All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Read Online Free Page A

history provide illuminating ways of seeing other than our own. Underlying it all is an attempt to understand the dynamics of the way we live desire and love today. Since our social moment impacts on the way we experience love and helps to shape our desires, some of the imbalances that our times have produced are also my subject.
    Given the nature of the oft ungovernable emotion under consideration, the voyage this book takes us on inevitably bears the traces of my own experience and observation. If I have structured it in part along the trajectory of a life, it is because we live love differently–though never altogether differently–as we grow up and older. I am as interested in the Himalayas of voluptuous passion as in the plateaux of what might be called ordinary, quotidian love. Appreciating the latter, I have learned in the course of my days, is as much of an art and perhaps, also, an ethics, as succumbing to the sublimities of the first.
    Love crops up in multifarious discourses–from soaps to statistics, from cyberspace to science, from religion to fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology, and many of those guidebook and self-help points in between. It has long been part of an energetic cultural conversation, which loops from life to writings and images and back again, each shaping and reshaping the other. Since a single book is no encyclopaedia, I have had to wend my way through sources, magpie-like, and pick and choose. These choices reflect what I have learned about love through partners, friends and children, from reading, observation and gossip as well as from the more structured interviews I conducted in the course of research (though, of course, for reasons of privacy, I have anonymized these in the text). So I should say something about my choices, limits and prejudices.
    Humans live love as a narrative: we tell ourselves stories embedded in the stories our culture and traditions have given us. Purported facts, often contradictory, sometimes garnered from the labs of biologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as their theories, feed into these and into our cultural definitions and expectations of love. I have used all these but often focused on the narratives: they simply reveal more about how love is lived. So the stories people tell about themselves or others, whether in interviews or more artfully, in fiction, form the bedrock of this book. Because some of the great psychoanalytic thinkers have made love their subject and illuminated its vagaries, I find myself often enough drawing on Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Adam Phillips. Given that their observations are garnered from years of listening to and observing those who came to see them often because they were troubled by love’s unruliness or failure or their own incapacity to love, this seems apposite. If, as my last book Mad, Bad and Sad showed, the profession isn’t uniformly reliable, some of its best thinkers offer up intriguing perceptions on that mysterious and paradoxical creature that the human is.
    One dominant and fashionable set of explanations about love comes from the thinking of evolutionary psychologists and biologists. The impetus of science is to reduce, in the best sense of that word, complexity to a generalizable hypothesis. But to assume that we are primarily, like animals or selfish genes, driven by a reproductive urge which can explain all the manifestations of either sex or love, adultery or jealousy, hetero-or homosexual, is a reduction too far. Of course, the analogy with animals can be drawn, and sometimes fruitfully, particularly when we take into account the huge diversity of the animal world. Yes, we want to survive and many of us want to have children and look after them as best we can and in security. But humans also have language: they make and tell stories about themselves, elaborate their urges, play out their fantasies through complicated technologies, construct