Lovestruck

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Lovestruck (disambiguation).
Part of a series on
Love
Red-outline heart icon
Red-outline heart icon
Types of love
Social views
Concepts

Being lovestruck means having mental and physical symptoms associated with falling in love: "Love-struck ... means to be hit by love ... you are hit in your heart by the emotion of love".[1]

While being lovestruck has historically been viewed as a short-lived

humoral model was abandoned, and since the advent of modern scientific psychiatry
.

Metaphors

The concept is associated with a set of metaphors attempting to convey the speed and intensity of falling in love by describing it as a physical process of falling or being struck.

Alternately, falling in love is often described with reference to

Tristram Shandy, describe the process by referring to it as the act of being shot with a gun: "I am in love with Mrs Wadman, quoth my uncle Toby – She has left a ball here – added my uncle Toby – pointing to his breast".[2]

Psychoanalysis

The twentieth-century saw the concept of love-sickness reconceptualised by

Freud asked rhetorically, "Isn't what we mean by 'falling in love' a kind of sickness and craziness, an illusion, a blindness to what the loved person is really like?"[3] Half a century later, in 1971, Hans Loewald took up the theme, comparing being in analysis "to the passions and conflicts stirred up anew in the state of being in love which, from the point of view of the ordinary order and emotional tenor and discipline of life, feels like an illness, with all its deliciousness and pain".[4]

Symptoms

A 2005 article by Frank Tallis suggested that being utterly romantically lovestruck should be taken more seriously by professionals.[5]

"For love-struck victims, the world appears altered. Replacing the flatness of ordinary experience is a fullness".[6]

According to Tallis, some of the symptom clusters shared with being lovestruck include:

More substantively, the estimated serotonin levels of people falling in love were observed to drop to levels found in patients with OCD.[7] Brain-scan investigations of individuals who professed to be "truly, madly, deeply" in love showed activity in several structures in common with the neuroanatomy of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), for example, the anterior cingulate cortex and caudate nucleus.[8]

Criticism

Some who would "disagree with Frank Tallis's fundamental thesis that love should be seen as a mental illness ... concur that at the extreme and under certain circumstances love sickness can drive a person to despair".[9]

They would suggest however that "'disordered love' ... can be understood more clearly in terms of attachment theory".[10]

Literary examples

  • The character of Romeo fits the archetype of a lovestruck youth that he has become the very model of Cupid himself.[11]
  • In
    Song of Solomon: "comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love".[13]

See also

References

  1. ^ Jennifer Overton, Snapshots of Autism (2003) p. 58.
  2. ^ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Penguin 1976) p. 554.
  3. ^ Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1988) p. 9.
  4. ^ Quoted in Malcolm, p. 127.
  5. ^ Tallis, F. (2005). "Truly, madly deeply in love". The Psychologist. 18 (2): 72–74.
  6. ^ Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, Mother with Child (1994) p. 117.
  7. S2CID 12630172
    .
  8. S2CID 1448875
    .
  9. ^ M. J. Power, T. Dalgleish, Cognition and Emotion (2008) p. 342.
  10. ^ Power, Dalgleish, p. 351.
  11. ^ Clayton G. MacKenzie, Emblems of Mortality (2000) p. 75.
  12. ^ A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990) p. 417.
  13. ^ J. M. & M. J. Cohen eds., The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations (1964) p. 42.

Further reading

  • Frank Tallis, Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness (2005)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lovestruck&oldid=1176953733"