the point where self-perception becomes self-policing.
VI. RESISTANCE
What does the patient appear unwilling or unable to examine?
The possibility that awareness itself may be part of the problem.
The protagonist is highly capable of identifying social structures, particularly those surrounding gender, sexuality, and capitalism. However, this recognition rarely develops into a sustained examination of how those structures have become desirable, useful, accommodating, or pleasurable to her.
When confronted with this issue, the patient:
☒ Intellectualizes
☒ Contradicts itself
☒ Repeats the pattern
☐ Offers an unexpectedly revealing response
☐ Changes the subject
Clinical note:
This resistance produces one of the patient’s most interesting tensions. It knows enough to diagnose the system around its protagonist, but not necessarily enough—or not willingly enough—to let her recognize herself as one of its participants.
VII. INSIGHT
Does the patient recognize its own contradictions?
☐ Fully
☒ Intermittently
☐ Barely
☒ The contradiction may itself be intentional
Observed moments of insight:
The protagonist’s eventual recognition of her bisexuality opens a more fluid understanding of gender and desire. Describing herself as “playing at being a man” briefly exposes the performative quality of the categories that have constrained her.
Limitations of insight:
The newly discovered freedom is rapidly translated back into familiar binaries. Sexual identity becomes legible through appearance and behavior, apprehension becomes “mannish,” and difference is once again given a prescribed performance.
VIII. DIAGNOSIS
Clinical impression:
Hello, Limerence presents itself as preoccupied with desire, but its deeper fixation is arguably desirability: the unstable social value attached to being wanted, choosing whom to want, and becoming the kind of person whom others are expected to want.
Its central contradiction lies in its protagonist’s acute awareness of the systems governing her behavior alongside her persistent participation in them.
The protagonist can identify the machinery of patriarchy, objectification, gender performance, and commodification, but recognition rarely develops into escape. As a result, the patient remains caught between satire and sincerity.
In fact, the patient’s most interesting possibilities emerge from the difficulty of resolving that uncertainty.
IX. SIDE EFFECTS
Observed reactions:
☐ Desire to reread
☐ Desire to recommend
☒ Desire to discuss
☐ Desire to investigate further
☒ Residual image
☒ Unresolved irritation
☐ Unexpected recognition
☐ Desire to forget
Persistence:
Certain images remain stubbornly, wonderfully lodged in memory: the body being cracked back into shape; the grotesque intimacy of imagined touch; a safety pin piercing sweaty, supple flesh.
More significantly, the unresolved contradiction between the protagonist’s political vocabulary and her actual behavior continues to provoke thought.
X. PROGNOSIS
Expected course without intervention:
Continued fixation on desire, accompanied by intermittent episodes of self-recognition and recurrent attempts to treat self-evading explanations as resolution.
Likelihood of resolution:
☐ High
☐ Moderate
☒ Low
☒ The unresolved condition may be the point
Recommended treatment:
Additional attention should be paid to distinguishing recognition from resistance, being observed from experiencing oneself, and wanting another person from wanting what their desire appears to confer.
Follow-up:
☐ Required
☐ Recommended
☐ Unnecessary
☒ The patient will probably return in another form
FINAL ASSESSMENT
Primary finding:
The protagonist can identify the machinery of desire with considerable precision, but remains uncertain whether she wants to dismantle it or simply be wanted within it.
Aftercare:
Monitor for further attempts to distinguish desire from possession, agency from performance, and self-knowledge from the comforting act of having a name for what hurts.
An advance copy was provided by Mariner Books.