Review Essay: Attachment and Eros: Opposed or Synergistic?

Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY:  W.W. Norton, 2002,  224 pp.)

In Can Love Last, Stephen Mitchell deconstructed the resistances—personal, metapsychological, and cultural—to sustaining vibrant and intimate sexual relationships over the long haul. This discussion is concerned with the way in which Mitchell's emphasis on risk shortchanged the importance of safety in long-term romantic passion. By showing how security and dependency needs can fuel rather than dampen eros, the author proposes an alternative thesis.

Where they love, they cannot desire; where they desire, they cannot love.

It is helpful to postulate the existence for the … child of two mothers—shall I call them the object-mother and the environment-mother? The mother as object … who may satisfy the [child's] urgent needs (id relation) and the mother … who actively provides care (ego relation) … are vastly different for the [baby]. It is the environment-mother who receives all that can be called affection and

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sensuous co-existence; it is the object-mother who becomes the target for excited experience backed by crude instinct-tension.… The opportunity for giving and for reparation that the environment mother offers by her reliable presence, enables the coming together of the object-mother and the environment-mother. Failure of the object-mother to survive or of the environment mother to provide … the opportunity for reparation leads to … splitting and even disintegration

The parent and child's mutual involvement in an adoring love affair as well as its slow undoing mark the developmental movement from oedipal to post-oedipal forms of relatedness.… How the dyad negotiates this transition speaks to the fate of oedipal passion in later adult love relations … distinguishing the person who can accept romantic defeat, and goes on to “try again” from the one who comes to see himself as a romant