Aspects of Love, Loss, and Development

In this issue we have a few articles covering varying contemporary topics. Within them emerges some themes within which I would like to expand upon in this part of the editorial. They are as follows: love, loss, and development, and they interact with each other in various ways. These articles invite us to think about how these profound themes mutually influence experience from an educational and personal perspective.

What is Love?

This is a question that is age-old, meaning different things to different people and cultures. As such it makes it a broad and varied topic. Various motivational models from Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1943) to Heard, Lake, and McCluskey's extension of attachment theory (2009) recognise how fundamental it is in the development of the self.

How that motivation is developed, nurtured, and expressed has various nuances and differences. In particular, when thinking of couples, can we ask how much of our biological instinct to love is programmed to be with just one person? How significant are social and cultural engineering and the interaction with other motivational systems in fostering relational security? Stephen Mitchell (2002) asks in the title of his book, Can Love Last?. These questions point to the notion that romantic relationships require work and can be fragile. In this issue Anne Power explores this further in a follow-up to her previous article in Attachment (Power, 2018). She looks at and questions contented couples, their contrasting cultural modes of union, and what has made their relationships work.

What role does the subject of love have within the clinical arena and how is that thought about and reflected on as it arises whether explicitly or implicitly? There is a strong sense and understanding that this can be a thorny subject when thinking of transferential and countertransferential love. There are associated difficulties of boundaries being blurred, misunderstandings, misattunements, to disclose or not disclose,