Liah Greenfeld's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"

In the 16th century, in England, several remarkable things happened:

Social mobility, inconceivable before, became legitimate and common;
The ideal of Romantic love between a man and a woman emerged and “true love,” as we understand it today, was added to the human emotional range;
The word “people,” which earlier referred to the lower classes, became synonymous with “nation,” which at the time had the meaning of “an elite”;
Numerous new words appeared, among them “aspiration,” “happiness,” and “madness”;
The English society, previously a society of hierarchically arranged orders of nobility, clergy, and laborers under the sovereignty of God and his Vicar in Rome, was redefined as a sovereign community of equals;
The nature of violent crime, personal and political, changed, with crime that was not rational in the sense of self-interested becoming much more common;
The attitude to pets, especially dogs and cats, changed, transforming these animals in many cases from living multi-purpose tools to our friends and soul-mates;
The pursuit of growth -- rather than survival, as was the case before – became the goal of the economy;
Mental diseases which were later to be named “schizophrenia,” “manic-depressive illness,” and “depression” were first observed, shifting the interest of the medical profession, in particular, from other, numerous, mental diseases that were known since the times of antiquity.

Were these things connected? And, if they were, what were the connections between them? These are the questions I shall be exploring in this blog.

In the course of these explorations we shall

Arrive at a new interpretation of mental diseases with uncertain organic basis, such as schizophrenia and affective disorders, and find their actual causes – sought by psychiatrists without success for the past two centuries;
Resolve the mind/body, or psychophysical, problem which Western philosophy has not been able to resolve in over two millennia, and define the mind;
Redefine what it means to be human, when human life begins, and where the difference between us and other animals lies;
Deepen our appreciation of Shakespeare and Darwin;
Learn to understand (and thus, at the very least, make the first step towards the ability to prevent) tragedies such as Newtown mass shooting and Boston Marathon bombing;
Acquire a new and surprising angle at modern poetry and detective fiction;
Reconsider the bases of psychology;
And prove the empirical reality of the soul.
Possibly, we’ll do more, but certainly no less. This is my promise to the readers of this blog and I invite them to hold me accountable, if any part of it remains unfulfilled.

I come to this online activity after thirty years of research, thinking, and teaching on the subject of modern culture, that is, of the culture of modern societies. It is impossible to understand modern culture without the comparison with other type of cultures, and it is unproductive to study any culture without attention to its relation to the individual mind. Thus, though a social scientist, not a psychologist, by training and profession, I have been led by my research itself to focus on psychology’s central topics, and by the results of this research to conclude that looking at these topics from the social science point of view has a lot to offer to those interested in them. It is a great pleasure for me, therefore, to join the Psychology Today blogging community.

[Originally published on Psychology Today]

Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

Surprise! Surprise! Love, too, in the sense we understand it now, is not a universal human emotion. Even today it is not universal: some cultures are familiar with it and some are not. And, historically, only the last five hundred years in human history have known it -- the same five hundred years that have known happiness, aspiration, and ambition. The first humans to fall in love also lived in the 16th century and were English. Today, of course, this most powerful feeling is familiar everywhere within the so-called "Western" civilization (which includes all societies based on monotheistic religion, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and it has penetrated into other civilizations as well. But it has spread from England, accompanying other experiences (such as ambition or happiness) which were at first specifically English, and reached other societies in translation from the English language. Love as we understand it, therefore, also does not spring from human "nature": it is essentially a cultural phenomenon.

We all feel that our lives would be incomplete without love, isn't this so? Many of us do not find it and suffer because of this. The search itself often becomes a source of suffering. But we all want love and are unwilling to give up. It seems unbelievable that there were times and there are still places, where people have never had this need and hardly would be able to understand why we make such a big deal about it. Yet, this is a historical fact: for most of human history love scarcely touched more than a couple of eccentric individuals here and there.

We also know precisely what it is we are looking for--we recognize love immediately when we meet it, we know when it is "the real thing" and when what we encounter is not "it" but an emotion that only bears a superficial resemblance to it. If we are mistaken, if we take for "real love" something that only appears as one, for "true love" something that is false, we can go mad, have a nervous breakdown. Indeed, such "disappointments in love" are among common causes of depression and even suicide. We all know what it is, and yet, it is so difficult to define.

Among other reasons, this difficulty has to do with the word "love," which (unlike “happiness”) is an old word that was commonly used before it acquired its modern meaning. In general, it referred to an ecstatic desire of any kind, which implied the experience of self-transcendence--this was, in fact, the original meaning of the word eros in Greek. Because of this general meaning, “love” could be used to express both the purely spiritual sentiment of Christian love and even the divine love of God itself (agape, caritas, eros of Christian theology) and the physical desire, libido, which the church considered essentially sinful--sexual lust. When the 16th century English concept of love--which is our concept--was added to these older meanings, this resulted in some confusion. You may remember Shakespeare’s sonnet, one of many in which he defines true love, but where he says, admitting to the multiplicity of meanings the word “love” allows:

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no; it is an ever fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;…

Love alters not with [Time’s] brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

The characteristic of true love that Shakespeare stresses in this sonnet is its unchanging nature: it is one-in-a-lifetime passion. Admit it: this is what we all want, however difficult it proves for most of us to find. Those who argue that our desires are genetically, and therefore, evolutionarily determined, should consider that; it is far more likely that we share our genetic endowment with the clearly polygamous apes, than with species genetically remote from us, such as wolves, penguins, or swans, who mate for life. Yet, we long for a monogamous lifetime relationship.

There are, of course, other characteristics which distinguish love as we understand it today from other emotions (including those that could be called “love” in different times and cultures). And, again, Shakespeare was the first to point to them. For example, “true love” is a passion, that is, an authentic and free expression of one’s innermost self; in fact, it is the ultimate modern passion, the supreme movement of the human spirit. None of the earlier concepts of love included this element. [See the discussion of passion in Modern Emptions: Aspiration and Ambition]. As a passion, it is irrepressible, uncontrollable, free from extraneous compulsion, and oblivious of social norms. The definition of love as the ultimate passion (i.e., the most authentic expression of the self), it must be pointed out, changed the view of human nature. This was done in Romeo and Juliet, the story of ideal love, in which Shakespeare provided us with the clearest description of what the love that we now want is.

In short, love makes it possible for every one of us to find one’s proper place in the world and to define oneself. It leads one to the discovery of one’s true identity (we often say that we find true understanding in the loved one, someone who really understands us): one’s identity, one’s true self is found in another person, in what he or she sees in one. This other person, immediately recognized (thus true love is love at first sight), then is recognized as one’s destiny, the One, and finding love at once also becomes self-realization, giving meaning to life as a whole. It is this that we all want--not simply affection, or companionship, or sex. In fact, the relationship between the essence of love-experience, which is self-affirmation, and sex, which is usually connected to it, is quite complicated. I’m going to discuss it in the next post.Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

If you ever wondered, love--the identity-affirming one we all desire--is not dependent on sex and can well thrive without it. Love, as already Shakespeare said (and Shakespeare--see Modern Emotions: Love--was the expert on the subject) is a marriage of minds, after all, and the bodily element in it is at most secondary. Of course, the experience of that love we are discussing here is essentially erotic in the sense that the emotion is ecstatic and self-transcendent--finding that perfect understanding (the understanding that allows one to understand and accept oneself) in another person implies virtually merging with the other person in one’s innermost self, making the other person an essential, vital part of one’s identity. And this self-transcendence, merging of the minds, is naturally felt as a physical longing, a desire to become physically one--expressed as sexual desire. But sex, in this case, is an expression of love, not the other way around, and love can have numerous other expressions, it does not necessitate sex under all circumstances.

Here in America, we prefer materialistic interpretations of everything, which leads us to see all emotions as a function of our biological constitution, so love is usually understood as an essentially sexual feeling, as an expression of sexuality. We tend to equate “romance” and “romantic” with sex and sexual. As a result, sex acquires a far greater importance in our society, than it has in many other societies, and it leads many of us to mistake sex for love and therefore to have disappointing relationships or even become disillusioned in love altogether and settle for sexual attraction only. This is a peculiarity of the American culture; many other cultures would not even connect the primary emotion of sexual arousal to the tertiary emotion of love, whatever their specific concept of love (see Are Human Emotions Universal?).

The association of sex with the new—our--idea of love (as identity-affirming, revealing one’s true self, and making life meaningful) in the 16th century in England ennobled and purified sex, which was considered fundamentally sinful in the Christian worldview (it was the original sin, you will remember; because of our discovery of sexuality we were expelled from Paradise and became mortal), and legitimated it outside marriage where it was by necessity allowed (while making marriage itself, if loveless, illegitimate--nobody thought of making love a condition for marriage before). Yet, this association, which encourages the contemporary American to see sexual attraction as the source and foundation of love, was quite accidental for the English culture where our idea of love emerged. Shakespeare, the great love poet, had very little to say of sex that was good. Far from being the foundation of love, loveless sex (which he called “lust”) was revolting: it led to nausea, not to love. Consider this:

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Employ’d no sooner, but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallow’s bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, -- and prov’d a very woe;

Before, a joy propos’d; behind, a dream:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.



So love, which we all today want and the ideal of which was first presented to us in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is not a sexually driven emotion. It may be more akin to the exemplary male friendships of antiquity, which allowed one person to find his alter ego (his “other self”) in the other. For his reason, this ideal, identity-affirming love can be found not only in homosexual relationships, but in relationships in principal lacking any sexual dimension. It is on these that I shall focus in my next post. Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

In the last post [Modern Emotions and Perennial Drives: Love and Sex], I argued that the modern concept of love as an identity-affirming emotion, the way to one’s true self, and the supreme expression of the self, changed the cultural significance (that is, our attitude to) of sex, elevating it far above the base drive, legitimate only in marriage for the purpose of procreation and even then considered sinful within the framework of Christian morality which was dominant in our, Western, civilization throughout the last fifteen centuries of its pre-modern existence. Love became the greatest modern passion, it was presented from the outset--in Romeo and Juliet--as sexual love between a man and a woman, and the involvement of sex in it purified sex and added to it an important spiritual dimension. The essence of the modern ideal of love, and of love-relationship, however, has always remained its identity-affirming power, the fact that it offered the most direct route to finding oneself and, therefore, to meaning in life and happiness [see Modern Emotions: Happiness].

So long as this was the essence of the emotional bond in a relationship, the relationship could diverge from the ideal-typical image of love and still be recognized and characterized as love. The most obvious diversion was the understanding that love was possible between persons of the same sex. Such love relationships could be both sexual and not sexual (though in the United States, as noted in the last post, they would most probably be sexual). It is quite possible, for instance, that the insistence on the homosexual couples’ right to marry--at a time when the institution of marriage loses support among heterosexual population--has as its goal precisely this recognition on the part of society at large. Given that we consider only love marriage as truly legitimate (which is, incidentally, the reason for our divorce rates), giving homosexual couples’ the right to marry necessarily amounts to the public acknowledgment of their relationships as love.

But love has extended farther than homosexual couples from the original modern idea of it as a sexual relationship between a man and a woman: it extended to relationships that are not sexual at all. It is only since the 16th century that love in the sense of identity-affirming emotional bond, filling one’s life with meaning, could be found--and sought--in the relationships of parents and children. This may seem counterintuitive, especially in regard to mother-child relationships, given what we know about the bonds between mothers and their young in the animal kingdom. Surely, human motherly love derives from the same instinctual (natural) source! But both comparative zoology and comparative history contradict this assumption. Even the most devoted animal mothers chase their offspring away, when the job of raising them up to maturity, genetically determined, indeed, is completed--think of cheetas, leopards, bears. As to history, it is enough to consider the past of Western societies. Before the 16th century, when the contemporary concept of love emerged, children were commanded to honor their mother and their father and owed their parents the duty of obedience and respect to the end of their days. The parents owed their children nothing: the Ten Commandments include no mention of parental duties. Certainly, sometimes profound affection tied generations living in the same household. But it was dependent on class, with the top families in the social hierarchy entrusting the upbringing of their children, from the moment of birth, to various servitors, and hardly having any but the most formal relations with them at all. Very often, moreover, affection could not go deep: women were constantly pregnant, infant and child mortality was extremely high, both physical and psychological investment in a particular child had to be kept at a minimum. But even were all this not so, affection (a secondary emotion--see Are Human Emotions Universal?) cannot be equated with love as we understand it today-- a much more complex tertiary, culturally produced emotion, which affirms the ideal identity of the individual and helps him or her to find meaning in life.

From the 16th century on, many a woman would find true love--and herself--only in motherhood and the love of a child. This, far more than anything else, explains why modern society places children on such a pedestal. Children too, especially before they reach the age when they can search self-affirmation outside of home, become very dependent on the parent’s love in the formation of their identity (I shall explain in a later post why they were not so dependent in pre-modern societies). This may explain the paradox that it is precisely in our time, when parents--especially mothers--are much more emotionally (and otherwise) invested in their children than ever before, that children have so many complaints against their parents (especially mothers, perhaps): just see the posts on problems with mothers in the days around Mother’s Day in Psychology Today. We expect from our parents much more and, obviously, have many more reasons for disappointment and frustration.

But the deep need for finding meaning in one’s life--the reason for being on this earth at this time--and for the affirmation of self leads us to expand the concept of identity-affirming love even further and include in it dumb creatures, our pets. Our concept of pets and the idea of dog as a man’s best friend derive directly from the search for self-definition. Most modern languages do not have a special category for pets within the general designation of domestic animals. Derived from a Scottish and North English agricultural term for a lamb or kid taken into the house and brought up by hand, the word “pet” was, in Scotland, first applied metaphorically in early 16th century to spoiled children and then to animals, such as monkeys or peacocks, kept for entertainment or home adornment, rather than a utilitarian purpose such as hunting mice and protection. In England, the word “pet” soon became a term of endearment. The first instance of its application to a dog, cited by Oxford English Dictionary, happened in 1710 in connection to “amorous passions.”

It is our need for self-affirming love that led us to see a fellow being, a soul-mate, in a creature with a tail and four paws--a dog or a cat, and the many of you who have owned one know precisely what I am talking about and how powerful the emotion is and how it fills one’s life. This emotion--this variety of love--has also been unfamiliar to people in pre-modern societies, just like “romantic” love, identity-affirming parental love, happiness, and ambition, already discussed in these posts. What connects all of them is that each has a role--and helps--in the construction of our personal identities. In the next post I shall explain why the need for such help arose and what was the source for this expansion in the range and change in the character of our emotional life.Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience