ABSTRACT
Freud approached the topic of love reluctantly, fearing to encroach on the poetic territory of gifted poets or philosophers like Plato and Schopenhauer. Not without irony he claimed that when psychoanalysis touches the subject of love its touch must be clumsy by comparison with that of the poets. In spite of this reluctance, I showed in a series of publications (1971, 1980 and 1982) that Freud contributed more to the understanding of love than anyone after Plato. In these publications I tried to disprove a widely held opinion-both outside and within psychoanalysis – that Freud, who changed our understanding of sexuality so fundamentally, had little or nothing to say about love. This opinion could be maintained only because Freud never unified his thinking on love along the lines of dream theory or the theory of sexuality.
