LOVE: FROM LIBIDO THEORY
TO OBJECT RELATIONS
by Robert M. Young
I shall begin and end in the domain of idealizations, ones which mean a lot to me.
As a schoolboy I was required to memorize the following poem by Leigh Hunt:

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:-Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?"  The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
This was my introduction to a way of seeing human relations which was half-way to
secular humanism. It conveyed that to love one’s fellow human being could place one at
the head of the list of those who love God. (The other half is to try to behave altruistically
without recourse to God.) I have heard it said by an eminent professor of ethics that
loving everyone is such an implausibly undiscriminating response. But he is missing the
point that to love everyone is to impute something unique and valuable, a spirit or at least
a human ‘species being’, to every person, making him or her part of a larger and valued
entity, humankind. This is the point made by Preacher at the end of John Steinbeck’s
classic novel of suffering and redemption, The Grapes of Wrath. In the depths of the
American depression, when the migrants from Oklahoma to California are at a point of
maximum immiseration, Preacher shares his theology. It is no longer evangelical or even
Christ-centred. Perhaps, he muses, we are each a tiny part of one big soul. Religions and
ethical systems urge us to value one another in this or related ways, while our actual
behaviour falls far short of this ideal. Indeed, it is often said that pacifists love humanity
in general but get on badly with one another and those close to them. Still, many strive
toward the fulfilment of the ideal of what we once called ‘brotherly love’, and some
institutions, for example, the United Nations, seek – however imperfectly - to embody it.
Of course, as I shall amply illustrate, the truth of human relations is that they are
inescapably and irreducibly ambivalent. Indeed, Kleinians are taught that to believe that
one can operate at one end of the emotional spectrum and love others all the time is to
occupy the paranoid-schizoid position, wherein we make extreme splits. It is much more
mature to dwell in the depressive position where everything is a mixture and a matter of
degree. Yet romantic love between individuals is surely paranoid-schizoid, though not
virulently or malignantly so. We attribute a heightened degree of beauty, goodness and
other desirable and admirable attributes to the lovedone, and our doing so often actually
evokes or brings out the best in them. We find it hard to be apart from them and when
separated go to extreme lengths to be reunited with them. We want to gaze into their
eyes, hold them close and never let them go. We want to touch, kiss, caress, join in
lovemaking, mingle fluids, have children together, raise a family (or the equivalent in
homosexual couples). We want to merge.
Love inspires extreme altruism. We make sacrifices for our lovedones, even to the
point of risking or forfeiting our own careers or even our lives. When one dies, the other
is utterly bereft and often finds it hard to carry on and has to negotiate the boundary
Freud draws between mourning and melancholy (Freud, 1917). When permanent
separation and divorce occur, as they do in up to half of couple relationships, the angry
feelings are often extreme. This is not surprising, since choosing a life partner or spouse
is probably the most externally un-coerced and most committed choice we make in our
lives except, perhaps, to children and to Arsenal football team (in the case of my
children).
I don’t know about you, but I really think I know about love. Heaven knows I
have had my vicissitudes and failed relationships, but commitment to the ideal of a loving
and lasting relationship with one other person has never left me. It has wavered and
faltered and undergone recurrent disappointment but it has never gone. You may say,
‘Some guys never learn’, but, as my mother used to say, ‘Always let your reach exceed
your grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?’ ‘In for a penny, in for a pound; it’s love that makes
the world go round.’ ‘All you need is love.’ ‘Love is a many-splendoured thing.’ I found
it easy to locate in my memory dozens of songs with love in the title, many – most – of
which I know by heart. Most of the Beatles’ twenty-seven number one hits are about love
and its tribulations. As I was writing this talk I was offered on cable television sixty-four
of the most admired love songs on two CDs for £19,95. Think, also, how much of fine art
and the rest of culture – both high culture and the low culture of soaps, tabloids and
schlock writing – is about love.
I have spoken so far about idealized love of humanity in general and idealized
love of a one other in the sense of lovers or partners or husband and wife. But there are,
of course, many varieties of love and some very good books about them. I will list some
and dwell on a few. There is, for example, Platonic love in two senses. One is the belief
that we are each half a soul and go through life finding our other half, thereby becoming
complete. This is an attractive myth, but, in truth, most of us have to make do with more
than one mate, so it is hard to hold onto the idea that our other half is unique. The other
sense of Platonic love is love which is deep but does not involve overt sexual relations –
the love of a dear friend. I love and have loved several people in this way, mostly women,
as it happens. Then there is parental love, something which we as psychotherapists know
to be fraught. Its vicissitudes are the source of most of our and our patients’ difficulties –
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too little, too much, too preoccupied, being orphaned, parents divorce or don’t get on,
physical or sexual abuse. Sibling love is almost as dicey and in danger of causing
ructions. One of the very first brothers in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Cain, killed the
other one, Abel. Relations with grandparents are often safer, less potentially damaging.
If we turn to psychoanalytic thinking about love, there are about two hundred
articles in the main journals and several admirable books. I have perused them all, read
many and studied some closely. However, I have not made much of a dent in the 11,961
books on love and currently in print listed by Amazon.com. I have prepared a reading list
and starred some items, in particular, the writings of Irving Singer (1984, 1984a, 1987),
Otto Kernberg (1987, 1995), Ethel Person (1988, 1991) and especially Martin Bergmann,
whose The Anatomy of Loving (1987) I commend to you most highly of all.
(Unfortunately it is currently out of print, but I found over three dozen second hand
copies on offer on the internet under BibliofInd and ABEbooks). Half of Bergmann’s
book is addressed to the history of theories of love, a topic better canvassed in Singer’s
three volume history of ideas of love, the third volume of which recapitulates the first two
and has a sixty page chapter on psychoanalysis. The second half of Bergmann’s book is
the best single source for psychoanalytic ideas about love. His main finding is simply put.
When we fall in love, it is ‘a refinding of some aspect of a repressed relationship with a
parent or parent-figure, a dim recalling of a very early symbiotic phase, the inclusion of
the other within the bounds of the self and thus some undoing of separateness, and the
transfer of some degree of idealization of the self or the parent onto the new love object’
(Pulver, 1989, p. 655). Bergmann considers this notion of refinding to be Freud’s most
profound contribution to the understanding of love. However, ‘lovers do not simply and
repetitively refind infantile objects, but seek objects who can undo the wounds and
humiliations experienced early in life at the hands of their infantile objects, with the
outcome of love dependent on the balance achieved between its repetitive and reparative
functions’ (Person, 1992, p. 847).
Coming to love someone is typically a powerful, irrational and all-consuming
experience, which is why we call it ‘falling in love’, i.e., infatuation, which can be shortlived or develop into a more mature love. This idea certainly conforms to my own
experience. The hard task, as most of us have occasion to discover, is what you do when
you discover that this has happened. Another way of putting this point is to say that we
all fall in love with an infantile fantasy, and this is a neurotic symptom. If you are lucky
and work at it, you will find enough that is good between you so that you can build a
strong and lasting relationship out of the good elements plus what else you can add from
the rest of life, along with large doses of tolerance, loyalty and true grit.
I now want to say something important about changing conceptualisations of love.
A classical Freudian would find it obvious that a talk on love should be included in a
series of sexuality, because classical Freudianism conceptualised love in terms of instinct
and libidinal energies. Love is, on this view, a sublimation of sexuality. The concept of
libido, which meant sex drive in reductionist versions of Freudianism, now means
something as wide as negative entropy. (Entropy is a concept in physics, specifically
thermodynamics, indicating the tendency of systems to disorganise, for their energy to
run down to equilibrium; negative entropy characterises energised, complex, relatively
organised systems which need further inputs of energy to be maintained.) I suppose it
would be too crude or simple to say that in orthodox Freudianism any cunt or cock would
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do, but the uniqueness and individuality of the character and attributes of the chosen one
– ‘the object of my affection’, as the song says – would be seen in the context of libido
and sexual energies.
Love was reconceptualised in the wake of the rise of object relations theory in the
work of Ronald Fairbairn, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. The libido theory, which
roots love and sexuality in instinctive hedonism, is now out of fashion in most quarters.
In the great Freudian triad of instinct, aim and object, the emphasis has shifted decisively
from aim to object, and the mental representations of instincts are to the fore rather than
their biological roots. Indeed, Fairbairn went so far to say that libidinal attitudes do not
determine object relations. On the contrary, he maintained that object relations determine
libidinal attitudes (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 137). One way to characterise the
change is that what was once rooted in biology has come to be grounded in relationships;
what was focused on sexual areas – erogenous zones – is now focussed on the
unconscious phantasies in the inner world. In some circles the privileging of certain body
parts in Freudian theory has been replaced by a claim that any part of the body, any
function, anything at all can be the legitimate focus of sexual preoccupation, excitement
and gratification. Still others (e.g., O’Connor and Ryan, 1993, p. 246; cf. Young, 1996)
seek to root out all naturalism from sexual identity, orientation and behaviour.
Don’t get me wrong. Sexuality, sexual parts, erogenous zones and phases of
psychosexual development have not been purged from most psychoanalytic theory. It is
still the result of biology and evolution that we make highly-charged responses to breasts,
bottoms, eyes, hair, vaginas, clitorises and penises (some would add anuses) rather than,
say, toes, knees or elbows. (I am reminded of a skit by Billy Connolly in which he goes on
at length about God having some spare scrotum left over after creating Adam, so he put it
over the elbow.) In characterizing the change from libido theory to object relations theory
the most helpful thing that can be said is that erogenous zones and psychosexual phases
have moved from the foreground to the background. Sexuality has been progressively
relocated so that relationships are in the foreground, and sex is seen in that context as one
way of loving. Kisses and cuddles and particularly hugs which do not lead to intercourse
are no longer seen as truncated or postponed lovemaking but are valued in their own right
as expressions of love which are highly valued. Indeed, in this country two thirds of
people value affection and companionship as the most important thing in a relationship,
while only 16% think sex is (Wellings, 1994, p. 264).
One feature of the libido theory has, in certain quarters, been placed under
particularly critical scrutiny: the centrality of the Oedipus complex in psychosexual and
moral development. There are those – I am not among them (Young, 2001) – who seek to
discard any notion that there is a privileged path of development which we must all pass
through if we are to attain maturity. They also reject the claim that failure successfully to
negotiate the Oedipus complex is certain to land one in psychological trouble. On this
matter there can be no compromise as far as Freudians are concerned. Freud called the
Oedipus complex, the painful working out (from about three and a half to five years in
childhood) of psychosexual relations between the child and the parents, 'the core complex'
or the nuclear complex of every neurosis. In a footnote added to the 1920 edition of Three
Essays on The Theory of Sexuality, he made it clear that the Oedipus complex is the
immovable foundation stone on which the whole edifice of psychoanalysis is based:
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It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the
neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of
infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on
the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of
mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis.
With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex
has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the
shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents
(Freud, 1905, p. 226n).
No compromise is possible with respect to the significance of the Oedipus complex, then.
However, if you read the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with an open mind,
Freud’s ideas about sexuality come across as rather more liberal and tolerant of aberration
than many of his critics represent them as being. For example, the first essay is not about
normality but about sexual aberrations. The second essay is about infantile sexuality, and
the third is about puberty. You could say that normal adult sex comes last. Indeed, ‘The
Finding of an Object’ of one’s affections turns up in the very last section of the third and
last essay. You could say that normal love is something reached by a circuitous path from
polymorphous perversity through a series of fixations and incestuous wishes, eventually
renounced, although (in strict Freudian theory) the girl does not finally sort out hers until
she has a child, i.e., a symbolic substitute penis. (Nagera, 1981, pp. 67-72; Klein, 1928,
1945, pp. 50 sqq. and 72-74). In fact, that path from polymorphous perversity to more
civilized love is the one he says, in Totem and Taboo and in Civilization and Its
Discontents, that humanity actually travelled in history.
In the first essay Freud stresses just how wide the range of human sexual behaviour
is. His is not a rigid position. He says quite straightforwardly that everyone is to some
extent a deviant. Freud wrote,
No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called
perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself
enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of
reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar, and,
indeed, insoluble difficulties as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish
mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological
symptoms (Freud, 1905, pp. 160-61).
This allows for quite a lot of latitude, but there is still a definite limit. His model is one of
norm and deviation – deviation up to a point, but you are supposed to get back onto the
appropriate path in the end. There were definite taboos, as well. According to Freud, it
was a perversion if the lips or tongue of one person came into contact with the genitals of
another or if one lingered over aspects of foreplay which, as he quaintly put it, 'should
normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim’ (Freud, 1905, pp.
151, 150; cf. p. 211). He regarded 'any established aberration from normal sexuality as an
instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism' (Freud, 1905, p. 231).
Once again, object relations theory has not jettisoned this way of thinking,
although certain dissidents and would-be reformers of psychoanalysis – e.g., Lacanians,
5
feminists, gays and lesbians – would gladly see it off. The majority, I’d say, stop a long
way short of jettisoning some version of obeisance to the libido theory, biological links
for sexuality and love and the Oedipus complex. As I have said, what has happened in
most quarters is a recontextualisation, whereby instinct and biology are seen as less deep
that object relations, which are our unconscious feelings in our inner worlds about
important figures in our lives, initially carers, followed by other significant figures, say,
other relatives closely involved with our care, siblings, teachers and mentors, friends,
boyfriends and girlfriends, partners, husbands and wives, children.
0tto Kernberg has written extensively on love and its pathology. He offers a
summary of his views which he reformulates in the light of later research. He sets out to
integrate object relations theory with basic Freudian concepts:
I concluded that the capacity to fall and to remain in love reflected the successful
completion of two developmental stages: In the first stage, the early capacity for
sensuous stimulation of erotogenic zones is integrated withy the later capacity for
establishing a total object relation. In the second stage, full genital enjoyment
incorporates early body-surface eroticism in the context of a total object relation,
including a complementary sexual identification. The first stage requires, in
essence, that primitive dissociation or lack of integration of the self and of object
representations be overcome in the context of establishing ego identity and the
capacity for object relations in depth. The second stage requires the successful
overcoming of oedipal conflicts and the related unconscious prohibitions against a
full sexual relation (Kernberg, 1977, p. 80)
After reviewing new work, especially by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (e.g., 1985), he says,
To conclude, the maturation in the sexual realm, in the realm of object relations,
and in superego development jointly determines the capacity for mature love and
for the couple’s stability, but also creates potential conditions for its dissolution.
Sexual passion as the ongoing crossing of boundaries in the realm of selfexperience both protects the couple and creates new conditions for it, with
consequences that cannot be fully foreseen. I think that mature love relations are
not “postambivalent”, but remain ambivalent with the predominance of love over
hatred, and remain ambiguous, with a combination of intimacy and secrecy,
growing freedom, mutual sexual experience, and a persistent mystery of the everchanging nature of private fantasy life. Intimacy and discretion are two essential
ingredients of mature love relations; they permit the combination of optimal
expression of sex and love, and the optimal absorption and neutralization of
aggression in the relationship. The awareness, tolerance, and integration of the
many complex aspects of one’s own sexuality reinforces the capacity for mutual
empathy, another dimension of the growth of the couple. And empathy, in turn,
reinforces intimacy, discretion, and love (pp. 111-12).
Kernberg’s writings about love have been revised and collected in a volume entitled Love
Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995). I admit that he writes in a difficult style, but
he repays patient study.
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I have dwelt at length on love, committed partnership and marriage, but, of
course, these are the exception – however desired and repeatedly sought after. Over
eighty per cent of people in this country say that fidelity in a relationship is highly
desirable and infidelity is wrong, but thirty-seven per cent of men and twenty-nine per
cent of women commit it at least once during their relationship. Moreover, though most
take vows of lifetime commitment, the marriages of about forty per cent of young people
will end in divorce, and predictions are that this will rise to half (Wellings, 1994).
It behoves us, then, to look at other kinds of love relationships, ones less likely to
succeed. The incapacity to love or make commitments usually betokens an absence of a
deep tie to one person in the early years of their life (Bergmann, 1987, p. 269). As bad is
a carer who is physically present but emotionally absent. André Green has, in my
opinion, painted the definitive picture of such a person in his essay, ‘The Dead Mother’
(1983). She is not physically dead, but there is no end to her dying, and she is not ‘there
for us’, resonating, containing, caring; she is ‘somewhere else’, preoccupied. Bergmann
gives us sketches of other unpromising forms of love, for example, triangular love,
conflicted love, loveless sexuality, masochistic and sadistic love, Pygmalion love,
narcissistic love, addicts of love (whose relationships do not survive the waning of
infatuation), aim-inhibited love (where the sexual component is absent, repressed or
taboo).
He also writes at length and movingly about transference love, a normal part of
the psychotherapeutic relationship which must be transformed by sublimation, if the
therapy is to prosper, into a striving for understanding. Occasionally a patient will not
settle for this, and, alas, occasionally the therapist succumbs – or, worse – seduces the
patient. The taboo against sex with patients or clients lies at the heart of the forms of
abstinence which constitute the analytic frame and define professional integrity (Young,
1998). The analytic space is an Oedipal space. The analytic frame keeps incest at bay.
The analytic relationship involves continually offering incest and continually declining it
in the name of analytic abstinence and the hope of a relationship that transcends or goes
beyond incestuous desires. Breaking the analytic frame invariably involves the risk of
child abuse and sleeping with patients or ex-patients is precisely that.
Bergmann puts some of these points very nicely. He says,
In the analytic situation, the early images are made conscious and thereby deprived
of their energising potential. In analysis, the uncovering of the incestuous fixation
behind transference love loosens the incestuous ties and prepares the way for a
future love free from the need to repeat oedipal triangulation. Under conditions of
health the infantile prototypes merely energize the new falling in love while in
neurosis they also evoke the incest taboo and needs for new triangulation that
repeat the triangle of the oedipal state (p. 220).
With respect to patients who get involved with ex-therapists, he says that they claim that
“‘unlike the rest of humanity I am entitled to disobey the incest taboo, circumventing the
work of mourning, and possess my parent sexually. I am entitled to do so because I
suffered so much or simply because I am an exception’” (p. 222). From the therapist’s
point of view, ‘When the transference relationship becomes a sexual one, it represents
symbolically and unconsciously the fulfilment of the wish that the infantile love object
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will not be given up and that incestuous love can be refound in reality’ (p. 223). This is a
variant on the Pygmalion theme. The analytic relationship works only to the extent that
the therapist shows, in Freud’s words, ‘that he is proof against every temptation’ (Freud,
1915, p. 166). Even so, somewhere between 2.5% and 10% of male therapists have sex
with patients. Female therapists do it, too, but only a fraction as often.
Before I share some clinical summaries with you I want to round out my sketch of
kinds of love. Not all love is for people. The headmistress of my son’s primary school
loved her dog so much that it was sweet to behold, I was so grief-stricken when my dog
was run over when I was ten that I have never had another pet. People love their schools,
their colleges, especially Oxbridge ones. I certainly do. People love their regiment, their
city, their country, the sports teams they support. Harold Searles waxes eloquent about
his love of the region where he grew up and tells us of many more sorts of love for the
non-human environment. He writes,
Probably for everyone who has found life to be more kindly than cruel, the land of
his youth is a golden land; youth is such a golden time of life. Certainly for me the
Catskill region of upstate New York possesses an undying enchantment, a beauty
and an affirmation of life’s goodness which will be part of me as long as I live. For
as far back as I can recall, I have felt that life’s meaning resided not only in my
relatedness with my mother and father and sister and other persons, but in
relatedness with the land itself – the verdant or autumn-tapestried or stark and
snow-covered hills, the uncounted lakes, the rivers (Searles, 1960 p. ix).
I am sure we all have places we love, just as we have inanimate objects we love and
cherish. Bikers love their motorcycles; other men love their motors. A lawyer friend from
Texas told me that when he suggested that one of his clients, a successful industrialist,
should think of making a will and making provision for his lovedones, the reply was,
‘Don, I don’t love nuthin’ but my corporation’. We love songs, symphonies, books,
plays, creations in the visual arts. Toddlers love transitional objects, and many’s the
grown-up who does, too. We may be lonely at times in our lives, but we still lavish our
love over all kinds of objects of affection. There have been times when the only thing that
stood between me and despair was the timbre of Willie Nelson’s voice.
Now some cases. When I cast my mind over the people I have seen in
psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I am struck by how hard love is. I do not think is right or
prudent, in Hampstead, to give detailed expositions of case material, but I will offer some
vignettes.
A man who was pushed hard by his parents and succeeded academically yet has
no confidence in his abilities in his profession (which is the same as his father’s) and has
always been plagued by his mother’s incessant fault-finding. She got him special tuition
at every stage of his education. When he sought a long-term relationship every new
potential partner was found wanting in increasingly rapid order – too much body hair, too
small breasts, even ‘too Celtic’ (whatever that is). He switched to telephone sex and
could deem several women inadequate in a single evening. He also got through the
introductory year of several psychotherapy trainings, but all were found wanting, as well,
as was the therapist who came before me and as, eventually, was I.
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A man whose mother could not cope in a war-ravaged country felt she had to take
my patient in and out of children’s homes. The father was gone before he was born.
When he was not in an institution he was a latch-key child. Now living in Britain, he
cannot commit himself to a woman, and each, in turn, loses patience and leaves him.
A man whose mother died when he was one. His father remarried, but the
stepmother brought a lover into the family home and turned all the children against the
father and drove him out. My patient married a bullying woman who divorced him and
left him nearly broke. He, too, now finds it hard to make a commitment and becomes
involved with a compliant woman. She, alas, cannot break away from her domineering
brute of a husband, so my patient loses out for a third time.
A young woman whose family of origin was so ‘perfect’ that neither she or her
sister can seek a new and independent relationship.
Another young woman has grown up in this country, but her family is from a
foreign culture in which a daughter stays at home until she marries. She lives a life of
hypocrisy, sleeping with men but appearing to her parents chaste and pure and
deferential, though seething underneath. No man has the right combination of skin
colour, religion and social standing to be acceptable to the family or, indeed, to her, so
she languishes and frets about her body. She failed at university and in psychotherapy
training because she could never do the reading or write the essays, though she excelled
in class discussions.
A cleric’s father died in World War Two when the boy was one. He and his
widowed mother moved into the maternal grandmother’s home. When the mother
decided to re-marry, the grandmother would not let the boy move out with her. He
becomes successful in career terms but fears women will dominate him, so he turns to
mutual masturbation with adolescents or inadequate men. No amount of effort to get on
with eligible women gets very far.
An older man marries late, and it is decided not to have children. Both he and his
wife come from families in which the father was unfaithful and walked out. When he
retires, he, who has been almost totally faithful, goes on holiday alone and falls in love
with an unhappily married woman, but he breaks it off and comes home bereft and seeks
his wife’s support and sympathy. The wife is devastated, and he seeks therapy in order to
understand his aberration and save his marriage.
A man in his mid-thirties who received utterly inadequate parenting at the hands
of a hippy mother and a cuckolded father who left when he was a toddler, cannot bear to
have a child, even though this will likely lead to his losing the wife he really loves. He
cannot find the resources to give what he never had and identifies with the unloved and
deprived baby, whose needs he cannot imagine meeting, since his never were. And he is
right about himself. He has already walked away from one baby in an earlier relationship.
When his wife has miscarried he has been relieved. The prospect of becoming a father
makes him seriously suicidal.
None of these people want to settle for less. Each of them shares the ideals of
what constitutes a loving relationship which romantic songs, films, novels and poetry
leads us to aspire to. All but one of them – the cleric – functions adequately in
intercourse. It is the quality of their relations which is wanting. They suffer from the
heritage in their
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respective inner worlds of the emotional structures within which they grew up. Their
problems are hellishly difficult to shift. I have mentioned eight patients. I know I helped
the retired man who had the affair. I know that the serial fault-finder got nowhere, as he
had in a decade of work with his precious therapist. The cleric gave up the inappropriate
relations with unsuitable partners and is at peace in a pious celibacy. The rest are in the
balance, and I am not unhopeful, though I am far from complacently optimistic. The
foundations of their object relations will have to be re-laid or at least importantly
reconstructed, and in my experience this is a very slow process with an uncertain
outcome.
Just before closing I offer another rendition of a good and loving relationship, this
time from Bergmann. He finds the roots of love in our prolonged infantile dependency.
The wish to merge, to be at one with the beloved, is a yearning for the very early
symbiotic phase of infancy (pp. 260-61). He concludes by saying that mutual idealization
is a healthy component of love.
Idealization identification and regression to infancy all partake of the love
experience without being allowed to go beyond a certain limit. Seen in this
perspective love constitutes an ideal compromise formation of a great variety of
wishes and needs. What Is surprising, therefore, is not that it often falls short of the
ideal, but that in spite of these numerous checks and balances, many lovers succeed
in transforming falling in love into an approximation of ideal love… We cannot
forego idealization entirely, but the transformation of falling in love into a
permanent tie depends significantly on the ability to establish an inner peace
between the idealization we bring with us from infancy and our capacity to accept
the limitations of reality (pp. 277-78).
I conclude with my most cherished passage on love, one which I heard so often as
a child and keep on the wall next to my bed. In an increasingly secular age I think we
encounter it too seldom. It says, with unparalleled eloquence what love is and what life
loses without it.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am
become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have
not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked,
thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all thing, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth; but where there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be
tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
10
For we know in part, and we prophecy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done
away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a
child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
This is the text of a talk given in the CONFER series on ‘The Labyrinth of Sexuality’ at
the Tavistock Centre, London, 27 November 2001.
REFERENCES AND READINGS
(Place of publication is London unless otherwise specified.)
WORKS CITED
Bergmann, Martin (1987) The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know
What Love Is. Columbia.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine (1985) The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the
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Freud, Sigmund (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholy’
______ (1905) 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', S. E. 7, pp. 125-245
______ (1912-13) Totem and Taboo, S. E. 13, pp. 1-161.
______ (1915) ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, S. E. 14, pp. 117-40.
______ (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, S. E. 14, pp. 243-58.
______ (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents, S. E. 21, pp. 59-145.
______ (1953-73) The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth (S.E.).
Kernberg, Otto (1977) ‘Boundaries and Structure in Love Relations’, J. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn., 25: 81-114
______ (1995) Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale.
Klein, Melanie (1928) ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, W. M. K. Vol. I, pp. 18698.
______ (1945) ‘The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties’, W. M. K. Vol. I,
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______ (1975) The Writings of Melanie Klein, 4 vols. Hogarth. Vol. I: Love, Guilt and
Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945. Vol. II: The Psycho-Analysis of Children.
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Child Analysis. all reprinted Virago, 1988. (W. M. K.)
Green, André (1980) ‘The Dead Mother’, reprinted in On Private Madness. Hogarth,
1986, pp. 142-73.
11
Greenberg, Jay R. and Mitchell, Stephen A. (1983) Object Relations in Psychoanalytic
Theory. Harvard.
Nagera, Humberto, ed. (1981) Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Libido Theory.
Karnac.
O’Connor, Noreen and Ryan, Joanna (1993) Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities:
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Person. Ethel Spector (1988) Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion. N.
Y.: Norton; reprinted London: Bloomsbury pb, 1990.
______ (1991) ‘Romantic Love: At the Intersection of the Psyche and the Cultural
Unconscious’, J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 39S: 383-411
______ (1992) Review of Bergmann, The Anatomy of Loving, J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.
40: 845-49.
Pulver, Sydney E. (1989) Review of Bergmann, The Anatomy of Loving, Psychoanal.
Quart. 58: 655-58.
Searles, Harold F. (1960) The Nonhuman Environment: In Normal Development and in
Schizophrenia. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Singer, Irving (1984) The Nature of Love, vol. 1. Plato to Luther. Chicago; pb 1987.
______ (1984a) The Nature of Love, vol. 2. Courtly and Romantic. Chicago; pb 1987
______ (1987) The Nature of Love, vol. 3. The Modern World. Chicago; also pb (contains
summaries of vols 1 & 2).
Wellings, Kate et al. (1994) Sexual Behaviour in Britain: The National Survey of Sexual
Attitudes and Lifestyles. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Young, Robert M. (1996) ‘Is “Perversion” Obsolete?’, Psychology in Society no. 21: 5-26.
______ (1988) ’The Analytic Frame, Abstinence and Acting Out’, Psychoanalytic
Studies Distance Learning Unit, University of Sheffield.
______ (2001) ‘Locating and Relocating Freudian Ideas about Sexuality’, in Celia
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*______ (2001) Oedipus Complex. Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books.
LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS
Alberoni, Francesco (1981) Falling in Love. N. Y.: Random House.
Altman, L. (1977) ‘Some Vicissitudes of Love’, J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 25:35-52.
Arlow, Jacob A. (1980) ‘Object Concept and Object Choice’, Psychoanal. Quart. 49:109-33.
*Armstrong Perlman, Eleanore (1991) ‘The Allure of the Bad Object’, Free Assns. (no. 23) 2:
343-56.
Balint, Michael (1952) Primary Love and Psychoanalytic Technique. enlarged ed., Tavistock,
1965. see esp. chs. on Eros and Aphrodite, Genital Love, Love and Hate and Love for the
Mother & Mother Love.
Baumeister, R. F. and Wotman, S. R. (1992) Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited
Love. Guilford.
Baumgart, H. (1990) Jealousy: Experiences and Solutions. Chicago.
Bak, R. (1973) ‘Being in Love and Object Loss’, Internat. J. Psychoanal. 54: 1-7.
Benjamin, Jessica (1990) The Bonds of Love. Virago pb.
12
Bergmann, M. S. (1986) ‘Transference Love and Love in Real Life’, Internat. J. Psycho-anal.
11: 27-45; reprinted as ch 18 in Bergmann (1987).
***______ (1987) ‘What Freud Discovered about Love’; ‘Varieties of Love and Loving’, chs
13 and 20 in The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is.
Columbia pb, pp. 156-80, 257-78. All of Part II is concerned with ’The Psychoanalytic
Contribution’.
Brehm, S. (1988) ‘Passionate Love’, in R. J. Sternberg and M. L. Barnes, eds., The Psychology
of Love. Yale, pp. 233-63.
Brown, Norman O. (1966) Love’s Body. N. Y.: Vintage pb.
Cancian, Francesca M. (1986) ‘The Feminization of Love’, Signs 4: 629-709.
Cartledge, S. and Ryan, J., eds. (1983) Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions.
Women’s Press pb.
Cole, William G. (1958) Sex and Love in the Bible. Association Press.
De Rougemont, D. (1956) Love in the Western World. N. Y.: Doubleday.
Ebaugh, Helen R. F. (1988) Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. Chicago pb.
Evans, W. N. (19534) ‘Two Kinds of Romantic Love’, Psychoanal. Q. 22: 75-86.
Fiedler, Leslie (1966) Love and Death in the American Novel. N. Y.: Stein and Day.
Fisher, Helen (1992) Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Adultery, Monogamy and Divorce.
Simon and Schuster.
Forward, Susan (1988) Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. N. Y.: Bantam
Freud, Sigmund (1953-73) The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth
(S.E.).
*______ (1905) 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' S. E. 7, pp. 125-245; key passage p.
222. (See also. appendix - 'List of Writings by Freud Dealing Predominantly or Largely
with Sexuality', pp. 244-5).
*______ (1910) ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the
Psychology of Love I)’, S. E. 11:163-76.
*______ (1912) ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love
(Contributions to the Psychology of Love II)’, Ibid., pp. 177-90.
______ (1918) ‘The Taboo of Virginity (Contributions to the Psychology of Love III)’ Ibid. ,
pp. 191-208
_____ (1921) ‘Being in Love and Hypnosis’, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
S. E. 18: 111-16; see also pp. 140-43, 166-67.
______ See also S. E. 21: index entries on Love.
Fromm. E. (1956) The Art of Loving; reprinted Unwin pb, 1957.
______ (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Reprinted Pimlico pb, 1997.
Gaylin, Willard (1986) Rediscovering Love. N.Y.: Viking.
**Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. Polity pb.
Goode, W. J. (1959) ‘The Theoretical Importance of Love’, Amer. Sociol. Rev. 24: 34-47.
Grossman, Carl M. (1965) ‘Transfrence, Countertransference and Being in Love’, Psychoanal.
Q. 34: 249-56.
Hafner, Julian (1993) The End of Marriage: Why Monogamy Isn’t Working. Century pb.
Hazo, R. G. (1967) The Idea of Love. N. Y.: Praeger.
Haddon, C. (1985) The Power of Love. Michael Joseph.
13
Hamon, Marie-Christine (2000) Why Do Women Love Men and Not Their Mothers? N. Y.: The
Other Press pb.
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Hitschmann, E. (1952) ‘Freud’s Conception of Love’, Internat. J. Psycho-anal. 33: 421-28.
Jekels, L. and Bergler, E. (1934) ‘Transference and Love’, Psychoanal. Quart. 18:325-50.
Kernberg, Otto (1977) ‘Boundaries and Structure in Love Relations’, J. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn., 25: 81-114
*______ (1995) Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale.
**Klein, Melanie (1937) ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, reprinted in Love, Guilt and Reparation
and Other Works 1921-1945. Hogarth Press, 1985, pp. 305-43.
Kogan, Ilany (1995) ‘Love and the Heritage of the Past’, Internat. J. Psychoanal. 76: 805-24.
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Freudian Psychoanalysis. Faber and Faber.
Lewis, C. S. (1936) The Allegory of Love. Reprinted Oxford, 1985.
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______ (2001) Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context. Continuum, esp. chs. 6 and 7 on early
obect love and loss of the loved object.
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Experience of Romantic Love. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
*Reik, T. (1944) A Psychoanalyst Looks at Love. N. Y.: Farrar & Rinehart.
Richards, Arnold and Arlene, eds. (1994) The Spectrum of Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of
Martin S. Bergmann. International Universities Press.
Ross, John M. (1991) ‘A Psychoanalytic Essay on Romantic, Erotic Love’, J. Amer.
Psychoanal. Assn. 39S: 439-75.
Rubin, Lillian (1990) Erotic Wars. N. Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Saul, L (1950) ‘The Distinction between Loving and being Loved’, Psychoanal. Quart. 19:
412-13.
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Searles, Harold (1959) ‘Oedipal Love in the Counter Transference’, Internat. J. Psychoanal.
40: 180-190.
______ (1960) The Nonhuman Environment: In Normal Development and in
Schizophrenia. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Singer, Irving (1984) The Nature of Love, vol. 1. Plato to Luther. Chicago; pb 1987.
______ (1984) The Nature of Love, vol. 2. Courtly and Romantic. Chicago; pb 1987
**______ (1987) The Nature of Love, vol. 3. The Modern World. Chicago; also pb (contains
summaries of vols 1 & 2).
______ (1994) The Pursuit of Love. Johns Hopkins; pb 1995 (sequel to trilogy).
Solomon, R. C. (1981) Love, Emotion, Myth, and Metaphor. N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor pb.
_____ (1988) About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times. N.Y.: Simon
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Tanner, Tony (1979) Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Johns Hopkins;
paperback, 1981.
14
SEX, SEXUALITY, LIBIDO AND OBJECT RELATIONS:
Abraham, Karl (1924) ‘A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, viewed in the Light of
Mental Disorders’, in Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1927; reprinted Maresfield,
1979, pp. 418-501.
Benjamin, Jessica (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of
Domination. N. Y.: Pantheon; reprinted London: Virago,pb., 1990.
Bullough, Vern L. (1994) Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research. Basic Books.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J, (1985) Creativity and Perversion. Free Association Books pb.
Cornwell, Joan (1985) ‘The Establishment of Female Genital Sexuality’, Free Assns. 1:57-75
*Delvin, David (1993) The Good Sex Guide. Ebury pb.
Domenici, Thomas and Lesser, Ronnie C. (1995) Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic
Reappraisals of Sexual Identities. Routledge. (essays by gay and lesbian analysts and
therapists).
Freud, Sigmund. (1953-73) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Hogarth.
*______ (1905)'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' S. E. 7, pp. 125-245. See esp.
appendix - 'List of Writings by Freud Dealing Predominantly or Largely with Sexuality',
pp. 244-5.
*______ (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents. S. E. 21, pp. 59-145.
**Giddens, Anthony. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. Polity; pb, 1993.
**Greenberg, Jay R. and Mitchell, Stephen A. (1983) Object Relations in Psychoanalytic
Theory. Harvard, esp. Part II on Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip, pp. 119-232.
Harding, Celia, ed., Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Routledge.
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Kohon, Gregorio (1985) 'Objects Are Not People', Free Associations 2:19-30.
Laplanche, Jean (1976) ‘The Order of Life and the Genesis of Human Sexuality’ and ‘Sexuality
and the Vital Order of Psychical Conflict’, in Life and Death In Psychoanalysis. Johns
Hopkins, pp. 6-24. 25-47.
______ and Pontalis, J.-B (1983) 'Sexuality', in The Language of Psychoanalysis. Hogarth, pp.
418-22; see also 'Libido'. 'Object', 'Object Relation(ship)', 'Oedipus Complex', etc..
Masters, W. H. and Johnson, V. E. (1966) The Human Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown;
reprinted Bantam pb, 1980.
*Nagera, H., ed. (1981) Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Libido Theory. Karnac pb.
Porter, Roy and Hall, Lesley (199%) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in
Britain, 1650-1950. Yale.
Reinisch, June M. with Beasley, Ruth (1990) The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex; What
You Must Know to Be Sexually Literate. N. Y.: St Martin’s Press; reprinted
Harmondsworth: Penguin pb, 1991.
*Stoller, Robert (1986) Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (1975). Maresfield pb.
15
______ (1991) ‘Eros and Polis: What Is This Thing Called Love?’ (essay review), J. Amer.
Psychoanal. Assn. 39: 1065-1102.
______ (1991) ‘Horrah for Love’, J. Amer Psychoanal. Assn. 39S: 413-35.
Sutherland, J. D. (1963) 'Object Relations and the Conceptual Model of Psychoanalysis', Brit.
J. Med. Psychol. 36:109-24.
______ (1980) 'The British Object Relations Theorists: Balint, Winnicott, Fairbairn', J. Amer.
Psychoanal, Assn. 28:829-60, (notice: no Klein)
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*______ (2001) Oedipus Complex. Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books.
Writings by Young available at http://www.human-nature.com
DISSIDENT SEXUALITIES
Apter, Emily and Pietz, William, eds. (1993) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Cornell.
Chancer, L. S. (1992) Sado-Masochism in Everyday Life. Rutgers.
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Frosh, Stephen (1994) Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Gamman, Lorraine and Makinen, Merja (1994) Female Fetishism: A New Look. Lawrence &
Wishart.
Garber, Marjorie (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kaplan, Louise J. (1991) Female Perversions. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Michael, Robert T. (1994) Sex in America: A Definitive Study. Little, Brown.
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and Psychoanalysis. Virago.
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______ and McIntosh, Mary, eds. (1992) Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornogaphy Debate.
Virago.
Sexualities: Challenge and Change (1994) Special Issue of Feminist Review. no. 46. Spring,
1994.
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Attitudes and Lifestyles. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Relations 12 (no.2): 1-20.
*______ (1996) ‘Is “Perversion” Obsolete?’, Psychology in Society no. 21: 5-26. http://humannature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper56.html
PERVERSITY AND PERVERSION
*Burch, Beverly (1993) ‘Heterosexuality, Bisexuality, and Lesbianism: Psychoanalytic Views
of Women’s Sexual Object Choice’, Psychoanal. Rev. 80:83-99.
16
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J, (1985) Creativity and Perversion. Free Association Books.
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Wishart.
*Giddens, Anthony (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. Polity; pb, 1993. esp. chs 7-9 re: ‘plastic sexuality’
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21: 401-15.
______ (1952) ‘Notes on the Analysis of Sexual Perversions’, Internat. J. Psychoanal. 33: 397402.
______ (1956) ‘The General Theory of Sexual Perversions’, Internat. J. Psychoanal. 37: 396403.
______ (1964) ‘The Psycho-analytic Theory of Sexual Deviation with Special Reference to
Fetishism’, in I. Rosen, ed., The Pathology and Treatment of Sexual Deviation: A
Methodological Approach. N. Y.: Oxford, pp. 123-45.
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The Psychoanalytic Quest for Knowledge and Truth. Free Association Books, pp. 230-49.
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371-84.
______ (1990) Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (1978). Free Association Books pb.
Parkin, A. (1963) ‘On Fetishism’, Internat. J. Psychoanal. 44: 352-61
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*Stoller, Robert (1986) Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (1975). Maresfield pb.
Waddell, Margot and Williams, Gianna (1991) ‘Reflections on Perverse States of Mind’, Free
Assns. (no. 22) 2: 203-13.
Wulff, M (1946) ‘Fetishism and Object Choice in Early Childhood’, Psychoanal Quart. 15:
450-71.
Copyright: The Author
Address for Correspondence:
26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk
Web site and writings: http://www.human-nature.com
17