ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author describes how love is far less important to most people and especially to our youth than success or security or popularity. He made the important distinction between the passive wish to be loved and the active capacity to love another. The author traces the very origins of the capacity to love through the entire life cycle. In doing so, he anticipated in 1961 the discussions of narcissism, object relations, and the problems of establishing and maintaining intimacy that occupy center stage in psychoanalysis today. In "Varieties of Love," Romi feels that the emotion of love is neglected and not respected in American society. Love and hate, positive and negative, kinds of feelings toward the same person. People who grow up and are fixated to this way of feeling and reacting are people who are afraid to fall in love because any kind of love is to them a danger.