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Reader, beware! The book under review and my own book (Bergmann, 1988) on love (reviewed in these pages, volume 76 (2), Summer, ) were published within a month of each other. Two books on love, both written by psychoanalysts living in the same city—the reader will forgive me if I review this book with mine as background.
Person writes in a felicitous style. The manner of presentation is upbeat. She is writing more for the general than for the professional audience. She deliberately presents no clinical material of her own, but draws instead on the rich reservoir of popular fiction, bestsellers, and motion pictures. This, to me, formidable and inchoate material she succeeds in arranging into such chapters as “Falling in Love,” “Pleasure and Pain Associated With Romantic Love,” “Love That Endures,” “Triangular Love,” and “Love That Is Curative,” as well as “Love That Led To Disillusionment.” A large number of witnesses appear, deliver their message, and are not heard from again. The author is not so much an investigator of the puzzle of love as an enthusiastic warrior enlisted on behalf of romantic love:
Romantic Love is an act of the imagination. For some of us it will be the great creative triumph all our life…. Romantic love offers not just excitement of the moment but the possibility of dramatic change within the self…. It can be seen as a paradigm for any significant realignment of personality and value, (p. 20)
Throughout the book the nature of this romantic love is not further defined. I turned therefore to another recently published book on love by the philosopher Irving Singer (1987). It so happens that his book opens with the question: Does anyone still believe in romantic love? He goes on to state:
By and large, it is fiction based upon wish-fullfilment, enabling the reader to escape the unpleasantness of ordinary life. Moralists have often condemned, and critics concerned about aesthetic standards have always scorned, such literature on the ground that it dist