“Love is merely a madness and deserves a dark house and a whip as a madman do.” This quote is from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. As You Like It was one of Shakespeare’s more comical plays and follows a strong young woman, Rosalind, with big ideas as she escapes her uncle and eventually finds love (Wikipedia). The idea behind this quote is that being in love is like being insane and so people in love belong in an insane asylum along with crazy people. This negative view of love is both disheartening and upsetting, but it does reveal some possible truth. Terms like love sick, lovelorn, crossed in love, infatuated, obsessed, spellbound and stuck on are all commonly used to describe someones feelings when they are in love. So does love truly make you crazy? Is it a disease?
In psychology, love is a subject quite often interpreted and researched as there are many many different types of loves that psychologists art trying to understand. Some psychologists believe love is a vital part of a human’s life cycle, while others find love to be a nuisance and quite fatal. With so many convincing opinions coming from various intelligent and famous psychologists, it is hard to distinguish which idea fits best and if love truly causes more harm than happiness or vice versa.
Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid were early researchers on the topic of love and believed there were two types of love, companionate and passionate love. Passionate love can be both positive and negative and includes intense and sexual emotions. Companionate love is softer, trusting love. (Weiten) Passionate love can be negative because the intense emotions can more easily lead to heart break and aggressive arguments. In more extreme cases, heart break and sorrow ca...
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...rlier, are also stimulants that are released when a person smoke or drinks, yet another reason these stimulants may be seen as addicting. Treatment for love addiction is even coming into practice whether it is talk therapy or biotechnology. Overall, there has been enough discussion and theories that love is an addiction to say that it is quite possible love is an illness and can cause someone a lot of pain.
In conclusion, the question is not whether or not love exists, the question now is: is love safe and worthy of our effort? Whether it is selfless or selfish or purely a chemical reaction, is this feeling something so vital that it is worth risking our sanity? Psychologists have been researching different types of loves and their affects on people, but it is ultimately the people’s choice to accept love, even if it means hard work and risking their well being.
"Love can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters you destiny for future loving moments" says Fredrickson but she seems to have forgotten that there always two perspectives to any ideology. It is indubitable that the experiences of love play a crucial role in molding an individual, but it is ignorant to say that only love will cause such change. The reality is that not all relationships and encounters are true "micro-moment of love" and those negative experiences also partake in what creates the identity and thought process of an individual. With the knowledge that an individual 's cell play a crucial role in deciding who to have "micro-moments of love"; such negative experience will be associated with the factual, biological notion of love. Thus causing individuals to feel that the negative experience they had to face and deal with were a result of their body and its biology. The idea that their body and brain, essentially unalterable, were capable of causing them pain and heartache, will hinder them from achieving the love and longing for others that Fredrickson describes. The idea that love is functioning by the orders registered by the individual 's body, makes love uncontrollable. Humans in nature are predisposed
Both author’s illustrate well, that a lack of love can have a profound effect on the behavior of a person. Whether a person has never experienced love by fortune or by design, the initial introduction of love into
love in the context of being a device that is used to protect and to care for people
The scientific definition of love is "having stimulation that one desires" (5). Recent research by two British neurologists concludes that love is linked to certain brain activities. By conducting tests using a magnetic resonance imager, the scientists measured brain activity in 17 people while they were viewing a picture of their loved one, and while they were viewing a photo of a friend of the same sex as their lover. When the individuals see the picture of the person they love, clear activity occurs in four regions of the brain that were not active when the image of the friend was present. The media insula, which is responsible for instinctual feelings, and the anterior cingulate, which acts in response to euphoria-inducing drugs, such as cocaine, are the two areas of the cortex stimulated by pictures of a lover. The striatum, that is activated when we are rewarded and the prefrontal cortex also increase their activity when shown the same picture.
Sian Beilock is the author of this novel, the information written by her would be considered credible due to the fact that she is a leading expert on brain science in the psychology department at the University of Chicago. This book was also published in the year 2015 which assures readers that the information it contains is up to date and accurate. The novel is easy to understand and the author uses examples of scientific discoveries to help make the arguments more relatable. Beilock goes into depth about how love, is something more than just an emotion, it derives from the body’s anticipation. “Volunteers reported feeling
Freud wrote that loving and being loved can be utilized to achieve a sense of true happiness and fulfilment in this life. He describes love as “a method that takes a firm hold of its objects and obtains happiness from an emotional relation to them” (p. 7). Freud also theorizes that love does not strive to avoid pain, but instead passionately attempts to reach a positive fulfillment of happiness. Freud specifically mentions sexual love, which “gives us our most intense experience of an overwhelming pleasurable sensation and so furnishes a prototype for our strivings after happiness” (p. 8). By placing love at the center of everything, happiness can easily be found, but at the same time love comes with a certain vulnerability within an individual and can make a person susceptible to a very painful amount of suffering
As any romantic will assert, love is by far the most powerful force known to human hearts and minds. This sentiment is espoused throughout history, almost to the point of cliché. Everyone has heard the optimistic statement, “love conquers all,” and The Beatles are certain, however idyllic it may be, that “all you need is love.” Humanity is convinced that love is unique within human emotion, unequalled in its power to both lift the spirit up in throws of ecstasy, and cast it down in utter despair.
In The New Humanities Reader edited by Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. We read about Barbara Fredrickson the author of the book “Love 2.0” copy right (2013). Barbara Fredrickson is a psychologist who show in her research how our supreme emotion affects everything we Feel, Think, Do and become. Barbara also uses her research from her lab to describe her ideas about love. She defines love not as a romance or stable emotion between friends, partners and families, but as a micro-moment between all people even stranger (108). She went farther in her interpretation of love and how the existence of love can improve a person’s mental and physical health (107). Through reading
Love is arguably the most powerful emotion possessed by mankind; it is the impalpable bond that allows individuals to connect and understand one another. Pure love is directly related to divinity. Without love, happiness and prosperity become unreachable goals. An individual that possesses all the desired superficial objects in the world stands alone without the presence of love. For centuries love has been marveled by all that dare encounter it. Countless books and poems have been transcribed to explain the phenomenon of love, but love surpasses all intellectual explanations and discussions. Love is not a definition, but rather a thought, an idea. This idea, the idea of love, burns inside us all. Instinctually, every soul on Earth is
One may ask what love is, how do you define love? You can look up the word love in the dictionary and find ten or more different explanations. Most sociologists consider love to be learned through cultural experiences (Love). This would mean that however or if persons parents showed them love while growing up, that is how that individual would interpret love throughout their life. When the Puritans first came to America, their concept of love was less of a romantic passion and more of a deepening reciprocal of respect and affection (Seidman 16). During the Enlightenment (1714-1818), love was typically viewed as a rational and orderly experience that could be controlled by those who experienced it (Sternberg 69). Love was assumed to be a rational feeling made by rational people and thus could be controlled. This belief had a major alteration during the eighteenth and nineteenth century when people began to believe that love was uncontrollable and could happen without reason (Sternberg 70). This change in the perception of love being uncontrollable also shifted the conclusion that people were not as rational as first presumed. In the late twentieth century, love became more sexualized and erotic which became perceived as a crisis in sexual morality and marriage (Seidman 66). Love today is viewed as unobtainable by reason of Americans have unrealistic expectations of love, true love, love at first sight, and the idea that love conquers all (Love). As a result of these unrealistic views, Americans have moved back to the concept that love is controllable but not necessary for a “romantic” relationship (Sternberg 63). As presented, love and the interpretation of what love is has transformed dramatically over the past two hundred years ...
Around the world people love. They live for love, they write for love, the sing, eat, cook, die and kill for love (ForumNetwork, 2009). Since the beginning of recorded time, people have wondered why love is such an intense and universal feeling. There is no culture in this planet that does not have love (ForumNetwork, 2009). This essay will only talk about romantic love were sexuality and attraction are involved. Romantic love, is one of the most powerful energies on earth (ForumNetwork, 2009), it is indeed one on the most addictive substances we can experience at least once in our life. The rush of cocaine and the rush of being in love depend on the same chemicals in our brain (ForumNetwork, 2009); we are literally addicted to love. The feeling of being in love does not depend whether the other part loves you back or not, it will help you feel more happy that is for sure, but the intensity of the feeling loved or heartbroken is the same, they both depart from the same principle: the love and desire of the other. Love remains in the most basic system of our brain, under all cognitive process, under all motor impulses; it is placed in our reward system, the most ancient systems of all (ForumNetwork, 2009).
Love is one of those things that means different things to different people. If you would look the word love up in the dictionary, you would find this: “an intense feeling of deep affection.” For some people, love can be purely romantic or even just purely sexual. For others, real love can only exist between family members or between people and a god. For some people, it is felt for your partners, family, pets, or even inanimate objects. None of the people are right or wrong, but I do know one thing, love is very powerful. Love is overused in today's world, people say they love someone because of the way they look or their body. That isn't love. To me, love is the most spectacular, indescribable, deep euphoric
As a conclusion, love is unique among those mental states. Although we celebrate love, we also recognize it can resemble an illness. Thus, the word love is complemented by love sickness. There is equivalent construction that relates to any other positive mental state. Poets experience a sickness as a consequence of the absence of their lovers. Also, psychiatry recognizes abnormally elevated mood in the form of mania. Lovesickness and the anguish of rejection, however, can lead to anguish and real suffering—both mental and physical. If love is a sickness then perhaps it has a cure. However, the wounds of love are cured by only by those who made them.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,. 349. The. “Psychological Theories About the Dynamics of Love (I).” 01 Mar. 2005 http://psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa022000a.htm Richmond, Raymond Lloyd.
Love happens when you least expect it. It can happen on the street corner, at the bar, at the grocery store, the park. That’s one of the greatest things about love. As for me I found love in the pouring down rain in the middle of the street. I fell in love with a man who I never thought in a million years I’d fall for. A man who is loving, caring and respectful. The night I laid my eyes on him I knew he was it. He came into my life at a point when I was unraveling and losing control. I was lost for two years after my high school sweetheart and I broke up, I thought I was never going to find real love, but I did. He saved me and I remember every minute from that night.