At the Nexus of Love, Lust, and Attachment

One might think that after 100-odd years of scrutiny, psychoanalysis would have exhausted what it had to say about love, lust, desire, and passion. To the contrary, participants in the 2003 International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) Online Colloquium entitled “What Happens When Love Lasts” An Exploration of Intimacy and Erotic Life? generated a wealth of new directions for exploration. As the moderators of the colloquium, Randall Sorenson and I were struck by the depth and breadth of perspectives expressed over the course of that dialogue, the jumping-off point of which was the first chapter of Stephen Mitchell's book Can Love Last? and Virginia Goldner's paper “Attachment and Eros: Opposed or Synergistic?,” which offered an alternative to Mitchell's paradigm. The current issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues is a collection of articles that grew out of that large-scale study group. The authors represented here were selected from among those whose postings captured our attention by virtue of their freshness, articulateness, and the intriguing slant they offered on the matters in question.

The collection begins with a piece by Goldner that grounds the reader in Mitchell's original thesis and her counterformulation. She includes an analysis of the responses these articles engendered in the IARPP online discussion. Of the remaining nine articles in the collection, some directly engage Mitchell and Goldner, whereas others choose a different starting point entirely. The authors discuss lust as a private subjective experience and as a psychosocial event; they contextualize erotic life and attachment vis-á-vis varying gender circumstances and diverse cultural and spiritual practices; they challenge us variously to theorize differently within current