ABSTRACT
While Freud, Buber, and Marcel wrote robustly about the permutations of love, including how to expand and deepen this capacity, they all were fairly gloomy in their characterization of what they took to be the human condition and what was reasonably possible. Freud, for example, wrote, “The unworthiness of human beings, including the analyst, always impressed me deeply, but why should analyzed men and women in fact be better. Analysis makes for integration but does not itself make for goodness” (Hale, 1971, p. 188). Buber, sounding like Freud who described most people as “trash,” “riff-raff,” and “good-for-nothings” in his correspondences (Roazen, 2001, pp. 26, 27),TS : Please change the numbering of all endnotes from i, ii, iii..etc. to 1,2,3.. etc.xxx wrote in his “Autobiographical fragments,” that most people were “tousle-heads and good-for-nothings,” though he still loved them (Buber, 1967a, p. 38). Finally, Marcel described “the essence of our [“broken”]xxxi world is perhaps betrayal … we live in a world where betrayal is possible at every moment, in every degree, and in every form” (Marcel, 1965a, p. 97).xxxii
