Mind Moves: Valentine's Day is approaching. It is both a commemoration and a celebration of love. It is a time to evaluate our relationship with love, with the people we love and the people who love us. It is a day to acknowledge that our deepest desire is to love and to be loved. Our deepest distress often derives from the death of love.
Love is essential to human survival; survival depends on this love. This human "attachment" is usually defined as the mutually affectionate, emotional relationship and desire to maintain closeness between two people. Often the first attachment is to the mother. This is the first prototype of love. It is the model we internalise and bring to our adult relationships unless there is rupture, disruption, deprivation or privation.
Studies of the human infant show that once attached, there is distress at separation, pleasure at reunion and a constant awareness of the care-giver. Life revolves around this loving presence. In that presence there is security, arms that enfold, and a shield against the world. Without this love there may be physical and emotional failure to thrive. Indeed, to love and be loved is so crucial to our development that a vast literature of psychological research examines the consequences of the loss of the loved one on a person's later capacity to love.
The famous, still relevant research by Spitz in the 1940s shows that the tiniest amongst us may become depressed if deprived of love. Spitz's work described what he called anaclitic depression in orphaned institutionalised infants, those infants who were only provided with unloving perfunctory physical care by a series of non-involved caretakers.
The later writings of psychoanalyst John Bowlby depict the painful phases an infant goes through when the love object is removed. This is a terrible sequence of protest, inconsolable crying and a soul-wrenching state of sadness before final desolation and resignation set in and the infant folds inwards upon itself.
Adult love and loss is not so different. We have celebrated it and elevated it in our search to understand it. It is the quest for the unattainable. The emotions of star-crossed lovers fill our minds and imaginations as well as our poetry, drama, opera and art in creative attempts to capture the complexity of love. Impossibility creates passion. Love at its most romantic is often unrequited, unconsummated or denied. Who does not cry at Madam Butterfly's drama, or Casablanca's departure scene, or when Rhett Butler finally and frankly does not give a damn? The power of Titanic is in the passion before the cold sea envelopes one lover leaving the other to remember forever.
Romantic love is often depicted as ill-fated or illicit; from the first forbidden fruit it is a dangerous business. Most of its metaphors are painful. It is something we fall into, fall out of, drown in or are pursued or imprisoned by. Our hearts are captured and trapped. Love drives us crazy, drives us mad. We are bitten and smitten. We sigh for it, die for it; lovers are shot and pierced by Cupid's arrow, maimed yet sustained by the lure of love. No neurochemical analysis explains its unquantifiable emotions; no neuoropsychological investigation locates its source. Because dying of a broken heart is not just a fictional analogy but a physiological actuality often observed in the swift death of an elderly couple, one after the other. This is love.
Sadly, the pain of love lost may seem unsustainable. The Samaritans remind us that Valentine's Day is a time when people may especially need their support.
Love is complex beyond comprehension, attracting and attaching itself to a vast affective range. It is many things: the sacrifice of the soldier, the skill of a surgeon, the courage of a fire fighter, the compassion of a nurse. It is celebrating someone else's success. It is friendship when times are bad.
Love is sitting by a hospital bed. It is the drawing of a child left on a parent's pillow. It is an apology. It is words unspoken. It is forging a Valentine's card for a schoolboy to show his friends in school. Love is grieving a lover. It is letting go. It is loving, sexual intimacy. And for some, love is celibacy, choosing a way of life that serves other people.
Love is deep passion between a man and a woman. It is the moment a mother looks in the eyes of her newborn; looks at the father of her child. It is young love. It is old love.
Love is not the battered woman arriving at the refuge. It is not pornography. It is not the broken man cast aside, not cruelty or infidelity. It is not the one-night stand. Love is not the abused child, the infant scarred by a parental blow, the self-loathing of the schoolchild cornered in the playground, the text message of hate, the street assault.
There are a profusion of psychological descriptions but a scarcity of solutions for loss of love. On Valentine's Day it is timely to celebrate the many loves in our lives, to acknowledge that if we are alive and have thrived in life so far, it is because someone, some time, has loved us enough.
How are we loved? Let us count the ways. Today.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.