I have attempted to conceptualize passionate love from a psychoanalytic perspective. Having noted psychoanalysis' long-standing reluctance to confront adult love, I have turned to the love poetry of different cultures and the more modern philosophers of love for more detailed descriptions of its phenomenology. With these depictions in mind, such love can be defined as a complex and somewhat conflictual affective disposition, rather like a mood, evoked by the image of another person and characterized by periods of passionate excitement and intimate repose.