Commentary on “Is There a Drive to Love?”

Harry Harlow, in his Presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1958, noted that psychologists had contributed little to our understanding of love that hadn't been expressed more eloquently by writers and artists, and he pleaded for experimental work that analyzed love into its component variables. I would like to thank Yoram Yovell for the opportunity to comment on his ambitious and scholarly paper, clearly an effort in this direction, which summarizes and attempts to integrate so many seemingly disparate literatures in order to further our understanding of that most elusive and unruly of human activities—Eros. He has embarked on a daunting mission—the explication of a complex mental state in terms of its underlying neurobiology. In so doing, he has articulated a carefully reasoned hierarchical model of how different neurobiological systems contribute to the evocation of motivated behaviors; summarized the current experimental research on the neurobiology of sexuality, attachment, and romantic love; and proposed ways in which attachment and sexuality contribute to romantic choice. He has made an excellent case for the continued utility of the economic/quantitative viewpoint as a bridge between neurobiology and drive. To truly explicate the essential ideas introduced would necessitate a book, rather than a paper.

Yovell's efforts to find correspondences between neurobiology and romantic love are, however, hampered by the fact that the different literatures he tries to integrate define central terms in the discussion (sexuality, instinct, drive, motivation) in unique, sometimes incompatible ways and that few studies address the unconscious or conflicted aspects of object choice. Because the task of integrating neurobiology with (rather than substituting for) psychoanalytic insights is essential for the development of our field, in this commentary I try to delineate areas in need of further clarificat