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Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's new book is a collection of thirteen essays on three subjects: cherishment psychology; sexual and gender identity; and character theory. Eight of the thirteen essays have been previously published and will be familiar to many readers. Most of the new material is devoted to character theory.
The title essay, “Where Do We Fall When We Fall in Love?,” is Young-Bruehl's answer to the evolutionary psychologists who see falling in love, or infatuation, as an immersion in a tide of endogenous amphetamines. In their view, infatuation is an evolved mechanism for bonding couples together long enough to conceive children. The amphetamine bath is succeeded by an endorphin soak, which corresponds to an attachment phase that may or may not be lasting.
Young-Bruehl rejects this mechanistic account and articulates a view of falling in love and what follows that fits into her own (and Freud's early) instinct theory. As she reiterates several times in this collection, Young-Bruehl posits a dual instinct theory in which the sexual instincts are essentially narcissistic, while the ego instincts