What is this thing called love? Defining the love that supports marriage and family

The aim of this article was to define, on the basis of theorizing and research, the love that supports marriage and the family, or the type of love that is related to high levels of satisfaction in relationships, to the psychological well-being of family members and to stable family relationships. Literature is reviewed that explores the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of both mature and immature love, and I conclude that all three aspects of love can be either mature or immature. With regard to the emotional component, I have noted that feelings of both passion and companionship can continue throughout life. Immature love is exemplified in such constructs as limerence, love addiction, and infatuation. Given that love is socially constructed, I note that it can be strongly affected by the beliefs about love that are present in the culture, and that these beliefs can be either functional or dysfunctional. Particularly dysfunctional beliefs include those emphasizing that love is blind, external, and beyond the control of the lovers. Behaviors characteristic of mature and immature love are also explored. It seems that mature love may be best conceptualized as creating an environment in which both the lovers and those who depend on them can grow and develop. This type of love supports marriage and family life.     

Some reflections on the origin of hate between man and woman

There is no love without hate and no hate without love; their opposite is indifference. According to Winnicott, human being’s deepest guilt evolves when his hate is stronger than his love. This paper will explore how the origin of hate may lie in early helplessness, in the difference between sexes and disturbances of developmental phases. Finally, it will be illustrated how hate can protect love in a relationship between man and woman.     

Attachment to the Missing Object: Infidelity and Obsessive Love

In an object relations study on infidelity and obsessive love, the author observes that in relationships marked by chronic, repetitive infidelity and obsession, the lover is enamored with that which they can not have and that the psychological development of such individuals may have been traumatized by early attachment disturbances in the primary dyad. Tenacious, unsatisfying love-attachments as seen in sexual addictions and obsessional love may result from the internalization of an absent or intermittent object relationship—a morbid attachment to the missing object of infancy. Such patients often demonstrate depressive/addictive traits and schizoid defenses and typically have difficulty forming an attachment bond with the analyst, perceiving the analyst as a dangerous, rejecting agent who will recapitulate the original trauma. In the clinical case of Gretchen, the author uses Winnicott's (1960) concept of holding to create a progressive therapeutic bond, as toxic resistant forces are gradually resolved.     

Idealization and mourning in love relationships: normal and pathological spectra

Prior to the last two decades, psychoanalytic literature focused on the psychopathology of sexual life, rather than on an integrated overview of love relationships. Only in the last twenty-five years has its scope been expanded to include the psychodynamics and phenomenology of love relationships per se. Nevertheless, a selective, critical review of the literature indicates that little attention has been paid to a) the interrelation of narcissism, self-esteem, and love relationships; b) the role of the ego-ideal and idealizations in the capacity for falling in love and sustaining love relationships; and c) the faculty for, and/or impediments to, transcending intrapsychic self-boundaries in mature love relationships. In this paper, a brief exposition of the ego-ideal developmental sequences and their integration into the superego as a differentiated structure serves as an introduction to the proposal of a developmental continuum of mechanisms of idealization and their respective nodal transmutations throughout the life cycle. This developmental continuum may contribute to the ongoing elucidation of the aforementioned problems. This referential frame is ultimately applied to the exploration of categorical and dimensional pathological variations of idealization and mourning in love relationships and in different levels of personality organization: neurotic, borderline, and narcissistic structures. A clinical vignette illustrates some of the correspondence criteria between this frame of reference and its clinical applications.     

Taking the Love Pill: A Reply to Naar and Nyholm

In recent discussions about whether the use of a love pill to enhance love in our romantic relationships is desirable, one argument centres on the question whether this love pill would secure the final value we attribute to love. Sven Nyholm argues that it would not, because one thing we desire for its own sake is to be at the origin of the love others feel for us. In a reply, Hichem Naar argues against Nyholm that a love pill does not need to be incompatible with the final value we attribute to love and that a love pill can have a facilitating role in the creation and sustainment of loving attachment. I think Naar is right but does not address Nyholm's worry completely. I will argue that Naar and Nyholm are speaking of different ends for which the love pill is used as a means, and that whether the love pill would fail or not fail to secure the final value we attribute to love, depends on this particular end.     

A social categorical approach to a question about love

Although scholars' interest in love phenomena has continued to increase in recent years, a common conceptual language for the study of love has not yet emerged, as is evidenced by the large number of love taxonomies and associated vocabularies that have been advocated. A promising avenue for the development of a common scientific vocabulary of love lies in the systematic examination of the love vocabularies of laypersons to identify what varieties of love, if any, their lexicon reflects. Several means by which love researchers have attempted such examinations are described and illustrated with reference to the linguistic expressions “love” and “in love.” These methods include direct questioning, autobiographical reports, inferential studies, and the prototype approach, which introduces the probabilistic view of cognitive categorization structure and process to the study of love. Several of the underlying assumptions of the prototype approach are discussed and contrasted to those of the social categorical approach we present here. The social categorical method is described in this approach, respondents place persons in their actual social worlds into social categories, and the associations among the memberships of those categories are examined. Finally, the implications of some of the findings derived from this method for a taxonomy of love and for the study of interpersonal relationships are discussed.     

Developmental and dynamic dimensions of hate,rage, and violence

Abstract

Hate may be regarded as a complex affective-cognitive emotion and attitude alloyed with aggression. Hate and aggression have both neurobiological and environmental determinants. Hate may be overt or covert, externalized or internalized, and/or somatized. Persistent recurrent painful and traumatic experiences generate and exacerbate hate and aggression. An amalgam of hate and love is evident in the ambivalence of all self and object relationships and in conscious and unconscious fantasy. In the mature personality, there is a preponderance of love over hate. There may be justified hatred of sociopathic individuals and groups.     

Love,Ethics, and Authenticity: Beauvoir's Lesson in What It Means to Read

Beauvoir's distinction between romantic and authentic love offers us an opportunity for thinking through the complex relations among philosophy, reading, and love. If we accept her account of romantic love as a flawed, dependent mode of being, and her suggestion that an authentic love—one that engages maturely with the other—is possible, then we might take the risk of thinking of reading in these terms.     

People newly in love are more responsive to positive feedback

Passionate love is associated with increased activity in dopamine-rich regions of the brain. Increased dopamine in these regions is associated with a greater tendency to learn from reward in trial-and-error learning tasks. This study examined the prediction that individuals who were newly in love would be better at responding to reward (positive feedback). In test trials, people who were newly in love selected positive outcomes significantly more often than their single (not in love) counterparts but were no better at the task overall. This suggests that people who are newly in love show a bias toward responding to positive feedback, which may reflect a general bias towards reward-seeking.     

Using subtle reminders of love to foster healthy snack choices

Employing three experiments with US college students, we examined how subtle reminders of companionate and sexual love affect consumers' healthy snack choices. Two different symbols of companionate and sexual love were used as manipulations. Results from the studies suggest that exposure to subtle reminders of companionate love lead to a greater likelihood of making healthy eating choices than subtle reminders of sexual love. These choices are likely driven by the activation of distal and proximal temporal construals. Interestingly, subtle reminders of sexual love appear to mimic a choice setting with no manipulation. This research should enlighten marketers who are interested in fostering healthy consumption. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Confucian love and global ethics: how the cheng brothers would help respond to christian criticisms

There is an increasing awareness that we are living in a global village, which demands a global ethics. In this article, I shall explore what contributions Confucianism, particularly its conception of love, can make. It has often been claimed that Confucian love is love with distinction, as a natural feeling, and as merely human love and so it is inferior to the Christian love, which is universal, commanded, and based on divine love. Drawing on the resources of the Cheng brothers’ neo-Confucianism, I shall explore how Confucianism can make creative responses to such criticisms and thus make a unique Confucian contribution to the emerging global ethics.     

Index to Volume 140

Abstract

University students from France and the United States completed the Hobart (1958) and Knox-Sporakowski (1968) scales measuring attitudes toward romantic love. Significant differences between the two samples were found, with the French placing higher value on chivalrous behavior by men and on jealousy as a measure of commitment. The French were also significantly more likely than the Americans to perceive love as irrational and as a cause of jealousy and clouded judgment, agreeing that it is too emotional an experience to be studied objectively. Gender differences interacted with cultural perspectives on several measured dimensions of romantic love.     

Coupling

Summary

This paper discusses the many factors that make for permanence in relationships. Some are practical and relate to the historical provisions of the marriage contract such as economics, child rearing, and social/familial concerns.

Others have to do with attachments needs, the instinctive drive towards safety which propels us to stay near someone who is discriminated as significant to our well being. Dysfunctional attachment needs are discussed as well as the difference between attachment and mature love.     

On love, hate and knowledge

In this short theoretical paper, I discuss Bion's three relations of love, hate, and knowledge, using Peirce's semiotic theory of relations and Bakhtin's semiotic/philosophical writings. Reading Bion through the prism of these resources allows us to better understand the meaning and ontogenesis of the basic relations and to examine their clinical explanatory value.     

Applications of rational-emotive therapy (RET) to love problems

Rational-emotive therapy (RET) can be particularly applied to individuals with serious love problems, such as people possessed by super-romantic love, limerents who are mired in obsessive-compulsive feelings, insensately jealous and possessive lovers, people who needlessly interfere with their encountering suitable partners, and those who suffer anguish and depression when they lose love. It also has important things to teach about keeping alive and enhancing normal love feelings. This paper outlines the RET theory of love and applies it to various amative difficulties.This article is to appear as a chapter inClinical applications of Rational-Emotive Therapy, edited by Albert Ellis and Michael Bernard, New York: Plenum, 1985.     

MODELING RELATIONS

In the ordinary way of representing relations, the order of the relata plays a structural role, but in the states themselves such an order often does not seem to be intrinsically present. An alternative way to represent relations makes use of positions for the arguments. This is no problem for the love relation, but for relations like the adjacency relation and cyclic relations, different assignments of objects to the positions can give exactly the same states. This is a puzzling situation. The question is what is the internal structure of relations? Is the use of positions still justified, and if so, what is their ontological status? In this paper mathematical models for relations are developed that provide more insight into the structure of relations “out there” in the real world.     

Space in the Trinity and in pastoral care

A central feature of the life of the Trinity is contrast without conflict: God is three and God is one. This dynamic has a spatial reference. The Three draw close to each other in the intimacy of love, but they also give each other space to be. This dynamic is a necessary condition for mature relationships on the human level. It is argued that effective pastoral counseling involves both moving in close through empathy and acceptance, and creating appropriate distance through a process that Martin Buber refers to as confirmation. Confirmation involves wrestling with the other person to help her or him actualize her or his God-given moral and spiritual potential.