When Harry Harlow announced that he wanted to study the science of love and attachment, the scientific community thought him mad. This was during the midcentury reign of behaviorism, and it was believed that all of our psychological processes were simply cued with reward and punishment—free will was a term most serious scientists rolled their eyes at. Harlow made his announcement at a psychology conference, and the others scoffed at his use of the word love. A fellow scientist interrupted him, “Don’t you mean proximity?”
Read the last exclusive Bookslut column at Kirkus on Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
Harlow’s experiments on affection, touch, attachment and, yes, love revolutionized the way we think of parenting and romance, and the bond between mother and infant. His work figures in Lisa Appignanesi’s new book All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. Like Harlow, Appignanesi is curious to understand love, to study it and work with it, both its nurturing and its destructive nature. Her work is expansive, covering centuries of romantic behavior, and exploring the love between couples, between mother and child, between friends. It’s an ambitious work, but that’s nothing new for the author of Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and over a dozen other books. Here, she talks about her new work.
First, I wanted to ask about the word "anatomy" in the subtitle, and why you chose that approach, rather than history or psychology or neuroscience or what have you. With such a library written on the subject already, how did you decide which angle to enter it from?
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I used the word anatomy in my subtitle because it implies both a close—beneath the surface—examination and a meditation on a theme from varying viewpoints. I wanted to look at the dynamics of love as it moves through individual lives. But since we live within historical moments and their residue, are the subjects, as well as the makers, of our culture, so history, literature, and scientific ideas all impact on the way we live love. And these have their part in the book as well.
My point of departure for the book was in the first instance a kind of “follow-on” from my last, a history of madness called Mad, Bad and Sad. One of the themes that emerged from that book was that over the last 200 years, there had been such a huge growth in the mind-doctoring professions [psychiatry, et al] that a greater and greater proportion of our human excesses—ecstasies, sufferings, eccentricities—had earned a psychiatric classification, often with a drug-cure attached, while in turn the area of sanity—the norm—had gotten smaller and smaller. So much so, that Love emerged as the only form of madness or excess that didn't find a classification in the DSM—or not yet.
So that was my point of entry into love. And then, of course, it grew and grew into a study not only of passionate love but its more temperate manifestations as well. The book is something of a life history of love, from cradle, where our patterns of loving are set in motion, to grave.
I enjoyed your sly dismissal of evolutionary psychology: "I'll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it's used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting. These natural men and women, after all, don't still shit in their back gardens." Between the evolutionary approach and neurological explanations being used for every emotion these days—telling us everything is hardwired and static—how do we bring culture and free will back into the discussion?
Science has always been about reduction, finding the simplest generalizable pattern in the world, until that's disproved or falsified and a new one is set in train. Humans don't live their lives by equations; nor when we hold hands do we think of leaps in our synapses.
We're complicated, messy species who live within culture and in societies, and we like to find meaning in our days. Everything in our environment from a parent's touch to the kind of music or stories we hear impacts on our hardwiring, as do our acts and our emotions. So little is static. How we experience passion, the stories we tell ourselves about it, the meaning we find in the extremes and everyday aspects of love—very little of this is found in evolutionary psychology or neurological explanations.
I wanted to talk a bit about the marriage section, partly because it's been in the news so much with New York legalizing gay marriage, but also because it's a healthy chunk of your book. But I felt it was rather summed up with your quotation from Kureishi: "There is little pleasure in marriage; it involves considerable endurance, like doing a job one hates." For all the pleasure the daily life of a marriage can bring, there does seem to be a drumbeat of tedium as well, which you handily admit. After reading the chapter, I sort of wondered, "Well, then, where's the appeal?"
Yes, it's quite true that marriages, or indeed any long-term settled unions, can grow tediously stale or worse, and our once idealized and passionate lovers turn into despised enemies. Luckily divorce now exists without too much social stigma attached, and if marriages become prisons, we can get out of them.
That said, excitement, the kind to be had from couplings, is only one of the “goods” that life brings. Nor do we stay young forever and hanker after excitement and pleasure in that early way. Samuel Johnson once said, and he was then no longer in his first youth, “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”
So what are the “goods” that marriage can bring? Well, for one thing marriage for many provides a sense of at-homeness in the world, a site of belonging which is often elusive elsewhere. It can act as a shield against the many downs of life. Our partners can make us feel safe, as well as, importantly, recognized. Over the long term, marriage gives us a depth of history. When people split up, that's often what they miss most. It's a history of joint projects and ventures, among which is family.
Jessa Crispin is the editor-in-chief of Bookslut.
