A PSYCHOANALYTIC ESSAY ON ROMANTIC, EROTIC LOVE

I have attempted to conceptualize passionate love from a psychoanalytic perspective. Having noted psychoanlysis' long-standing reluctance to confront adult love, I have turned to the love poetry of different cultures and the more modern philosophers of love for more detailed descriptions of its phenomenology. With these depictions in mind, such love can be defined as a complex and somewhat conflictual affective disposition, rather like a mood, evoked by the image of another person and characterized by periods of passionate excitement and intimate repose. A variety of both pleasurable and unpleasurable affects are entertained in romantic love, which derive from its both sensory and illusory wellsprings, from the opportunities it affords for sensual satisfaction and spiritual overreaching. These affects are activated in response to states of desire and satiety and as modes of communication with and knowledge of the other. They are accompanied and facilitated by the capacity for genital primacy and cognitive components in love-specifically the lover's capacity to express himself or herself in genital orgasm and then to create and dwell in metaphors about the lovers' sexual encounters. Whatever its infantile precursors and however regressive it can be at times, love emerges perforce as a late adolescent or young adult phenomenon. At this juncture, the prepotency of romantic love moves the individual to disengage from the injunctions and desexualized idealizations of his parental images and to reorganize the superego constructs based on these-to create his or her own ethic. Thus, while there may be other routes to maturity, embracing the feeling of being in love helps a person grow up.