What law does lust obey? When the Hollywood actor Mickey Rourke endeavoured to purloin a man’s girlfriend outside a London nightclub, the response was outrage.

How could sexual desire overturn the most basic rules of respect and etiquette? News that Rourke plans to move to London because of its apparent surfeit of available young women sent out even more shockwaves. The big question was: what exactly did Rourke think “available” means? We tend to see lust as dangerous. It is a corrosive force, blind in its insistence and destructive in its power. It breaks up relationships and enslaves us to the most unsuitable partners. But can we ever live without it? Lust is another name for libido, the way we form passionate attachments.

It suggests an almost automatic process, impervious to morals and commitments, to good advice or even threats.

Yet lust is not simply wild and irrational, it is moulded by specific forces. Even when we are drunk, we don’t lust after just anyone. A detail like a certain hair colour, a look, an odour, a garment may all precipitate desire. They open the floodgates even if we remain unaware of them at a conscious level.

These details usually have a secret history. They remind us unconsciously of people we have desired, fantasies we have had and situations that we have been involved in. When we encounter the detail later, we are overcome by emotion. And this is where lust betrays itself. When desire is triggered by some detail that chimes with our fantasy life, we want to possess the other person but something forbids us. It’s as if we’ve got too close. We are blocked from realising our deepest wishes, as if they had to be kept just slightly out of reach.

This is why lust so often ends in disappointment. But is this necessarily the case? Can lust ever be tamed within a relationship? If desire is triggered by details — such as green eyes — surely each time we encounter the trigger, we will be turned on? We would be doomed to stray.

Yet can a woman with green eyes ever become the woman with green eyes? If not, lust and love are forever doomed to miss each other. This is echoed in the popular cliché that a wife must be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. It conjures up the image of two separate people, but perhaps this is just another way of trying to domesticate the darker powers of lust. Rather than straying, we imagine that our partner is more than one person.

But ultimately, love and lust are very different. When people talk about their sexual conquests, they make comparisons: X was better than Y, etc. Lust means that you can compare people. But with love, you can’t make comparisons.

And where lust aims at possession, love involves the realisation that it is not possible to possess another person totally.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and author