What does it mean to love? How does this feeling change us? And what prevents us from loving another person truly, to the fullest? Prominent psychologists reflect on the feeling that makes us infinitely vulnerable and omnipotent at the same time.
Harry Sullivan, psychoanalyst:
Love exists when another person’s satisfaction and security become as important as one’s own satisfaction and security.
John Gottman, psychotherapist:
The greatest obstacle to love is self-importance, which causes people to end marriages because they «deserve» the perfect partner.
Henry Dix, psychoanalyst:
The opposite of love is not hate at all. Both coexist as long as a living connection is maintained. The opposite of love is indifference.
Otto Kernberg, psychoanalyst:
In a love relationship, there is a desire to complete oneself with something — starting with delight and satisfaction from the fact that the other accepts and even enjoys in us what we ourselves did not accept, and ending with overcoming the limitations of our own sex in unity with a partner.
Heinz Kohut, psychoanalyst:
The greater the confidence with which a person is able to accept himself, the more certain his self-image, the more confidently and effectively he will express and offer his love without experiencing excessive fear of being rejected and humiliated.
Karl Menninger, psychoanalyst:
A huge number of people suffer from unrequited love for themselves.
Esther Perel, psychotherapist:
Love has a price, but should not require self-renunciation. It is difficult to find attractive someone who has completely renounced personal independence. It is probably possible to love such a person, but it is definitely difficult to lust. Not enough resistance and tension. Loving each other without losing yourself is the biggest difficulty in emotional intimacy.
Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst:
One way to love people is to recognize that they have desires that exclude us, that it is possible to love and desire more than one person at the same time. Everyone knows this is true, but we don’t want those who love us to think that of themselves.
Viktor Frankl, existential psychologist:
Love inevitably enriches the one who loves. And if so, there can be no such thing as unrequited, unhappy love. Love is the experience of another person in all its originality and uniqueness.
Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst:
If an individual loves only one person and is indifferent to others, his love is not love, but a symbiotic attachment or an overgrown narcissism.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist:
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; where the desire for power is paramount, love is absent. One is not a shadow of the other.
Source: collection of K. Yagnyuk “Under the sign of PSI. Aphorisms of famous psychologists.