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Embracing popular culture's acknowledgment of the vital importance, magnetic pull, peremptoriness, and imaginative power of love, Ethel Person maintains that romantic love, indeed passion, serves an important function for the individual and for the culture. In her view, the longing for and the experience of love opens the individual to some of the most enriching and liberating possibilities that life can offer. Though seldom endless and never perfect, "for anyone who has been struck, there is no denying that love is an extremely powerful force filled with joy as well as sorrow" (p. 11). Love offers excitement for the moment and provides a narrative thread in our lives as well as in our literature. But, Person maintains, love can also be an agent of change; as such, it offers the possibility of dramatic change in the self.
With few exceptions the subject of passion and romantic love has been largely neglected by psychoanalytic writers. Rather than focusing on love, Person points out, psychoanalysts have subscribed more to Freud's schematic formulation of love as sexual energy, so that libido rather than passion is viewed as the central force in personality formation and functioning. This void, Person observes, is strange, since a large portion of psychoanalytic dialogue is made up of discussions of love. Indeed, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in common with fiction and film, have enormous appeal in modern Western culture because they provide a permissible channel for the expression of unrestrained subjectivity and feelings. Film, fiction, and psychotherapy accept, endorse, and validate the immense importance of inner subjectivity and have in common the ability to serve as windows into another's subjectivity. By weaving together fiction, film, and her psychoanalytic insights, Person seeks to fill the gap in psychoanalytic theory and provide a theory of love.
In something of a descriptive odyssey that meanders through an impressive array of classic and modern