The True Meaning of Love on a Psychological Standpoint

Butterfly Kisses on Cloud Nine

“You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul.” –Julie de Lespinasse.

Love and hate are two of the most compelling emotions human beings are capable of. Normally contrasted, these emotions are used to scale how much we like or dislike a certain object. However, recent studies show a different relation between the two that could significantly alter the way average people in society would view them. It’s common knowledge that a person in love may be capable of the most selfless acts of beauty or terrifying horrors, but people do not generally admit that this is due to the ever-thinning line drawn between love and hate in our world. The cause could stem from a diminutive detail in our pasts, stuck in our subconscious or a chance meeting that altered the balance in our lives. Either way, it’s hard to believe that love could become more complicated than it already seems, but Melanie Klein and Robert Sternberg prove just that. These psychologist’s analytical studies truly opened my world to love and all of its intricacies.

No one does a better job of explaining the complexities of love or captures its close relation to hatred better than esteemed psychologist Melanie Klein. Like many other post-Freudian psychologists, she emphasized the importance of pre-oedipal layers of personality development, with a specific concentration on early mother and child relationships. In her studies, she answers the question of where this intricate emotional combat originally stems from. Klein suggests that we, as babies, all have a primitive longing for our mother’s breast because it satisfies our self preservative needs and desires. While it is provided, the ba...

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...ices today. As long as I love with intensity and balance, I might make an alright triangle that could possibly match with someone else’s to give me my perfect happy ending. In that, I am not taking sides with either psychologist. Both claims have substantial validity and seem believable enough but my experiences with love, parental or intimate, have been too fleeting and insubstantial to make a claim about it. I do not doubt its power, but I do doubt that its meaning will ever truly be discovered.

Works Cited

Klein, Melanie, and Joan Riviere. Love, Hate and Reparation. New York: Norton, 1964. Print.

Klein, Melanie, and Juliet Mitchell. The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: Free, 1987. Print.

Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Da Capo, 1992. Print.

Sternberg, Robert J., and Michael L. Barnes. The Psychology of Love. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Print.