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

The average rating for Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-28 00:00:00 Jason Mcdonald 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

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-28 00:00:00 John Stapleton 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.