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Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

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A leading psychoanalyst examines romantic passion, how it affects our psychological growth, and the differences in the way men and women experience romance

384 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 1988

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About the author

Ethel Spector Person

33 books13 followers
Ethel Person, a Columbia University psychiatrist, did pioneering research on sexuality, visiting sex shops and drag dance clubs to help herself understand what motivates transsexuals and transvestites, and conducting broad-based clinical studies on the role of sexual fantasy in people’s lives.

Dr. Person wrote frequently on love and sexuality for general-interest publications and was the author of four books, the best known of which is By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives (1995), in which she argued that people shaped their lives by trying consciously or unconsciously to live out their fantasies.

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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
Profile Image for Isaac.
241 reviews39 followers
November 18, 2018
My favorite excerpts:

Simone Weil states the matter rather starkly:

“Instead of loving a human being for his hunger, we love him as food for ourselves. We love like cannibals. To love purely is to love the hunger in a human being. …But the way we actually do love is very different. Thanks to their companionship, their words, or their letters, we get comfort, energy, and stimulation from the people we love. They affect us in the same way as a good meal after a hard day’s work. So we love them like food.” – Pg. 44

The most recent and extreme account relating to falling in love to weakness is proposed by Francesco Alberoni:

“No one can fall in love if he is even partially satisfied with what he has or who he is. The experience of falling in love originates in an extreme depression, an inability to find something that has value in everyday life. The ‘symptom’ of the predisposition to fall in love is not the conscious desire to do so, the intense desire to enrich our lives; it is the profound sense of being worthless and of having nothing that is valuable and the shame of not having it.” – Pg. 84

The longing for wholeness, completeness, merger, and transcendence is the sorrowful heart of love – sorrowful because it is a longing that can never be wholly satisfied. There is no ultimate remedy for our existential plight, but love is the search for such a remedy, and transcendence the only means of feeling we have achieved it.

Passionate love seeks a transcendence akin to religious experiences. The ideal of merger through love represents a potential solution to the central human problem of estrangement, finiteness, and meaninglessness. Consequently, love is more than a relief from pain or alleviation of anxiety; it is a mode of transcendence as well as transformation. – Pg. 86

C. S. Lewis, though an eminent authority on love, fell in love for the first time late in mid-life. His former student …recalled Lewis’s remark about his idyllically happy marriage: “Do you know, I am experiencing what I thought would never be mine. I never thought to have at sixty what passed me by in my twenties.” [The movie, Shadowlands, portrays this romance.] – Pg. 109

In love, even while seeking renewal, lovers hark back to the past, to ongoing, often unconscious, wishes and fantasies. Love seeks to undo many disappointments of early life. …So it is that love seeks (unconsciously) to undo the losses of early life, to gratify unfulfilled and forbidden childhood wishes. In love the lover regains his lost omnipotence, takes total possession of the beloved and achieves Oedipal victory. In achieving a union with the beloved, he undoes the defects, losses, and humiliations of his past. In doing so, he identifies with the victorious rivals of his childhood and assuages his wounded narcissism.

…“The zeal to regain paradise springs from the memory that men once possessed it and lost it.” – Pg. 115

Passionate love cannot be sustained without those moments in which the lovers feel they have achieved merger, that they are one. Part of the ongoing intensity in love is the insistent hunger to re-experience such epiphanies. For many, sex is the principal channel for the mystical urge toward transcendence through merger, though it is by no means the only route. Epiphanies can occur in moments of extreme intimacy in which the sense of merger is marked by no more physical an exchange than a gaze, the touching of fingertips, one lover’s arm around the other’s shoulders. Perhaps these moments evoke something of that oceanic sense of oneness that floods mother and infant in their early days together. – Pg. 127

What are the prerequisites that allow for the perpetuation of warm affectionate bonding? The lovers must establish what for them will be the optimal distance between them, allowing for union without subverting autonomy through domination or submission. For most lovers, attaining the optimal distance means two things: the lover has the ability to periodically be alone without feeling empty and he has the ability to open up in intimacy. There must be some workable mutual accommodation to both intimacy and separation. Otherwise, the most loving bonds are experienced as intrusive, or the shortest of separations is experienced (by one lover, anyway) as intolerable. The lover must be able to periodically renounce his urge to nurture the Other and allow the beloved to move away. Individuals best able to maintain the paradoxical stance required in love – the ability to achieve union without compromising autonomy, and to tolerate aloneness without collapse of the self – are often those with a strong sense of self…

The lovers must be able to counter those disillusionments so rampant in committed relationships. These problems are easiest to counter when each lover’s idealization of the other has not been too extreme, meaning that it has been based on attributes which were accurately perceived and truly valued. Most important, the lover must be able to tolerate some frustration and to be satisfied with what is good, not demanding impossible perfection of either the beloved’s character or ministrations. In this sense, happy love depends in part on temperament, on the ability to look at life on balance. The lover must be able to discount some of the negatives, to blink and look away, to deny and to forgive. – Pg. 328

But there is no denying that preserving intensity does pose special problems. While excitement depends on novelty, on otherness, intimacy and security more often depend on knowledge. Therefore it would seem almost a contradiction in terms to expect that intimate loving couples could preserve excitement over a long period of time. The dilemma is how to perpetuate mystery, uncertainty, and novelty while integrating them into a stable relationship. Successful lovers intuitively (or accidentally) solve the problem in creative ways. There are a variety of strategies that different pairs of lovers use to cut this curious Gordian knot.

Excitement can be fostered by uncertainty, by periodic separations, by sharing external projects, by unconventionality, and, most importantly, perhaps, by ready access to the unconscious and the primitive reaches of one’s own and one’s lover’s soul.

Those lovers who use separation (psychic or geographic) to keep love exciting, find that their periods apart offer them opportunities for inner change or insight. Creative people are more apt to avail themselves of this mode, because they more often require intervals of separation and isolation for inner development, and they can more readily turn such periods into times of growth. Those inner changes and creative insights generated in separation are then brought back into the relationship, which becomes imbued with a new mystery. …Its rarity probably relates to the fact that both lovers must thrive on periodic separation, and this is usually only true of one.

Some lovers find their excitement in a shared external project. This may take the form of a cause that fires the imagination of both, offering them a joint source of excitement issuing from the external world. …For many, the common cause is political, though it could be artistic, religious, altruistic, or even mercantile in nature. Mutually engaged, passionate couples are often found in the wake of causes, jointly committed to doing good, righting injustice, reforming, preserving, or revolutionizing. – Pgs. 330-331

Perhaps the most reliable and least problematic way to preserve excitement – and this judgment surely reflects my psychological bias – is by being able to share new perceptions and insights emanating from the unconscious. This kind of excitement does not depend on any kind of external drama, but on sensitivity to the stages of one’s emotional development through the ordinary cycles of life. In short, the lovers undertake a joint emotional and psychological voyage, and for those who are psychologically attuned, there is novelty and wonder enough to preserve the pitch of excitement. For them, the excitement of a joint voyage of discovery replaces that of the amorous quest.

Even without special psychological aptitude, passionate intensity can be kept alive by access to the unconscious and to the “primitive.” Writers on love sometimes seem so committed to promoting “maturity” that they tend to overlook the importance of continuing access to the regressive within us all. One of love’s sources and great strengths, part of its very nature, is that it normalizes and harmonizes the expression of infantile and forbidden wishes. But strangely enough, for fear of appearing childish, many lovers are inclined to permit regression only within the sexual sphere – perhaps because people are conditioned to think of sex as grown-up and mature by definition, no matter what form it takes, whereas other behaviors are not accorded the same imprimatur.

For many lovers, the freedom to use baby talk, to baby and be babied, to play-act infantile hurt or anger perpetuate the creative pleasure of love. The distinguished academician who, in the privacy of the bedroom, clowns and acts out Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp with his beloved, recaptures his youth and his verve. How much liberty he experiences than those who feel compelled to conduct their intimate relationships with an air of weighty seriousness! Actually, one of the joys of real intimacy is the freedom it gives to shuck off all the layers of adulthood that may feel superimposed and much too heavy. And yet there is surely a prejudice against such “infantilism.”

Yet many distinguished voices, particularly those not weighed down with the burdens of the psychological literature on maturity, speak to the delights of regression within the freedom accorded by love. If baby talk offends – and it surely offends many – then at least playfulness and laughter may be defended. One must not forget that one of the greatest joys of love is release from the self, and one facet of release from self is the release from obligations, from seriousness, from the constraints of maturity and the world of considered judgement. – Pgs. 335-336
Profile Image for Margareta.
116 reviews9 followers
April 29, 2018
What else is more of an alluring subject matter than love and passion? Ethel Person does a tremendous job bringing in analysis on all levels, ultimately founded in psychoanalytic theory, to deliver a fascinating reflection on love and its depictions in culture.
Profile Image for Interecophil.
126 reviews1 follower
January 22, 2022
Fun read. Offers many opportunities for self-reflection and creation in love. Enjoyed the engagement with literature.

"Wise men warn us again and again not to expect permanent and serene happiness from love, to remember that it brings misery, makes one dependent on an object, has downs as well as ups, like any human creation. It is not love’s fault that we demand too much of it, putting all our eggs in one basket. We should know that there is no heaven on earth. It is even doubtful if there is heaven in heaven.”

Profile Image for Pi.
92 reviews
December 22, 2019
A really lovely academic work / comparative literature study on romantic love and its many forms, faces and functions. Quite dense. Great quotes (turns out many eloquent people have had a great deal to say about love).
Profile Image for Mohsen.
57 reviews5 followers
October 27, 2023
What a great book on love! Many have written about it. But an integrated psychoanalytic perspective with vast references to literature and movies, is not sth you find easily! I recommend it
Profile Image for Debbie.
231 reviews14 followers
July 9, 2011
My opinion of this book must come with a whopping disclaimer: It is by no means an exhaustive look at all of the dynamics in and complications of love.
That being said, I think Ethel Person did a great job of approaching her topic from psychological, philosophical and literary perspectives (and certainly more that I am neglecting). She attempts to describe her topic without the limitations of bias (although at times, particularly in her discussion of the gender differences in love, she gets a bit too purely Freudian for my tastes; although she clearly tries to present love in a positive light, rather than focus upon only relationships which get it all wrong, she attempts to show the benefits of even the types of love we often get squeamish about (although her direct discussion of homosexuality, while mentioned pretty frequently throughout the book, appears to only consist of a few paragraphs). There are parts of the book, however, which would probably upset some people. For instance, people in a loveless, yet (perhaps) affluent, marriage, staying together for the sake of status, who smugly believe their arrangement to be preferential to those which require risk and/or trouble of some kind, may not appreciate the mirror Person holds up about the lack of passion still remaining in their lives. Because, honestly, this book is not about comfortable love (although it certainly does discuss it) but about the passionate, end-all-be-all connections few people share. Person doesn't claim that these intense relationships are always meant to be; she probably devotes more pages to addressing the horrible demises this kind of encounter leads to. But her primary topic is the height of passion, not some lukewarm affection.
I feel this book would be helpful for a writer to read, if he or she is planning on including romance as any sort of plot line (or topic at all) in his or her book, although many of the aspects discussed seem obvious points. The whole package of the book delivers the topic of love from a decidedly optimistic perspective, without naively claiming that anyone can find the passionate lasting connection that so many yearn for. Without appearing to have an agenda (except perhaps, as mentioned, Freudianism), Person discusses the trend of various dynamics in love, both ideal and puzzling.
Profile Image for Sean.
13 reviews1 follower
July 1, 2015
A respected female psychiatrist takes on the (male dominated) establishment and argues- persuasively I might add- that romantic love is something more than nature, nurture, or psychosis. Dr. Person walks us through the various forms of love but focuses on romantic love. She explains the chemical and biological responses humans experience in the early stages of love, and the predictable evolution of feelings most people encounter - interesting information but nothing particularly profound or new in those sections. What is new is her insights into how little Psychiatry actually understands about the phenomenon of being in love, and how fundamental yet transcendent passion can be within people who truly experience love. This book changed my life because it helped me appreciate and embrace the idea of romantic love as something much more important and powerful than the mere result of life's formative experiences.
Profile Image for Katie.
35 reviews1 follower
July 23, 2008
If you've ever wondered about the idea of love and self - the psychological and philosophical aspects, you may enjoy this book. Although it is a bit anachronistic, it is insightful. I've enjoyed many of Dr. Person's books.
Profile Image for Erin.
122 reviews13 followers
November 20, 2009
i never, ever read books like this, but this is the best book about love and passionate relationships. it made me feel so weirdly relaxed about how i feel about relationships, and was also strangely hopeful. a must-read for sure.
Profile Image for Judy Gee.
32 reviews
June 6, 2008
After you get off the counselor's couch and cried your eyes out, eat comfort food and then read this gem. My favorite quote: Sex roles have changed but love plots remain the same.
Profile Image for Caroline.
159 reviews2 followers
November 2, 2008
This was a wonderful book, an objective yet sympathetic and rich effort to look at romantic love as a psychological phenomenon, with many touching and fascinating insights.
Profile Image for Mary Woody.
Author 16 books2 followers
August 19, 2012
This book was an excellent read. I loved the way the writer broke everything down and used a lot of examples. I learned some new things.I will read this book again some day.
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