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

Abstract

ETHEL SPECTOR PERSON: Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion. American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., Washington, DC, 2007, 379 pp., $29.95. ISBN 158562-240-0. Dr. Person is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, in New York City. Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters is a revision of Dr. Person's original work from 1988. I often read works that have a clinical application with an eye on how well their words might apply to my current patients. In this case, I found myself dwelling as much on my own experience of romantic love and passion as that of my patients'. While reading Dreams of Love, I was compelled to consider my relationship with my wife of 17 years, Leslie, who is my own great romantic passion. Such was the resonance I felt while engaging with this text. Dr. Person divides her work into five parts. Part 1 is titled, The Experience of Romantic Love. I found myself reading this section with the passion of a man who is deeply in love. My own experience resonated strongly with the description of falling in love-the excitement, the passion, the idealization, and the vulnerability. The description and examples of this phase of infatuation and passion captured the essence of this perfecdy normal insanity. Part 2 is titled, The Aims of Love. I found myself reading this section with the passion of an educator of psychotherapists. This section discusses the development of love, its place throughout the life cycle, and the positive, growthpromoting creativity that romantic love generates. The experience of love is presented in a developmental context. This section will find a home in the lecture hall where students of psychotherapy may make use of it to situate love in the passage of life. Part 3 is titled, The Paradoxes and Struggles Inherent in Love. I read this section with the passion of a clinician who spends much clinical time dealing with perversion (in the Freudian sense). Dr. Person discusses transcendence and enslavement, love and power, disillusionment, and that anathema of love, the triangle. Of particular interest was her discussion of enslavement and of power. The strength of this section was in its ability to frame the normal failings of love in relation to the potentially pathological distortions of obsession, masochism, and perversion. …