Commentary on “Is There a Drive to Love?”

The love story of Amor and Psyche, first told eighteen hundred years ago in the fairy-tale by Apuleius, came to my mind when reading the title of Yoram Yovell's paper: Shall we—psychoanalysts and neurobiologists—really try to decode the last secrets of love and thus risk losing its magic?

Amor visits Psyche every night but disguises his body and his name. Psyche finally cannot control her curiosity any more and approaches the sleeping Amor in order to observe him closely with the aid of an oil lamp. She does not watch out carefully: a bit of hot oil drops on to him: he awakes frightened and flees forever…

Love indeed has always been and probably always will be one of the great topics of human life. Shouldn't we therefore just leave it up to artists and writers to shed light on hidden dimensions of these fundamental questions of human existence?

Yoram Yovell—himself simultaneously a writer, a psychoanalyst, and a neuroscientist—seems to be predestined to meet the challenge to show if and what kind of a contribution contemporary science has to add to art and literature. Reading his sensitive and highly informative paper, I have the impression that Yovell never forgets the dimension of his topic. His long, precise, and careful paper offers an excellent overview of the state of discussion concerning the relationship between romantic love, sexuality, and attachment in contemporary psychoanalysis and empirical psychological and neurobiological research. He combines this overview with profound reflections and striking arguments for further developing a kind of a “metapsychology of romantic love.” He is devoted to one of the most valuable traditions of neuropsychoanalysis: trying to stimulate innovative developments within psychoanalytic theorizing. He examines the bodies of knowledge in psychoanalysis and in the neurosciences, “which employ different methodologies and stem from two different and complementary viewpoints on the human mind, correspond to each other, and may be