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Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters has one of the most intriguing titles of any recent psychoanalytically informed book. Rarely does a respected researcher-clinician address the topic of love in such unshamedly terms; analytic forays into this territory tend to emphasize etiology or consequences of intense affect states, rather than attempting to depict the states themselves as subjectively experienced. That task has been principally the province of poetry and fiction on the one hand and self-help or confessional pulp on the other.
It is Person's intention to write a natural history and encyclopedia of romantic love, both heterosexual and homosexual, in all its vicissitudes. Eschewing jargon, she charts love's permutations (including seduction, flirtation, and three different kinds of triangles), its childhood origins, idyllic beginnings, inevitable conflicts, and various denouements from disillusionment, betrayal, and loss to sustaining joy. Person attributes to psychoanalysis an undue, reductionistic emphasis on sexuality and psychopathology which has narrowed the focus of inquiry; her own definition of romance and passion, while including the erotic component, is not confined to this. She gives prominence to both the “gold mine and the mine field” (p. 254)—the potential for self-transformation as well as for devastation in the abandonment of self and partial merger that are fundamental features of passion.
Central to Person's approach is the notion of love as a catalyst for change; she sees passion as a “paradigm for any significant realignment of personality and values” (p. 23). It is progressive as well as regressive. In addition to an ecstatic rediscovery of symbiotic merger, “the glory of love is that it also moves us through the past and out of it” (p. 129).