Theories Of Love Research Articles

Freud's three theories of love in the light of later developments.

Evidence is presented that Freud developed three very different theories on love. These theories were not integrated into a coherent theory. In subsequent developments each theory had its own history. The paper discusses the history of the controversy on the genital character, the relation between love and gender identity, between love and narcissism, the hierarchical structure of the capacity to love, and the relation between love and object loss. The impact of some concepts such as symbiosis and the rapprochmente subphase on the understanding of conflicts in loving is raised. While at present differences in emphasis make it difficult to build a coherent psychoanalytic theory of love, it is productive to bring divergent views in touch with each other. A unified theory of love based on psychoanalytic observations is suggested.

Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction , and: The Oak in the Acorn: On "Remembrance of Things Past" and on Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn , and: Language and Narration in Céline's Writings: The Challenge of Disorder , and: Simenon: A Critical Biograph (review)

Reviewed by: Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, and: The Oak in the Acorn: On "Remembrance of Things Past" and on Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn, and: Language and Narration in Céline's Writings: The Challenge of Disorder, and: Simenon: A Critical Biograph Ben Stoltzfus Malcolm Bowie . Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 225 pp. $39.50. Howard Nemerov . The Oak in the Acorn: On "Remembrance of Things Past" and on Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. 153 pp. $16.95. Ian Noble . Language and Narration in Céline's Writings: The Challenge of Disorder. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1987. 227 pp. $39.95. Stanley G. Eskin . Simenon: A Critical Biography. Jefferson: McFarland, 1987. 304 pp. $24.95. Malcolm Bowie's Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction stages a dialogic exchange between psychoanalysis and writing. Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's theories are analyzed as fiction, and Marcel Proust's fiction is analyzed as theory. The result is an exciting and provocative substitution of one for the other whereby theory becomes fiction and vice versa. When Freud wrote his psychological theories, he was outspoken about their tendency to become fiction, whereas Proust's fictional characters theorize endlessly about the human mind. Lacan's "discourse of the Other," which is always a fictitious discourse, no matter what it is, is also an attempt to give his analysis of the unconscious mind a scientific basis worded, nonetheless, in a language that is metaphorical and opaque. Bowie's wonderfully [End Page 298] close readings of Freud, Proust, and Lacan juxtapose radical psychological theories with twentieth-century imaginative literature. Bowie begins with "desire" as a major conceptual nostrum of the age and ends with "theory's intermittent self-awareness as passion." He argues that the imagery of all three writers combines the sexual and intellectual modes of desire into a portrait of the mind that, in all its pursuits, whether theoretical or fictional, is enthusiastic, rapacious, and self-consuming. In this "passionate" pursuit of goals the mind oscillates between certitude and fiction, between fulfillment and ruin. Bowie's metaphor for this dialectic is Titian's Diana and Actaeon, in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, showing Actaeon's astonished gaze directed simultaneously at the goddess and the stag's skull. It is the glance of the hunter who has become the hunted. Actaeon thus symbolizes Freud's, Proust's, and Lacan's quest for an elusive truth that is always both inside and outside the cave, because the hunter of truth, as Lacan describes the process, is and always has been inside the cave where truth resides. This paradoxical pursuit of knowledge, with its ever-receding goals, epitomizes an archaeology of the mind that fuses desire and death. For Freud, psychoanalysis, like archaeology, is the exploration of anterior states. Both fields are concerned with burial and excavation, with the uncovering of the past, and with its rendering in the present. Freud believed that a person's psychic relics (buried by time and by repression) are more durable than the archaeological ones that are always unearthed incompletely or in fragments. Unlike archaeologists, Freud and Proust believed that the privileged territory of the unconscious mind or of involuntary memory always resurrects its relics intact. The temple of the psychic past is never in ruins; it surfaces complete, untarnished, and in the present. Although Bowie could have pursued a few of these connections in more detail, the suggestion is there, and the reader can draw all the necessary conclusions. The important point is that Proust's theories of love and jealousy embedded in his fiction and in the privileged moments of involuntary memory do resemble Freud's theories of the unconscious: psychoanalysis, like involuntary memory, uncovers the past. Proust also acts as a link, if a link is needed, between Freud and Lacan. A la recherche du temps perdu, with its rich metaphorical veinings—the "madeleine," the Vinteuil sonata, Venice's uneven paving stones, the starched napkin, the tinkle of the coffee spoon on the cup—illustrates the fact that nothing in the unconscious or the subconscious is ever lost. Freud...

Parametric instability of thick, orthotropic, circular cylindrical shells

The dynamic instability of simply supported, finite-length, circular cylindrical shells subjected to parametric excitation by axial loading, is investigated analytically. The shell is taken to be orthotropic, due to closely spaced longitudinal and/or circumferential stiffeners or to many layers of fiber-reinforced composite material either oriented at angles of 0° and 90° (cross-ply) or at +θ and −θ (angle-ply) with respect to the shell axis. The theory used is a general first-order shear deformable shell theory introduced by Hsu, Reddy, and Bert; it can be considered to be the thick-shell version of the popular Sanders-Koiter thin-shell theory. By means of tracers, this theory can be reduced to thick-shell versions of the theories of Love (and Loo) and of Donnell (and Morley). Quantitative results are presented to show the effects of shell geometry, materials, and fiber orientation on the stability boundaries.

Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process.

This article explores the possibility that romantic love is an attachment process--a biosocial process by which affectional bonds are formed between adult lovers, just as affectional bonds are formed earlier in life between human infants and their parents. Key components of attachment theory, developed by Bowlby, Ainsworth, and others to explain the development of affectional bonds in infancy, were translated into terms appropriate to adult romantic love. The translation centered on the three major styles of attachment in infancy--secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent--and on the notion that continuity of relationship style is due in part to mental models (Bowlby's "inner working models") of self and social life. These models, and hence a person's attachment style, are seen as determined in part by childhood relationships with parents. Two questionnaire studies indicated that relative prevalence of the three attachment styles is roughly the same in adulthood as in infancy, the three kinds of adults differ predictably in the way they experience romantic love, and attachment style is related in theoretically meaningful ways to mental models of self and social relationships and to relationship experiences with parents. Implications for theories of romantic love are discussed, as are measurement problems and other issues related to future tests of the attachment perspective.

A triangular theory of love.

This article presents a triangular theory of love. According the theory, has three components: (a) intimacy, which encompasses the feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness one experiences in loving relationships; (b) passion, which encompasses the drives that lead romance, physical attraction, and sexual consummation; and (c) decision/commitment, which encompasses, in the short term, the decision that one loves another, and in the long term, the commitment maintain that love. The amount of one experiences depends on the absolute strength of these three components, and the kind of one experiences depends on their strengths relative each other. The three components interact with each other and with the actions that they produce and that produce them so as form a number of different kinds of loving experiences. The triangular theory of subsumes certain other theories and can account for a number of empirical findings in the research literature, as well as for a number of experiences with which many are familiar firsthand. It is proposed that the triangular theory provides a rather comprehensive basis for understanding many aspects of the that underlies close relationships. What does it mean to love someone? Does it always mean the same thing, and if not, in what ways do loves differ from each other? Why do certain loves seem last, whereas others disappear almost as quickly as they are formed? This article seeks answer these and other questions through a triangular theory of love. This tripartite theory deals both with the nature of and with loves in various kinds of relationships. The presentation of the theory will be divided into three main parts. In the first part, the main tenets of the theory will be explained and discussed, and the theory will be compared with other theories of love. In the second part, the implications of the theory for close relationships and satisfaction in them will be described. In the third part, the theory will be shown account for many of the empirical phenomena that have been observed with regard love.

On the theories used for the wave propagation in laminated composite thin elastic shells

In this paper, the problem of propagation of free harmonic waves in cross-ply laminated thin elastic shells is considered. For this problem, a theoretical unification of the most commonly used, in physical and engineering applications, thin shell theories which take into consideration transverse shear deformation effects is presented. In more detail, the problem is formulated in such a way that by using some tracers, which have the form of Kronecker's deltas, the obtained stress-strain relations, constitutive equations and equations of motion produce, as special cases, the corresponding relations and equations of the transverse shear deformable analogs of Donnell's, Love's and Sanders' theories. Using an eigenvalue form solution of the equations of motion, a comparison of corresponding numerical results obtained on the basis of all of the afore-mentioned theories is made. Comparisons with corresponding results obtained on the basis of the classical thin shell theories of Donnell, Love, Sanders and Flugge are also made.

On the Theories of Family-Withering and Free Love in the Early Soviet Society

On the Theories of Family-Withering and Free Love in the Early Soviet Society

Plato's Theory of Eros in the Symposisum: Abstract

Recent work on Plato has rekindled interest in his theory of love. Several studies offer partial exegeses and critical assessments of the theory. Yet a systematic reconstruction of the theory does not exist, and disagreements remain about its central features and its virtues and defects. In this paper I offer such a reconstruction. In a larger study I attempt to understand and assess the theory relative to its cultural context and relative to recent, empirically oriented theories of love in the social sciences and biology. It must be remembered that while in English the single, all inclusive word 'love' covers a wide variety of feelings, attitudes, and behavior, in Ancient Greek three different words were used to cover different, perhaps overlaping portions of this variety. Eros was used to cover primarily the case of sexual love, and philia the cases of familial love and friendship, while agape represents a significant concept perhaps only later, in the New Testament. Here we are concerned only with Plato's theory of eros in the Symposium, though comparisons to philia and agape are useful and illuminating. To understand and assess a theory of love it is useful to place it in at least two wider settings. One is the cultural setting of the writer. This is important because some of the things a writer make take as characteristic of love or as data for his theory may be culture bound; for example, sexual attitudes and customs, courting and mating practices, perceptions of beauty. In the speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes Plato provides a partial cultural context for the theory expounded by Socrates and Diotima. Plato's theory must be placed in its cultural context. Perhaps the most sig-

Books in review

LANGUAGE AND POVERTY. Edited by Frederick Williams. Chicago: Rand Mc‐Nally, 1970; pp. xi 459. $10.50. THEORIES OF ATTRACTION AND LOVE. Edited by Bernard I. Murstein. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1971; pp. x 179. $8.95. BETWEEN PEOPLE: A New Analysis of Interpersonal Communication. By Gerald R. Miller and Mark Steinberg. Chicago: Science Research Associates, Inc., 1975; pp. 367. THE HUMAN AURA. By Nicolas G. Regush. New York: Medallion Books, 1974. 237 pp. $1.25. SEX ROLES: A JOURNAL OF RESEARCH. Published by Plenum Publishing Company. 227 West 17th Street, New York 10011. $14 yearly for individuals.

Theories of Attraction and Love.

Theories of Attraction and Love.