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There is no more central theme in human psychological existence than that complex swirl of intense emotionality and cognition designated by the terms, “love” and “hate.” There is, therefore, no more legitimate, but also no more challenging subject for a psychoanalyst to write about than this one, since the dramatic details of these passionate forces, and the associated conflicts they engender, are the objects of our daily professional work. The direct translation back and forth from the raw materials of frustrated loving to the more rarefied abstractions that govern “whole object relations,” is the content of the analyst's creative work. The subject requires a breadth of life experience and a technical aptitude that few individuals can achieve. Dr. Person has ambitiously undertaken the task of writing a psychoanalytically informed book about the phenomenology of love experiences in modern Western society. Her theoretical speculations are modest and traditional. They derive almost entirely from classical ego psychology, as influenced by the object relations ideas proferred by O. Kernberg.
The major thrust in her work lies in the compilation of a detailed phenomenology of the myriad possibilities that exist for love relationships in all the details of their social presentation and variegated rituals. The book is, in short, an attempt at a close-up examination under a high power field of how lovers can conceivably experience themselves and behave with one another at all stages of falling in love and/or breaking up their relationships. The vicissitudes of love are examined from every possibly vantage point in a laudable attempt to elucidate the truthful explanations for apparently contradictory behavior. A few chapter headings will illustrate: “Falling in Love,” “Love Realized: The Idyllic Phase,” “How Love Develops …,” “Triangles,” etc. A fundamental psychoanalytic viewpoint underlies all her descriptions, that is, that despite the apparent similarity of various love pa