Commentary on “Is There a Drive to Love?”

There is much that I genuinely admire in Yoram Yovell's brave paper. First of all, he is to be congratulated for even attempting a review from a multidisciplinary perspective of such a difficult topic as romantic love. Certainly it is much easier to feel scientifically secure in zeroing in on smaller and smaller patches of territory than it is to tackle such a huge and important problem as romantic love. As someone with a history of gravitating towards the review of near-impossible topics, I find myself in great sympathy with Yovell's effort. Given the limitations of space and time, let me organize my thoughts on this ambitious effort into two domains.

Drive theory within psychoanalysis

Are drives and instincts of necessity far from the conscious mind? The classical metapsychology of drives in psychoanalysis, in which drives were seen as of necessity operating at a great distance from conscious experience and behavior, has been the Achilles' heel of psychoanalysis, and for more than one good reason. Although it would be impossible to do justice to the complexities of the subject, or even summarize half of the seminal debates about drive theory in the modest space of this commentary, I think in a nutshell that the problem for psychoanalysis was the creation of a taxonomy and metapsychology for instincts and drives in which affective states were treated as virtually epiphenomenal. Freud, under the ideological sway of Helmholtzian images of the brain as analogous to some kind of energic/hydraulic system, did not give enough weight to ethology. Human emotional systems were not adequately conceptualized in evolutionary fashion as having of necessity deep continuity with other mammals, this despite Freud's admiration for Darwin. This attraction to mechanistic drive metaphors left affect in a secondary position as some kind of confusing “shadow” over the real action of drives and tied psychoanalysis to a theoretical