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One reason for choosing the title for this paper is because there has often been an idea that what may be curative about therapy is not so much the benefits of interpretation but a patient's sense of being loved by the therapist. Let's think about this some more. Another reason for choosing this title is related to one of the chapters in my earlier book, Learning from Life, which is called “Hate and containment”. Now I am proposing that we consider Love. But this is not necessarily the opposite to hate. It is often the other side of hate itself — just as hate can be the other side of love.
Some people speak of love as if it were something pure, much as we might see white light. Either it is “on” and the world is bright, or it is “off” and everything goes dark. I want to hold up a metaphorical prism to this light — to explore some of the many different colours that we can find in the spectrum of this thing called “love”.
Love can be tender; it can be harsh. It can be giving to another; it can be demanding of another. It can be pure; it can be perverted. It can provide security; it can become a great threat to security. It can be resilient and able to survive much testing. It can be fragile and liable to collapse when tested. It can lift us to great heights; it can dash us down and leave us broken. It can free us; it can imprison us. It can lead us to where we most want to be; and yet it can likewise lead us into dreadful misery. It is also so much more than any of this. And often, when we are least wanting to realise it, the person we feel that we so much love may be largely an image we have created in our own minds. Inevitably we wish to believe that this image is a reality rather than, to some extent, a fantasy. So, let us try to explore some of this further. But, of course, I can only touch upon a very small part of the spectrum of this thing we call love.
I would like to begin with the birth of a baby.
When things go well, and a mother bonds naturally with her infant