The Road Less Traveled - SECTION II - Love - Episodes 1 - 6

 

SECTION II - Love 

Episode 1:        Love Defined

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. This section will examine what lies in back of discipline-what provides the motive, the energy for discipline.

This force I believe to be love.

I am very conscious of the fact that in attempting to examine love we will be beginning to toy with mystery.

In a very real sense we will be attempting to examine the unexaminable and to know the unknowable.

Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.

I would not write this if I did not believe the attempt to have value, but no matter how valuable, I begin with the certain knowledge that the attempt will be in some ways inadequate.

One result of the mysterious nature of love is that no one has ever, to my knowledge, arrived at a truly satisfactory definition of love.

In an effort to explain it, therefore, love has been divided into various categories: eros, filial, agape; perfect love and imperfect love, and so on.

I am presuming, however, to give a single definition of love, again with the awareness that it is likely to be in some way or ways inadequate.

I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of benefitting others

At the outset I would like to comment briefly on this definition before proceeding to a more thorough elaboration.

First, it may be noticed that it is a teleological definition; the behavior is defined in terms of the goal or purpose it seems to serve-in this case., spiritual growth; and perhaps I may not have arrived at it through a clearly teleological process of thinking. Instead I arrived at it through observation in my clinical practice of psychiatry (which includes self-observation), in which the definition of love is a matter of considerable import.

This is because patients are generally very confused as to the nature of love.

For instance, a timid young man reported to me: "My mother loved me so much she wouldn't let me take the school bus to school until my senior year in high school. Even then I had to beg her to let me go. I guess she was afraid that I would get hurt, so she drove me to and from school every day, which was very hard on her. She really loved me."

In the treatment of this individual's timidity it was necessary, as it is in many other cases, to teach him that his mother might have been motivated by something other than love, and that what seems to be love is often not love at all. 

It has been out of such experience that I accumulated a body of examples of what seemed to be acts of love and what seemed not to be love.

One of the major distinguishing features between the two seemed to be the conscious or unconscious purpose in the mind of the lover or non-lover.

".. Second, it may be noticed that, as  defined earlier, love is a process of tending to oneself through an evolutionary process.- When one has attained one's limits, one is then said to have grown into a larger state of being.

Thus the act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth. It is through reaching toward evolution that we evolve .

.,. Third, this unitary definition of love includes self-love with love for the other. Since I am human and you are human too, to love means to love myself as dedicated to the human spiritual development - the race of which we are a part, and this therefore means a dedication to our own development as well as "that of otheirs":

'Indeed, as has been pointed out, we are incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves, just as we are incapable of teaching our children self-discipline unless we ourselves are self-disciplined. It is actually impossible to forsake our own spiritual development in favor of someone else's. 

We cannot forsake self-discipline and at the same time be disciplined in our care for another. 

We cannot be a source of strength unless we are nurtured by strength. 

As we proceed in our exploration of the nature of love, I believe it will become clear that not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but that ultimately they are indistinguishable.

- Fourth, the act of extending one's limits implies effort. One extends one's limits only by exceeding them, and exceeding limits requires effort.

When we love someone our love becomes real only through our exertion through the fact that for that someone (or for ourself) we take an extra step or walk an extra mile.

Love is not effortless.

To the contrary, love is effortful.

Finally, by use of the word "will" I have attempted to transcend the distinction between desire and action.

Desire is not necessarily translated into action. Will is desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action.

The difference between the two is equal to the difference between saying "I would like to go swimming tonight" and "I will go swimming tonight." 

Everyone in our culture desires to be loving, yet many are not in fact loving.

I, therefore, conclude that the desire to love is not itself love.

Love is as love does - both an intention and an action.

And will also imply choice.

We do not have to love. We choose to love no matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions.

On the other hand, whenever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made.

As I indicated, patients who come to psychotherapy are invariably found to be more or less confused about the nature of love.

This is because in the face of the mystery of love misconceptions about it abound. While this book will not remove from love its mystery, 1 hope it will clarify matters sufficiently to help do away with these misconceptions, which cause suffering not only to patients but to all people as they attempt to make sense out of their own experiences. 

Some of this suffering seems to me unnecessary since these popular misconceptions could be made less popular through the teaching of a more precise definition of love.

1 have therefore chosen to begin exploring the nature of love by examining what love is not.

Episode 2:        Falling in "Love"

Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that "falling in love" is love or at least one of the manifestations of love.

It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is "I love him" or "I love her."

But two problems are immediately apparent. 

The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience.

We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply.

We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex-unless we are homosexually oriented-even though we may care for them greatly.

We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated.

The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary.

No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough.

This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love.

But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic

lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes.

The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades.

To understand the nature of the phenomenon of falling in love and the inevitability of its ending, it is necessary to examine the nature of what psychiatrists call ego boundaries.

From what we can ascertain by indirect evidence, it appears that the newborn infant during the first few months of its life does not distinguish between itself and the rest of the universe.

When it moves its arms and legs, the world is moving.

When it is hungry, the world is hungry. When it sees its mother move, it is as if it is moving. When its mother sings, the baby does not know that it is itself not making the sound.

It cannot distinguish itself from the crib, the room and its parents. The animate and the inanimate are the same. There is no distinction yet between I and thou. It and the world are one.

There are no boundaries, no separateness. There is no identity. .

But with experience the child begins to experience itself namely, as "an entity separate from the rest of the world.

When it is hungry, the mother doesn't always appear to feed it.

When it is playful, the mother doesn't always want to play.

The child then has the experience of its wishes not being its mother's command.

Its will is experienced as something separate from its mother's behavior.

A sense of the "me" begins to develop.

This interaction between the infant and the mother is believed to be the ground out of which the child's sense of identity begins to grow.

It has been observed that when the interaction between the infant and its mother is grossly disturbed- for example, when there is no mother, no satisfactory mother substitute or when because of her own mental illness the mother is totally uncaring or uninterested-then the infant grows into a child or adult whose sense of identity is grossly defective in the most basic ways.

As the infant recognizes its will to be its own and not that of the universe, it begins to make other distinctions between itself and the world. When it wills movement, its arm waves before its eyes, but neither the crib nor the ceiling move.

Thus the child learns that its arm and its will are connected, and therefore that its arm is its and not something or someone else's.

In this manner, during the first year of life, we learn the fundamentals of who we are and who we are not, what we are and what we are not. By the end of our first year, we know that this is my arm, my foot, my head, my tongue, my eyes and even my viewpoint, my voice, my thoughts, my stomachache, and my feelings. We know our size and our physical limits. These limits are our boundaries.

The knowledge of these limits inside our minds is what is meant by ego boundaries.

The development of ego boundaries is a process that continues through childhood into adolescence and even into adulthood, but the boundaries established later are more psychic than physical.

For instance, the age between two and three is typically a time when the child comes to terms with the limits of its power.

While before this time the child has learned that its wish is not necessarily its mother's command, it still clings to the possibility that its wish might be its mother's command and the feeling that its wish should be her command.

It is because of this hope and feeling that the two-year-old usually, attempts to act like a mild autocrat, trying to give orders ("': to its parents, siblings and family pets as if they were menials and responds with regal anger when they won't be dictated to.

Thus parents speak of this age as "the terrible twos."

By the age of three the child has usually become more tractable and mellow as a result of an acceptance of the reality of its own relative powerlessness.

Still, the possibility of being powerful and controlling is such a sweet, sweet dream that it cannot be completely given up even after several years of very painful confrontation with one's own impotence.

Although the child of three has come to accept the reality of the boundaries of its power, it will continue to escape occasionally for some years to come into a world of fantasy in which the possibility of omnipotence (particularly its own) still exists.

This is the world of Superman and Captain Marvel. Yet gradually even the superheroes are given up, and by the time of mid-adolescence, young people know that they are individuals, confined to the boundaries of their flesh and the limits of their power, each one a relatively frail and impotent organism, existing only by cooperation within a group of fellow organisms called society.

Within this group they are not particularly distinguished, yet they are isolated from others by their individual identities, boundaries, and limits.

It is lonely behind these boundaries. Some people-particularly those whom Psychiatrists call schizoid-because of unpleasant, traumatizing experiences in childhood, perceive the world outside of themselves as  irredeemably dangerous, hostile, confusing and un-nurturing.

Such people feel their boundaries to be protecting and comforting and find a sense of safety in their loneliness.

But most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves.

The experience of falling in love allows us this escape-temporarily.

The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person.

The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic.

We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more!

In some respects (but certainly not in all) the act of falling in love is an act of regression.

The experience of merging with the loved one re-echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy.

Along with the merging we also re-experience the sense of omnipotence which we had to give up in our journey out of childhood.

All things seem possible!

United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all obstacles.

We believe that the strength of our love will cause the forces of opposition to bow down in submission and melt away into the darkness. All problems will be overcome.

The future will be all light.

The unreality of these feelings, when we have fallen in love, is essentially the same as the unreality of the two-year-old who feels itself to be king of the family and the world with power unlimited.

Just as reality intrudes upon the two-year-old's fantasy of omnipotence so does reality intrude upon the fantastic unity of the couple who have fallen in love.

Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself.

He wants to have sex; she doesn't.

She wants to go to the movies; he doesn't.

He wants to put money in the bank; she wants a dishwasher.

She wants to talk about her job; he wants to talk about his.

She doesn't like his friends; he doesn't like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other's.

One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place; gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals.

At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.

By my use of the word "real" I am implying that the perception that we are loving when we fall in love is a false perception-that our subjective sense of lovingness is an illusion.

A full elaboration of real love will be deferred until later in this section.

However, by stating that it is when a couple falls out of love they may begin to really love I am also implying that real love does not have its roots in a feeling of love.

To the contrary, real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act lovingly despite the fact that we don't feel loving.

Assuming the reality of the definition of love with which we started, the experience of "falling in love" is not real love for the several reasons that follow.

Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice.

No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable.

We are as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are obviously ill-matched as with someone more suitable.

Indeed, we may not even like or admire the object of our passion, yet, try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable.

This is not to say that the experience of falling in love is immune to discipline. Psychiatrists, for instance, frequently fall in love with their patients, just as their patients fall in love with them, yet out of duty to the patient and their role they are usually able to abort the collapse of their ego boundaries and give up the patient as a romantic object.

The struggle and suffering of the discipline involved may be enormous. But discipline and will can only control the experience; they cannot create it.

We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.

Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them. The extension of one's limits requires effort; falling in love is effortless.

Lazy and undisciplined individuals are as likely to fall in love as energetic and dedicated ones. Once the precious moment of falling in love has passed and the boundaries have snapped back into place, the individual may be disillusioned but is usually none the larger for the experience.

When limits are extended or stretched, however, they tend to stay stretched.

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.

Falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one's spiritual development.

If we have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to terminate our own loneliness and perhaps insure this result through marriage.

Certainly we are not thinking of spiritual development. Indeed, after we have fallen in love and before we have fallen out of love again we feel that we have arrived, that the heights have been attained, that there is both no need and no possibility of going higher.

We do not feel ourselves to be in any need of development; we are totally content to be where we are. Our spirit is at peace. Nor do we perceive our beloved as being in need of spiritual development. To the contrary, we perceive him or her as perfect, as having been perfected. If we see any faults in our beloved, we perceive them as insignificant-little quirks or darling eccentricities that only add color and charm.

 

If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage.

Frequently the trick goes awry one way

or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self- discipline supervene to prevent the bonding.

 

On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would

not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in wholehearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.

 

Episode 3:        The Myth of Romantic Love

To serve as effectively as it does to trap us into marriage, the experience of falling in love probably must have as one of its characteristics the illusion that the experience will last forever.

This illusion is fostered in our culture by the commonly held myth of romantic love, which has its origins in our favorite childhood fairy tales, wherein the prince and princess, once united, live happily forever after.

The myth of romantic love tells us, in effect, that for every young man in the world there is a young woman who was "meant for him," and vice versa.

Moreover, the myth implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined "in the stars."

When we meet the person for whom we are intended, recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love.

We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other's needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily forever after in perfect union and harmony.

Should it come to pass, however, that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other's needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or "true" love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie.

Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-Iove experience that traps us into marriage. But as a Psychiatrist 1 weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters.

Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth of falling in love.

Mrs. A. subjugates herself absurdly to her husband out of a feeling of guilt. "I didn't really love my husband when we married," she says. "I pretended 1 did. 1 guess 1 tricked him into it, so 1 have no right to complain about him, and 1 owe it to him to do whatever he wants."

Mr. B. laments: "I regret 1 didn't marry Miss C. 1 think we could have had a good marriage. But 1 didn't feel head over heels in love with her, so 1 assumed she couldn't be the right person for me."

Mrs. D., married for two years, becomes severely depressed without apparent cause, and enters therapy stating: "I don't know what's wrong. I've got everything 1 need, including a perfect marriage." Only months later can she accept the fact that she has fallen out of love with her husband but that this does not mean that she made a horrible mistake.

Mr. E., also married two years, begins to suffer intense headaches in the evenings and can't believe they are psychosomatic. "My home life is fine. 1 love my wife as much as the day 1 married her. She's everything 1 ever wanted," he says. But his headaches don't leave him until a year later, when he is able to admit, "She bugs the hell out of me the way she is always wanting, wanting, wanting things without regard to my salary," and then is able to confront her with her extravagance.

Mr. and Mrs. F. acknowledge to each other that they have fallen out of love and then proceed to make each other miserable by mutual rampant infidelity as they each search for the one "true love," not realizing that their very acknowledgment could mark the beginning of the work of their marriage instead of its end.

Even when couples have acknowledged that the honeymoon is over, that they are no longer romantically in love with each other and are able still to be committed to their relationship, they still cling to the myth and attempt to conform their lives to it. "Even though we have fallen out of love, if we act by sheer will power as if we still were in love, then maybe romantic love will return to our lives," their thinking goes.

These couples prize togetherness. When they enter couples group therapy (which is the setting in which my wife and I and our close colleagues conduct most serious marriage counseling), they sit together, speak for each other, defend each other's faults and seek to present to the rest of the group a united front, believing this unity to be a sign of the relative health of their marriage and a prerequisite for its improvement.

Sooner or later, and usually sooner, we must tell most couples that they are too much married, too closely coupled, and that they need to establish some psychological distance from each other before they can even begin to work constructively on their problems.

Sometimes it is actually necessary to physically separate them, directing them to sit apart from each other in the group circle.

It is always necessary to ask them to refrain from speaking for each other or defending each other against the group. Over and over again we must say, "Let Mary speak for herself, John," and "John can defend himself, Mary, he's strong enough." Ultimately, if they stay in therapy, all couples learn that a true acceptance of their own and each other's individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

Those who have read the O'Neils' book Open Marriage will recognize this to be a basic tenet of the open as opposed to the closed marriage.

The O'Neils were actually remarkably gentle and restrained in their proselytizing for open marriage.

My work with couples has led me to the stark conclusion that open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners.

Episode 4:        More About Ego Boundaries

Having proclaimed that the experience of "falling in love" is a sort of illusion which in no way constitutes real love, let me conclude by shifting into reverse and pointing out that falling in love is in fact very, very close to real love.

Indeed, the misconception that falling in love is a type of love is so potent precisely because it contains a grain of truth.

It is possible that one can experience real love which also has to with ego boundaries, since it involves an extension of one's limits.

One's attraction to love could lead one to peak forward and allow the beloved to ride over them in other words, we must be attracted and be committed to one's love beyond the ordinary and beyond self.

Psychiatrists call this process of attraction, investment and commitment "cathexis" and say that we "cathect" the beloved object.

But when we cathect an object outside of ourselves we also psychologically incorporate a representation of that object into ourselves.

For example, let us consider a man who gardens for a hobby. It is a satisfying and consuming hobby. He "loves" gardening. His garden means a lot to him. This man has cathected his garden. He finds it attractive, he has invested himself in it, he is committed to it -so much so that he may jump out of bed early Sunday morning to get back to it, he may refuse to travel away from it, and he may even neglect his wife for it. In the process of his cathexis and in order to nurture his flowers and shrubs he learns a great deal. He comes to know much about gardening -about soils and fertilizers, rooting and pruning. And he knows his particular garden-its history, the types of flowers and plants in it, its layout, its problems and even its future.

Despite the fact that the garden exists outside of him, through his cathexis it has also come to exist within him. His knowledge of it and the meaning it has for him are part of him, part of his identity, part of his history, part of his wisdom. By loving and cathecting his garden he has in quite a real way incorporated the garden within him, and by this incorporation his self has become enlarged and his ego boundaries extended.

What transpires then in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and a thinning of our ego boundaries. In this way the more and longer we extend ourselves, the more we love, the more blurred becomes the distinction between the self and the world.

We become identified with the world. And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to  experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we "fall in love."

Only, instead of having merged temporarily and unrealistically with a single beloved object, we have merged realistically and more permanently with much of the world. A "mystical union" with the entire world may be established. The feeling of ecstasy or bliss associated with this union, while perhaps more gentle and less dramatic than that associated with falling in love, is nonetheless much more stable and lasting and ultimately satisfying. It is the difference between the peak experience, typified by falling in love, and what Abraham Maslow has referred to as the "plateau experience."  and love, while they may occur simultaneously, often are disassociated, because they are basically separate phenomena.

* The heights are not suddenly glimpsed and lost again; they are attained forever.

It is obvious and generally understood that sexual activity

 

* Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking, 1970),

 

 

 

In itself, making love is not an act of love. Nonetheless the experience of sexual intercourse, and particularly of orgasm

(even in masturbation), is an experience also associated with a greater or lesser degree of collapse of ego boundaries and attendant ecstasy. It is because of this collapse of ego boundaries that we may shout at the moment of climax "I love you" or "Oh, God" to a prostitute for whom moments later, after the ego boundaries have snapped back into place, we may feel no shred of affection, liking or investment. This is not to say that the ecstasy of the orgasmic experience cannot be heightened by sharing it with one who is beloved; it can. But even without a beloved partner or any partner the collapse of ego boundaries occurring in conjunction with orgasm may be total; for a second we may totally forget who we are, lose track of self, be lost in time and space, be outside of ourselves, be transported. 

We may become one with the universe. But only for a second.

In describing the prolonged "oneness with the universe" associated with real love as compared to the momentary oneness of orgasm, I used the words "mystical union." 

Mysticism is essentially a belief that reality is oneness. The most literal of mystics believe that our common perception of the universe as containing multitudes of discrete objects-stars, planets, trees, birds, houses, ourselves-all separated from one another by boundaries is a misperception, an illusion.

To this consensual misperception, this world of illusion that most of us mistakenly believe to be real, Hindus and Buddhists apply the word "Maya." They and other mystics hold that true reality can be known only by experiencing the oneness through a giving up of ego boundaries. It is impossible to really see the unity of the universe as long as one continues to see oneself as a discrete object, separate and distinguishable from the rest of the universe in any way, shape or form.

Hindus and Buddhists frequently hold, therefore, that the infant before the development of ego boundaries knows reality, while adults do not.

Some even suggest that the path toward enlightenment or knowledge of the oneness of reality requires that we regress or make ourselves like infants. 

This can be a dangerously tempting doctrine for certain adolescents and young adults who are not prepared to assume adult responsibilities, which seem frightening and overwhelming and demanding beyond their capacities. "I do not have to go through all this," such a person may think. "I can give up trying to be an adult and retreat from adult demands into sainthood." Schizophrenia, however, rather than sainthood, is achieved by acting on this supposition.

Most mystics understand the truth that was elaborated at the end of the discussion of discipline: namely, that we must possess or achieve something before we can give it up and still maintain our competence and viability. The infant without its ego boundaries may be in closer touch with reality than its parents, but it is incapable of surviving without the care of these parents and incapable of communicating its wisdom.

The path to sainthood goes through adulthood. There are no quick and easy shortcuts.

Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened.

An identity must be established before it can be transcended.

One must find one's self before one can lose it.

The temporary release from ego boundaries associated with falling in love, sexual intercourse or the use of certain psychoactive drugs may provide us with a glimpse of Nirvana, but not with Nirvana itself.

It is a thesis of this book that Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.

In summary, then, the temporary loss of ego boundaries involving a recourse leads us to make commitments to other people--from the real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and therefore an incentive for) the more lasting psychic care that can be ours after a lifetime of love.

As such, therefore .. while falling in love is not itself love, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.

Episode 5:        Dependency

The second most common misconception about love is the idea that dependency is love.

This is a misconception with which psychotherapists must deal on a daily basis. Its effect is seen most dramatically in an individual who makes an attempt or gesture or threat to commit suicide or who becomes incapacitatingly depressed in response to a rejection or separation from spouse or lover. Such a person says, "I do not want to live, I cannot live without my husband [wife, girl friend, boyfriend], I love him [or her] so much." And when I respond, as I frequently do, "You are mistaken; you do not love your husband [wife, girl friend, boyfriend]." "What do you mean?" is the angry question. "I just told you I can't live without him [or her]." I try to explain. "What you describe is parasitism, not love. When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love.

Love is the free exercise of choice.

Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other."

I define dependence as the inability to experience wholeness or to function without depending on someone else  or being cared for by another.

Dependence by physically healthy adults-Is pathological-it is sick, always a manifestation of a mental illness or defect.

It is to be distinguished from what are commonly referred to as dependency needs or feelings. We all-each and everyone of us-even if we try to pretend to others and to ourselves that we don't, - have dependency needs and feelings.

All of us have desires to be babied, to be nurtured without effort on our parts, to be cared for by persons stronger than us who have our interests truly at heart.

No matter how strong we are, no matter how caring and responsible and adult, if we look clearly into ourselves we will find the wish to be taken care of for a change. Each one of us no matter how old and mature, looks for and would like to have in his or her life a satisfying mother figure and father figure.

But for most of us these desires or feelings do not rule our lives; they are not the predominant theme of our existence.

When they do rule our lives and dictate the quality of our existence, then we have something more than just dependency needs or feelings; we are dependent.

Specifically, one whose life is ruled and dictated by dependency needs suffers from a psychiatric disorder to which we ascribe the diagnostic name "passive dependent personality disorder." It is perhaps the most common of all psychiatric disorders.

People with this disorder, passive dependent people, are so busy seeking to be loved that they have no energy left to love.

They are like starving people, scrounging wherever they can for food, and with no food of their own to give to others.

It is as if within them they have an inner emptiness, a bottomless pit crying out to be filled but which can never be completely filled.

They never feel "full-filled" or have a sense of completeness.

They always feel "a part of me is missing." They tolerate loneliness very poorly. Because of their lack of wholeness they have no real sense of identity, and they define themselves solely by their relationships.

A thirty-year-old punch press operator, extremely depressed, came to see me three days after his wife had left him, taking their two children.

She had threatened to leave him three times before, complaining of his total lack of attention to her and the children.

Each time he had pleaded with her to remain and had promised to change, but his change had never lasted more than a day, and this time she had carried out her threat.

He had not slept for two nights, was trembling with anxiety, had tears streaming down his face and was seriously contemplating suicide. "I can't live without my family," he said, weeping, "I love them so."

"I'm puzzled," I said to him. "You've told me that your wife's complaints were valid, that you never did anything for her, that you came home only when you pleased, that you weren't interested in her sexually o~ emotionally, that you wouldn't even talk to the children for months on end, that you never played with them or took them anywhere. You have no relationship with any of your family, so I don't understand why you're so depressed over the loss of a relationship that never existed. "

"Don't you see?" he replied. "I'm nothing now. Nothing. I have no wife. I have no children. I don't know who I am. I may not care for them, but I must love them. I am nothing without them."

Because he was so seriously depressed-having lost the identity that his family gave him-I made an appointment to see him again two days later. I expected little improvement.

But when he returned he bounced into the office grinning cheerfully and announced, "Everything's OK now."

"Did you get back together with your family?" I asked. "Oh, no," he replied happily, "I haven't heard from them since I saw you. But I did meet a girl last night down at my bar. She said she really likes me. She's separated, just like me. We've got a date again tonight. I feel like I'm human once more. I guess I don't have to see you again."

This rapid changeability is characteristic of passive dependent individuals. It is as if it does not matter whom they are dependent upon as long as there is just someone. It does not matter what their identity is as long as there is someone to give it to them. Consequently their relationships, although seemingly dramatic in their intensity, are actually extremely shallow. Because of the strength of their sense of inner emptiness and the hunger to fill it, passive dependent people will brook no delay in gratifying their need for others.

A beautiful, brilliant and in some ways very healthy young woman had, from the age of seventeen to twenty-one, an almost endless series of sexual relationships with men invariably beneath her in terms of intelligence and capability. She went from one loser to the next. The problem as it emerged was that she was unable to wait long enough to seek out a man suited to her or even to choose from among the many men almost immediately available to her. Within twenty-four hours after the ending of a relationship she would pick up the first man she met in a bar and would come into her next therapy session singing his praises. "I know he's unemployed and drinks too much, but basically he's very talented, and he really cares for me. I know this relationship will work."

But it never did work, not only because she had not chosen well but also because she would then begin a pattern of clinging to the man, demanding more and more evidence of his affection, seeking to be with him constantly, refusing to be left alone. "It is because I love you so much that I cannot bear to be separated from you," she would tell him, but sooner or later he would feel totally stifled and trapped, without room to move, by her "love." A violent blow-up would occur, the relationship would be terminated and the cycle would begin all over again the next day.

The woman was able to break the cycle only after three years of therapy, during which she came to appreciate her own intelligence and assets, to identify her emptiness and hunger and distinguish it from genuine love, to realize how her hunger was driving her to initiate and cling to relationships that were detrimental to her, and to accept the necessity for the strictest kind of discipline over her hunger if she was to capitalize on her assets.

In the diagnosis the word "passive" is used in conjunction with the word "dependent" because these individuals concern themselves with what others can do for them to the exclusion of what they themselves can do.

Once, working with a group of five single patients, all passive dependent people, I asked them to speak of their goals in terms of what life situations they wanted to find themselves in five years hence. In one way or another each of them replied, "I want to be married to someone who really cares for me." Not one mentioned holding down a challenging job, creating a work of art, making a contribution to the community, being in a position where he or she could love or even have children. The notion of effort was not involved in their daydreams; they envisioned only an effortless passive state of receiving care. I told them, as I tell many others: "If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.

The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved."

This is not to say that passive dependent people never do things for others, but their motive in doing things is to cement the attachment of the others to them so as to assure their own care. And when the possibility of care from another is not directly involved, they do have great difficulty in "doing things." All the members of the aforementioned group found it agonizingly difficult to buy a house, separate from their parents, locate a job, leave a totally unsatisfactory old job or even invest themselves in a hobby.

In marriage there is normally a differentiation of the roles of the two spouses, a normally efficient division of labor between them. 

The woman usually does the cooking, housecleaning and shopping and cares for the children; the man usually maintains employment, handles the finances, mows the lawn and makes repairs. Healthy couples instinctively will switch roles from time to time. The man may cook a meal now and then, spend one day a week with the children, clean the house to surprise his wife; the woman may get a part-time job, mow the lawn on her  husband's birthday, or take over the checking account and bill-paying for a year.

The couple may often think of this role switching as a kind of play that adds spice and variety to their marriage. It is this, but perhaps more important (even if it is done  unconsciously), it is a process that diminishes their mutual dependency. In a sense, each spouse is training himself or herself for survival in the event of the loss of the other. But for passive dependent people the loss of the other is such a frightening prospect that they cannot face preparing for it or tolerating a process that would diminish the dependency or increase the freedom of the other. Consequently it is one of the behavioral hallmarks of passive dependent people in marriage that their role differentiation is rigid, and they seek to increase rather than diminish mutual dependency so as to make marriage more rather than less of a trap. By so doing, in the name of what they call love but what is really dependency, they diminish their own and each other's freedom and stature. Occasionally, as part of this process, passive dependent people when married will actually forsake skills that they had gained before marriage. An example of this is the not uncommon syndrome of the wife who "can't" drive a car. Half the time in such situations she may never have learned, but in the remaining cases, sometimes allegedly because of a minor accident, she develops a "phobia" about driving at some point after marriage and stops

The effect of this "phobia" in rural and suburban areas, where most people live, is to render her almost totally dependent on her husband and chain her husband to her by her helplessness.

Now he must do all the shopping for the family himself or he must chauffeur her on all shopping expeditions. Because this behavior usually gratifies the dependency needs of both spouses, it is almost never seen as sick or even as a problem to be solved by most couples.

When I suggested to an otherwise extremely intelligent banker that his wife, who suddenly stopped driving at age forty-six because of a "phobia," might have a problem deserving of psychiatric attention, he said

"Oh, no, the doctor told her it was because of menopause, and you can't do anything about that." She was secure in the knowledge that he would not have an affair and leave her because he was so busy after work taking her shopping and driving the children around. He was secure in the knowledge that she would not have an affair and leave him because she did not have the mobility to meet people when he was away from her. 

Through such behavior, passive dependent marriages may be made lasting and secure, but they cannot be considered either healthy or genuinely loving, because the security is purchased at the price of freedom and the relationship serves to retard or destroy the growth of the individual partners.

Again and again we tell our couples that "a good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people. "

Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love. The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents' failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood.

It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves.

Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security. Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of "I don't have enough" and a sense that the world is unpredictable and un-giving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable. It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behavior that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve. As also indicated in the previous section, love and discipline go hand in hand, so that unloving, uncaring parents are people lacking in discipline, and when they fail to provide their children with a sense of being loved, they also fail to provide them with the capacity for self-discipline.

Thus the excessive dependency of the passive dependent individuals is only the principal manifestation of their personality disorder. Passive dependent people lack self-discipline. They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention. In their desperation to form and preserve attachments they throw honesty to the winds. They cling to outworn relationships when they should give them up. Most important, they lack a sense of  responsibility for themselves.

They passively look to others, frequently even their own children, as the source of their happiness and full-fillment, and therefore when they are not happy or fulfilled they basically feel that others are responsible.

Consequently they are endlessly angry, because they endlessly feel let down by others who can never in reality fulfill all their needs or "make" them happy.

I have a colleague who often tells people, "Look, allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin.

As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it's there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you'll be endlessly disappointed."

As a matter of fact, it is no accident that the most common disturbance that passive dependent people manifest beyond their relationships to others is dependency on drugs and alcohol. Theirs is the "addictive personality."

They are addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up, and when people are not available to be sucked and gobbled, they often turn to the bottle or the needle or the pill as a people-substitute.

In summary, dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another.

But in actuality, it is not love; it is a form of anti-love.

It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure.

It seeks to receive rather than to give.

It nourishes infantilism rather than growth.

It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate.

Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.

Episode 6:        Cathexis Without Love

One of the aspects of dependency is that it is unconcerned with spiritual growth.

Dependent people are interested in their own nourishment, but no more; they desire filling, they desire to be happy; they don't desire to grow, nor are they willing to tolerate the unhappiness, loneliness and suffering involved in growth. Neither do dependent people care about the spiritual growth of the other, the object of their dependency; they care only that the other is there to satisfy them.

Dependency is but one of the forms of behavior to which we incorrectly apply the word "love" when concern for spiritual evolution is absent. We will now consider other such forms, and we hope to demonstrate again that love is never nurturance or cathexis without regard to spiritual growth.

We frequently speak of people loving inanimate objects or activities. Thus we say, "He loves money" or "He loves power" or "He loves to garden" or "He loves to play golf."

Certainly, an individual may extend himself or herself much beyond ordinary personal limits, working sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week to amass wealth or power. Yet despite the extent of one's fortune or influence, all this work and accumulation may not be self-enlarging at all. Indeed, we may often say about a self-made tycoon, "He's a small person, mean and petty." While we may talk about how much this person loves money or power, we frequently do not perceive him as a loving person.

Why is this so? It is because wealth or power have become for such people ends in themselves rather than means to a spiritual goal.

The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.

Hobbies are self-nurturing activities. In loving ourselves that is, nurturing ourselves for the purpose of spiritual growth -we need to provide ourselves with all kinds of things that are not directly spiritual.

To nourish the spirit the body must also be nourished. We need food and shelter. No matter how dedicated we are to spiritual development, we also need rest and relaxation, exercise and distraction.

Saints must sleep and even prophets must play. Thus hobbies may be a means through which we love ourselves. But if a hobby becomes an end in itself, then it becomes a substitute for rather than a means to self-development. Sometimes it is precisely because they are substitutes for self-development that hobbies are so popular.

On golf courses, for instance, one may find some aging men and women whose chief remaining goal in life is to knock a few more strokes off their game. This dedicated effort to improve their skill serves to give them a sense of progress in life and thereby assists them in ignoring the reality that they have actually stopped progressing, having given up the effort to improve themselves as human beings. If they loved themselves more they would not allow themselves to passionately settle for such a shallow goal and narrow future.

On the other hand, power and money may be means to a loving goal.

A person may, for instance, suffer a career in politics for the primary purpose of utilizing political power for the betterment of the human race.

Or some people may yearn for riches, not for money's sake but in order to send their children to college or provide themselves with the freedom and time for study and reflection which are necessary for their own spiritual growth. It is not power or money that such people love; it is humanity.

Among the things that I am saying here and throughout this section of the book is that our use of the word "love" is so generalized and unspecific as to severely interfere with our understanding of love. I have no great expectation that the language will change in this respect. Yet as long as we continue to use the word "love" to describe our relationship with anything that is important to us, anything we cathect, without regard for the quality of that relationship, we will continue to have difficulty discerning the difference between the wise and the foolish, the good and the bad, the noble and the ignoble.

Using our more specific definition, it is clear, for instance, that we can love only human beings. For, as we generally conceive of things, it is only human beings who possess a spirit capable of substantial growth. * Consider the matter of pets. We "love" the family dog. We feed it and bathe it, pet it and cuddle it, discipline it and play with it. When it is sick we may drop everything and rush it to the veterinarian. When it runs away or dies we may be grief-stricken.

Indeed, for some lonely people without children, their pets may become the sole reason for their existence. If this is not love, then what is?

But let us examine the differences between our relationship with a pet and that with another human being.

First of all, the extent of our communication with our pets is extremely limited in comparison with the extent to which we may communicate with other humans if we work at it. We do not know what our pets are thinking. This lack of knowledge allows us to project onto our pets our own thoughts and feelings, and thereby to feel an emotional closeness with them which may not correspond to reality at all.

Second, we find our pets satisfactory only insofar as their wills coincide with ours. This is the basis on which we generally select our pets, and if their wills begin to diverge significantly from our own, we get rid of them. We don't keep pets around very long when they protest or fight back against us.

The only school to which I recognize the possibility that this conception may be a false one; that all matter, animate and inanimate, may possess spirit. The distinction of ourselves as humans being different from "lower" animals and plants and from inanimate earth and rocks, is a manifestation of maya, or illusion, in the mystical frame of reference.

There are levels of understanding.

In this book I am dealing with love at a certain level.

Unfortunately my skills of communicating are inadequate to encompass more than one level at a time or to do more than provide an occasional glimpse of a level other than the one on which I am communicating.

we send our pets for the development of their minds or spirits is obedience school. Yet it is possible for us to desire that other humans develop a "will of their own"; indeed, it is this desire for the differentiation of the other that is one of the characteristics of genuine love.

Finally, in our relationship with pets we seek to foster their dependency. We do not want them to grow up and leave home. We want them to stay put, to lie dependably near the hearth.

It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.

This matter of the "love" of pets is of immense import because many, many people are capable of "loving" only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings.

Large numbers of American soldiers had idyllic marriages to German, Italian or Japanese "war brides" with whom they could not verbally communicate. But when their brides learned English, the marriages began to fall apart. The servicemen could then no longer project upon their wives their own thoughts, feelings, desires and goals and feel the same sense of closeness one feels with a pet. Instead, as their wives learned English, the men began to realize that these women had ideas, opinions and aims different from their own. As this happened, love began to grow for some; for most, perhaps, it ceased. The liberated woman is right to beware of the man who affectionately calls her his "pet." He may indeed be an individual whose affection is dependent upon her being a pet, who lacks the capacity to respect her strength, independence and individuality.

Probably the most saddening example of this phenomenon is the very large number of women who are capable of "loving" their children only as infants. Such women can be found everywhere. They may be ideal mothers until their children reach the age of two-infinitely tender, joyously breast-feeding, cuddling and playing with their babies, consistently affectionate, totally dedicated to their nurture, and blissfully happy in their motherhood. Then, almost overnight, the picture changes. As soon as a child begins to assert its own will-to disobey, to whine, to refuse to play, to occasionally reject being cuddled, to attach itself to other people, to move out into the world a little bit on its own-the mother's love ceases. She loses interest in the child, decathects it, perceives it only as a nuisance, At the same time she will often feel an almost overpowering need to be pregnant again, to have another infant, another pet. Usually she will succeed, and the cycle is repeated. If not, she may be seen avidly seeking to baby-sit for the infant children of neighbors while almost totally ignoring the pleas of her own older child or children for attention. For her children the "terrible twos" are not only the end of their infancy, they are also the end of the experience of being loved by mother.

The pain and deprivation they experience are obvious to all except their mother, busy with her new infant.

The effect of this experience is usually evidenced as the children grow to adulthood in a depressive and/or passive dependent personality pattern.

What this suggests is that the "love" of infants and pets and even dependently obedient spouses is an instinctual pattern of behavior to which it is quite appropriate to apply the term "maternal instinct" or, more generally, "parental instinct."

We can liken this to the instinctual behavior of "falling in love": it is not a genuine form of love in that it is relatively effortless, and it is not totally an act of will or choice; it encourages the survival of the species but is not directed toward its improvement or spiritual growth; it is close to love in that it is a reaching out for others and serves to initiate interpersonal bonds from which real love might begin; but a good deal more is required to develop a healthy, creative marriage, raise a healthy, spiritually growing child or contribute to the evolution of humanity.

The point is that nurturing can be and usually should be much more than simple feeding, and that nurturing spiritual growth is an infinitely more complicated process than can be directed by any instinct. The mother mentioned at the beginning of this section who would not let her son take the bus to school is a case in point. By driving him to and from school she was nurturing him in a sense, but it was a nurturing he did not need and that clearly retarded rather than furthered his spiritual growth.

Other examples abound: mothers who push food on their already overweight children; fathers who buy their sons whole roomfuls of toys and their daughters whole closetfuls of clothes; parents who set no limits and deny no desires.

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well.

It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing.

It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership.

The word "judicious" means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.