"Love" and the mental health professions: toward understanding adult love.

This essay explores three aspects of the normal processes of adult-adult love: falling in love, being in love, and staying in love. It describes the emotions, defenses, and challenges inherent in each phase. Love is an ordinary but immensely powerful adult aspiration. As a term it is impossible to define in any singular sense. The attainment of its lofty purposes requires profound intrapsychic adjustments involving creative acts of imagination, the integration of ideals with reality, evolving adaptations to the partner, the maintenance of a positive internal image of the partner, and ongoing struggles to overcome self-interest. These adjustments have not been well characterized by the mental health professions. This is ironic since a large portion of our work involves caring for love's casualties--that is, people whose miseries relate to their inability to successfully negotiate the phases of love or whose happiness is limited by their partners who cannot. Six arguments for ending professional avoidance of the topic are offered, the most compelling of which are love's relevance to both the pathogenesis of mental suffering and to the art of psychotherapeutic healing.