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The neglect which the subject of romantic love has encountered from
psychologists is only paralleled by the unique attention devoted to it by novelists and poets. Every year sees the appearance of thousands of works of fiction dealing mainly or entirely with this theme, which is represented in Psychological Abstracts by at most some half-dozen titles. All the more, therefore, should we be grateful to those psycholgists who, in however small degree, endeavour to redress the balance.
It is true that the method of approach of the present author is, strictly speaking, biological rather than psychological, but his work was published in a psychological journal and its value consists partly in the way in which it points to a possible relationship between biological and psychological factors. Briefly his thesis is that our choice of love object (like our choice of career, our liability to particular diseases and the manner of our deaths—matters which are to be treated in future communications) is determined by recessive hereditary factors. These factors, baffled in their attempt to manifest themselves in the anatomy or physiology of the individual, find indirect expression in guiding the direction of his loves and preferences in a manner that is, of course, totally unrecognized by the subject himself. There is thus a striking parallelism between the behaviour of the recessive genes in our hereditary make-up and the repressed elements of the mind. In fact, it would appear that the whole psycho-analytical conception of conflict could be applied with very little change to the biological sphere: and the author maintains that this dynamic view of the interaction of hereditary factors is in accordance with the general trend of recent genealogical thought.
If this is true, it is obvious that we have here a principle of the greatest importance. It seems that Mendel would have had as much justification as Freud for quoting 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo', and