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Falling in love is, undoubtedly, one of the most powerful and intriguing human experiences. Passionate love affairs have often changed the course of history as well as the course of individual people's lives. The phenomenon of love has been explored by poets, philosophers, songwriters, and novelists.
The scientific investigation of passionate love, however, has been extremely limited. Since Freud's (1921) dismissal of love as “aim-inhibited sex,” psychoanalysis has paid little attention to romantic love (; Reiff, 1963). Most psychoanalytic studies have focused upon the underlying psychodynamics of partner choice, explaining feelings of passionate love as the expression of unconscious fixations (Klein, 1957; Dicks, 1967; Kremen, 1971; Willi, 1975; Shor and Sanville, 1979; Sonne and Swirsky, 1981). Otto Kernberg, building upon the work of a group of French psychoanalysts, has made a major contribution in describing the developmental preconditions for stable love relationships (Kernberg, 1974a, 1974b, 1977.). Similarly, psychological