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WHAT IS LOVE? FOR MOST OF MANKIND it has been a sweet mystery whose presence was a miracle, whose absence was a disaster. For philosophers, before and after Plato, love has been the subject of serious disquisition and debate as either madness or the only road to salvation. To poets over the ages, it is reason for ecstasy, dismay, or serious perplexity. Love has its undoubted biology, its possible chemistry, its manifest physiology, and what may be deemed its anatomy. But it had no scientific psychology until Freud began his investigations into the depths of human behavior.
One may trace the evolution of Freud's thinking on love from the beginning in the Fliess letters (1892-1899) to the end in the Outline (1940). Hitschmann (1952) took the trouble to ascertain that Freud discussed love not less than 130 times in his writings.
Since 1939 there have been contributions dealing with type of object choice (Reich, 1953), genital primacy (Panel, 1969), the development of object relations (Modell, 1968), but not very many articles directed to the subject of love in its own right. Balint (1960), attributing a primordial constitutional aptitude—a diathesis—to love, offers a conception of primary love whose aim is to "establish—or, probably, re-establish—an all-embracing harmony with one's environment, to be able to love in peace" (p. 36). That he uses the word love within his definitions reinforces the impression that he considers love a given. Josselyn (1971) proposes a theory of love as