Ethel Spector Person > Quotes

“Too easily, in the name of the good, or the rational, or the moral, or the Christian, or the democratic, or even the merely socially acceptable, we blink away the actualities of our condition—the feelings, drives, dreams, and desires that express, with painful accuracy, the depths at which we really live. Not where we think or imagine we should live, or where society advises us to live, but where our lives are fueled and our deepest satisfactions experienced—this is what we disregard. We allow ourselves too often to live lives that are secondhand and largely theoretical.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Self-surrender sometimes has the potential for happiness. Submission never does.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“In part, love acts as change-agent because it is an explorative, imaginative transaction between two people, a partial escape from our own unremitting subjectivity into another’s. And in this it resembles, though it exceeds by far, the liberation we sometimes experience reading great literature.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Others may be more beautiful, yes, but the beloved has a more interesting face, hers reveals her soul. Others may be smarter, but he is more sensitive, which is what counts. And so forth. Loving may in fact feel so good because it is so creative.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Even when the lover has clearly been betrayed, he may willfully distort his perceptions in order to preserve the illusion that his love is ongoing and unthreatened, for it is the locus of his hopes and ambitions, it is his raison d’être. If he acknowledges that their love is transient or his lover less than worthy, then he fears his feelings were without foundation.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Insofar as contemporary psychoanalysts, and particularly some so-called revisionist analysts, address the question of love at all, they attempt to distinguish “mature” love from romantic love, loving from being in love: the former being healthy, the latter neurotic (perhaps worse) or inconsequential, or just an adolescent phase. Most mental health treatments of love are stale, antiseptic, and preachy; they generally denigrate the experience of falling in love. In essence they downgrade romantic love and endorse some version of nonpassionate “love” which is based on a rational decision to commit oneself to a person or situation.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Even when the would-be lover himself, without pressure from an outside advisor, longs to fall in love with a particular person, it is not within his control. Lillian Hellman, writing about her friend Arthur Cowan, who had declared her too old for him, finally divined what she thought was his true reticence in relation to her: “I was what he wanted to want, could not ever want, and that must have put an end to an old dream about the kind of life that he would now have because he didn’t really want it.” In fact, he seemed to prefer fashion models. It is for good reason that Cupid is known to be willful, mischievous, and sometimes even perverse. Love comes when it does.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“However, the worst horrors of unhappy love should not blind us to the enrichment that may occur even in painful love. When the outcome of love is unhappy, the lover may nonetheless have experienced the liberating effects of love and be able to preserve the fruits of that liberation, whether in expanded creativity, enlarged insight, or a subtle internal re-ordering of personality. There are even instances in which an unrealized love has served as the organizing force in a creative life: Dante is the classic example. For some, the memory of a lost love may provide the sweetness of an entire life.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“In part, socialization of the child proceeds because the child fears the loss of love should he not comply with parental demands. Similarly, the adult lover often harbors the underlying belief that the beloved must be placated in order to insure her constancy. Because of the early link between affection and dependency, subsequent attachments often reflect the deep- rooted idea of an inherent power differential in love.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“The lover who in childhood succeeded in integrating negative features into his image of mother will, once the first flush of romantic love has subsided, likewise be able to integrate negative features into his overall sense of the goodness of his beloved. He must be able to accept her with all her flaws, knowing that she cannot gratify him completely. If he is unable to do so, his recognition of her imperfections will result in his radically de-idealizing the beloved, and his love affairs will as a consequence be extremely short-lived.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“True love is ultimately the granting of full subjectivity to the Other, which demands that each lover maintain enough of a separate identity to serve reciprocally as an object for transcendence and surrender. The lover must not only have the capacity to idealize the be- loved; he must also hold himself worthy as an object for idealization.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“She did not understand either that his peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. As a child that has been hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into movement to drown the pain”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“At the other extreme are those who are unable to let go at all and for whom no one (or at least no one available to them) seems quite good enough to warrant their love, the tribute of themselves; they are inhibited from falling in love altogether and completely miss out on the creative potential of love.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“One longs for unconditional love, yet, paradoxically, one also longs to be loved for one’s particularity. The only satisfying answer to the question, “Would you love me if I weren’t pretty?” is yes and no.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“But recourse to the instruments of power, whether domination or submission, even when it is successful at stabilizing love, ultimately leaves the lover with a sense of sadness, a feeling that love is not naturally his due, but rather that he has had to elicit it by force or secure it through guile. To be loved as a consequence of coercion or guile is to forgo the experience of feeling loved for oneself.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“But when love is mutual, for a moment or a lifetime, annual or perennial, it blooms with a shape, a smell, and a color that makes it at once particular and general, impossible to convey fully yet amenable to precise characterization.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“In the exalted ego state that accompanies the realization of love, the usual ego defenses are less rigidly maintained. Furthermore, the influence of earlier experiences may be mitigated or changed and new resolutions to old conflicts achieved so that the lover has less of a stake in maintaining those defenses. This overall lessening of defensiveness allows for a flux in personality that permits a creative synthesis, a rediscovery of buried parts of the self, and these may in turn be incorporated with newly developed parts of the self, and new identifications. The range of possibilities is thus enlarged.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“As they grow older, children come to fantasize themselves as the principals, not as mere dependents in need of better parents. They strive to live up to the dictates of their own internalized ego ideal (that mental agency that is heir to the infantile wishes for perfection and that serves as a compass to ongoing aspirations.)”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“She did not understand either that his peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. As a child that has been hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into movement to drown the pain, in the same way Aleksey Aleksandrovich needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his wife...And it was as natural for him to talk well and cleverly as it is natural for a child to skip about”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“In the exalted ego state that accompanies the realization of love, the usual ego defenses are less rigidly maintained. Furthermore, the influence of earlier experiences may be mitigated or changed and new resolutions to old conflicts achieved so that the lover has less of a stake in maintaining those defenses. This overall lessening of defensiveness al-lows for a flux in personality that permits a creative synthesis, a rediscovery of buried parts of the self, and these may in turn be incorporated with newly developed parts of the self, and new identifications. The range of possibilities is thus enlarged.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“For them, love relationships do not simply assuage past losses and separations;they seem absolutely essential to maintain the integrity of the self. If this kind of lover feels rejected (as is almost inevitable), despite the fact that he may come to see the beloved person as totally bad, he persists in an unconscious identification with her in the hope of maintaining the integrity of his own ego. But the aggression toward the lost object persists and is ultimately turned against the self, against the part of the self-identification which is the merged or fused image of lover and beloved.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“True love is ultimately the granting of full subjectivity to the Other, which demands that each lover maintain enough of a separate identity to serve reciprocally as an object for transcendence and surrender. The lover must not only have the capacity to idealize the beloved; he must also hold himself worthy as an object for idealization.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Time may indeed heal, but to the lover time is like a terrible train, rushing the lover away from the last moment with the beloved. Time becomes space and inexorably separates.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Love serves to assuage the sorrows and wounds of some old developmental conundrums by binding the present to the past. It repairs the lingering humiliations of early life, melds the sensual to the tender, the body to the soul, and provides continuity at the same time that it separates the lover from the past.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“Some kind of partial romance can suffice for some people throughout their lives, serving as an end in and of itself. One thinks, for example, of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated epistolary romances, in which he eschewed an actual meeting with the object of his affection; or of Kafka’s, which suffered serious, ultimately fatal, damage when Kafka gave way to the inevitable insistence upon an occasional meeting in person. For others, partial romance is a transitional phase, serving as a slow induction into love itself.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

“But as I have previously suggested, it is somewhat naive to think that economic equality alone would equalize the power balance of a marriage. Economic emancipation is surely to be applauded—is indispensable really—but as long as older women are viewed as sexually less desirable than older men, a power imbalance will continue to exist, one that will continue to influence women to hold their tongues, keep the peace, and take the responsibility for pre- serving the marriage.”
― Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion