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‘Love entered the consulting room slowly, hesitantly’ comments Hester Solomon as she describes her work with the patient she calls Fay in the clinical section of this thoughtful and sensitive paper. The paper is by the winner of the Michael Fordham prize for the best paper relating to clinical issues published in 1998 in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, and is a worthy successor to her award-winning contribution ‘The Self in transformation: the passage from a two- to a three-dimensional world’. The first part of the paper outlines the conceptual matrix which underpins the clinical work. Solomon also explores the earliest love situations, drawing upon the work of Dr A. Piontelli and the developments occurring in psychoneurobiological research, to shed light on what happens in later life and in the consulting room. She remarks on the dearth of analytic literature about the positive rather than the pathological aspects of love, though love might be considered the driving force in the development of the self and at the heart of object-relating.
Solomon shows how difficult it is to trace a pattern in the dynamic that is called love. Not only are there different feeling states, developmental stages and ways of expressing love, but the individual experience of love may range from passionate involvement through to altruistic self-sacrifice. The writer suggests that love is almost always experienced alongside other emotions which may be equally varied. Contradictions abound:
The role of narcissism in love ineluctably links love of self with the love of the other, thereby enhancing the self at the very moment of the self's surrender to and mingling with the other; equally, love is ambivalent, and the couple that live only for each other must soon find ways of creating distance and space between them.
Love appears in many forms but the thread that links all of them is the self in relation to another.
Solomon proposes that two pivotal metapsychological questions dominate curre