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Love is a Many
Splintered Thing
Because ofthe way in which each lover sees the other as his best
self, the worth of each, previously buried or unrealized, is
allowed to surface. It is this goodnesstowards which love strives.
The lover feels expanded, conscious of new powers and a new-
found goodness within himself. He attempts to be his best
self.. ..The beloved sees good in the lover, of which the lover was
only dimly aware. Often what allows us tofall in loveisthe lovely
picture of ourselves reflectedin the lover's eyes. (p.68)
Although she doesn't say so, this is the Platonic view, and there
is no question that for Plato this true best self is real, albeit in the
mode of potentiality. The lover perceives truly; he does not invent.
If so, it is hard to see why Person believes that even this form can
end in deidealization. The other's good remains good regardless of
whether we remain in love with it. Yet there is a puzzle there, too,
for how can anyone, in Plato's view,fall out oflove with Good, except
through ignorance? Love-Eros--for Plato is the motive force of life
towards goodness, ever impelling us upward in the direction of
perfection. Were the beloved to forsake her own potential good by
lapsing into indifference to it oir by actively pursuing evil, these
would be excellent grounds indeed for disafTectionwith her. But this
is not, strictly speaking, a deidealization, since the beloved's good
remains good, although unactualized,
While Plato colors much of Person's discussion of love as an agent
of change, there is an acute divergence between them. In the above
quotation, Person seems certain love strives towards goodness. But
that remark is atypical, suffocated under numerous others wherein
love brings change for good OR ill. While Platonic Eros is always
agathotropic, growingtowards good, Person seems to applaud change
per se. Note that disease and disaster both wreak change, but only a
callous novelty-seeker would welcome them in themselves.
Whether love sees a true or false idealization of the beloved,
James is clear on the good use to be made of this superior insight.
Here again Person ambivalates. The lover may
...go so far as to renounce his very right to possess the beloved
or to be with her. In so doirlg he asserts his altruism, his
goodness, his capacityfor self-sacrificeon behalf of the beloved.
He achieves a kind of moral sluperiority and one of the 'purer7
forms of love: the ability to puct the beloved first. (p.118)
Thus granting the other's vilewpoint the same stature as one's
own is what James had in mind. But, accordingto Person, the lover
is as likely to see in the beloved's "palpitating little life-throbs" only
Review Essay!, 151
the capacity to arouse and gratify his olwn. The lover has both "a
need t o love...a need to minister to the beloved," and the capacity
to "idealize" the beloved's usefulness to him: "It is not just the
physical or spiritual person per se who is idealized; it is the
potential ability of the beloved, as imagined by the lover, to gratify
him" (p.120). In addition, while the lover is ministering to the
beloved he is also identifyingwith her; thus, "through his identifica-
tion with his beloved he shares vicariously in the pleasure of being
ministered to" (p.121), a kind of auto-eroticism. Self-sacrifice,
altruism's highest flying arrow, is liere bent back into the
boomerang of egoism, however indirect. Person will not say which
of these motivates true love, nor to which love ought aspire.
Perhaps Person conceives the enterprise of Dreams of Love and
Fateful Encounters to be strictly descriptive. I fear I find such
normative nonchalance offensive. Why write a book on love and why
read one except to sort out pathology fro~mparadigm? Our personal
experience of love is, of necessity, limited (unless we boast with Don
Juan "a thousand and three in Spain, alone"), and we seek to
supplement it. Love tainted or love true are equally instructive,
equally something to steer by, provided someone exercises the
judgment to label them both.
Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters is fatally flawed by a
lack of this judgment. Hence, true Platonic idealization,
Stendhalian crystallization, and self-serving egoistic constructions
are all on equal footing. Similarly, while she vaunts love's power to
change the lover she is unconcerned with distinguishing better
from worse. At fault are several factors that conspire against the
inquiry at the outset.
The first is Person's practice as a psychiatrist. The "talking cure"
of psychoanalysis requires a disciplined inonjudgmental acceptance
on the part of the analyst, regardless of the patient's depravity.
While Person does not, for obvious reasons, include patient
material from her own practice, she makes use of that of other
psychiatrists. All of it is presented in the same supposedly
straightforward and descriptive manner with which she ap-
proaches fiction and film. Somejarring j~urtapositionsof street-talk
and muse-inspired poetry result. An unrlepentant rationalist would
note here that a sample drawn from psychiatric patients, Hol-
lywood, and contemporary fiction is representative of exactly noth-
ing. In fact, such samples are biased towards the crash and burn
victims. Combined with her 'let-it-all-hang-out" attitude is her
apparent belief that exhaustive description is the necessary purga-
tive for the reductionism she attributes to other accounts of love.
152 Reason Papers No. 14
University ofDelaware