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February 6, 2006
The hunger for love is much more
difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa
Born on May 6,
1856, in Moravia, Sigmund Freud was destined to radically alter the
understanding of the human heart. Freud graduated as a doctor in
1881, and his initial professional work involved research on the uses
of cocaine. But over the next fifty years, following his fascination
with dream analysis, Freud developed the new field of psychoanalysis
and, abandoning his Jewish heritage, embraced atheism.
Since Freud,
many new theories of human personality have been constructed. And the
U.S. Department of Labor reports that psychiatry and psychology are
the “fastest growing
occupations projected to have the largest numerical increases in
employment between 2004 and 2014.”
Psychologists
study the human mind and human behavior. So it is more than idle
curiosity to wonder what they study of love. Very little, according
to “Love Doctor” Leo Buscaglia. In 1969, Buscaglia endured
professional ridicule in order to begin an experimental class devoted
to the study of love at a California university.
His students’
first major lesson about love was unexpected. “Love has really been
ignored by the scientists. It’s amazing,” wrote Bascaglia. “My
students and I did a study. We went through books in psychology. We
went through books in sociology. We went through books in
anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the
word love.”
So it is today.
Standing in the bookstore of our local state university, reading
through psychology textbooks, love is still absent from any
professional consideration.
Holding
Learning and Behavior, skimming chapter one on the psychology of
learning and behavior, I note that students will study the spectrum of
influences on human behavior: external events, classical Pavlovian
conditioning, habituation, operant conditioning schedules, punishment,
stimulus control, imitation, modeling, choice and self control. But
nary one word about love. Neither is love listed in the index.
The textbook
Science and Human Behavior by B.F. Skinner is only slightly
better. Love appears in the index twice. On page 162, love is
likened to fear and anger…a person “is generally talking about
predispositions to act in certain ways….the man ‘in love’ shows an
increased tendency to aid, favor, be with, and caress and a lowered
tendency to injure.” On page 310, Skinner teaches that “…love might
be analyzed as the mutual tendency of two individuals to reinforce
each other, where the reinforcement may or may not be sexual.”
That’s it.
That’s the full consideration of the one emotion forceful enough to
make the world go round.
In The Nature
of Prejudice, the author actually writes a complete sentence about
love. “Why is it,” he asks, “that we hear so little about love –
prejudice – the tendency to overgeneralize our categories of
attachment and affection?” This notion of “love-prejudice” pops up
just one more time in his textbook that has six pages referenced in
the index for sex and a whole section devoted to sexuality.
Sensing a
pattern, I reached for the fourth and final psychology textbook,
Psychology of Behavior. Its eighteen chapters thoroughly cover
human behavior: human consciousness, evolution, nervous cells and
structure, psychopharmacology, methods of research, ethical issues,
vision, audition, chemical senses, control and movement, sleep,
reproductive behavior, emotion, memory, ingestive behavior, relational
learning, schizophrenia, affective disorder, anxiety disorder,
autistic disorder, hyperactivity disorder, stress disorder and drug
abuse.
Love? Not
there. But, checking the book’s index, if you want to know about sex,
there is no end in sight: hormones, chromosomes, activational effects,
gender development, sexual maturation, arousal, prefrontal cortex,
hormonal control, human sex, sex of lab animals, neural control,
sexual dimorphism, prenatal androgens, sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN),
orientation, heredity…my fingers wore out just listing all the ways we
have to study sex.
Love may make
the world go round. But when the world is sick from lack of love, it
is the last thing our love doctors think to check.
If the academics miss the obvious, a
humble woman with no desire to reach the pinnacle of professional
greatness sees it all. “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for,
forgotten by everybody,” said Mother Teresa, “I think that is a much
greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing
to eat.”
In the midst of
plenty, we are a love sick world.
What does it say
about the likelihood that we can recover from love sickness, if our
most elite educators study more about our sexually dimorphic nucleus
than about our ability to love one another?
What does it say
about our future, if those who study to fill the exploding market of
jobs for psychiatrists and psychology can memorize the
psychopharmacology of modern drugs, but have only read two pages in
their college text about love as a prejudice?
And what does it
say about our children and their love future when we have saturated
their world with so much of sexual orientations and so little of
love?
“Being unwanted,
unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody…” We are love sick. And
we need a cure.
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It is easy to
love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to
us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to
relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home.
Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other
must start.
Mother Teresa
December 10, 2004
The Best Part of Snuggling
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