A General Theory of Love

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini & Richard Lannon

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First annotation on Dec 20th, 2022. Last on May 26th, 2025.

Chapter 1

Some might think it strange that a book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding—and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives. The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so. Because of the brain's design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does. Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer's day
"Man is a credulous animal and must believe something, " wrote Bertrand Russell. "In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." Wherever and whenever they are, people vastly prefer any explanation (however flawed or implausible) to none. When Freud announced that he had plumbed once and for all the inky depths of human passions, a world desirous of reassuring certainty flocked to his vision.
As in politics, the factor determining the longevity and popularity of these notions was not their veracity but the energy and wit devoted to promoting them.
First, a curious correlation has prevailed between scientific rigor and coldness: the more factually grounded a model of the mind, the more alienating. Behaviorism was the first example: brandishing empiricism at every turn, it was thoroughly discomfiting in its refusal to acknowledge such staples of human life as thought or desire. Cognitive psychology bristled with boxes and arrows linking perception to action and had nothing to say about the unthinking center of self that people most cherish. Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind's Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage—including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.
Modern neuroscience has been equally culpable of propagating an unappealing and soulless reductionism. If the psychoanalysts spun an intangible castle in the air for humanity to inhabit, neuroscience has delivered a concrete hovel. Is every mood or manner best understood as the outcome of molecular billiard balls caroming around the cranium? When emotional problems arise, is a steady diet of Ritalin for children and Prozac for adults to be our only national response? If a woman loses her husband and becomes depressed, does her sorrow signify, or is she just a case of chemistry gone awry? Science is a newcomer to the business of defining human nature, but thus far it has remained inimical to humanism. Seekers of meaning are turned away at the door.
If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be for arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.
Although this book traffics in those scientific discoveries, we cannot endorse the myopic assumption that academic papers hold the key to the mysteries of love. Human lives form the richest repository of that information. Those who attempt to study the body without books sail an uncharted sea, William Osler observed, while those who only study books do not go to sea at all.
The investigation of these queries is not just an intellectual excursion: people must have the answers to make sense of their lives. We see the need for this knowledge every day, and we see the bitter consequences of its lack. People who do not intuit or respect the laws of acceleration and momentum break bones; those who do not grasp the principles of love waste their lives and break their hearts
Long before science existed, sharp-eyed men and women told each other stories about how people are, stories that have never lost their power to enchant and instruct. The purpose of using science to investigate human nature is not to replace those stories but to augment and deepen them. Robert Frost once wrote that too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. That principle is mirrored in the study of the brain, where too many experts, out of plain fear, avoid mentioning love.

Chapter 2

As physicists and mathematicians delved deeper into the stuff of reality, they collided with the end of objectivity's jurisdiction. "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" asked William Butler Yeats in 1928. The poet was in perfect harmony with the science of his age, which was reeling at the impossibility of dividing—as traditional science demanded— the knower from the known
The first blow to the clockwork universe came from Albert Einstein. His relativity theory proposed that the flow of time depends on where you are, and that different observers may not agree even about the chronological order of the events they witness. A few years later, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that any mathematical system contains, like the gleaming and inaccessible jewels of a dragon's lair, true theorems that can never be proven. Between Einstein and Gödel came Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle. Heisenberg showed that the more precisely one determines the position of an atomic particle, the less one can know about its speed. These shy qualities reverse their roles: the more exactly a particle's velocity is measured, the more elusive its location becomes.

Chapter 3

As elegant as his insight may be, it is the force of Archimedes' emotion that calls to us down the centuries. His thrill, not his intellectual dexterity, is what has given his theorem its notoriety. The real principle behind his principle is that most people will never fathom its mathematics—but his exuberance they do understand. That rush of joy comes to some from seeing an out-of-the-park home run, to others in the colors of the sun setting into the Pacific, or in the eyes of a newborn baby. Archimedes' delight transmits itself across two millennia in a heartbeat.
Exhilaration, longing, grief, loyalty, fury, love—they are the opalescent pigments that gild our lives with vibrancy and meaning. And emotions do more than color our sensory world; they are at the root of everything we do, the unquenchable origin of every act more complicated than a reflex. Fascination, passion, and devotion draw us toward compelling people and situations, while fear, shame, guilt, and disgust repel us from others. Even the most desiccated neocortical abstractions pulse with an emotional core. Greed and ambition run beneath the surface of economics; vengefulness and reverence under the veneer of justice
The reptilian brain usually comes outfitted with a worry setting near the middle of the scale, a compromise that maximizes survival: too much fear is globally inhibiting, while too little promotes recklessness. The prehistoric crocodilian needed enough daring to venture out in the open from time to time, but it also required the wariness that allowed it to slip into the pond on a moment's notice. Most people have a moderate amount of inbred worry, although our popular culture is fond of idealizing individuals whose worry is nonexistent

Chapter 4

Most of them have one thing in common: an exquisite, lifelong sensitivity to separation's pain. The miniature losses contained in a rebuke, a spat, and other transient relationship rifts can arouse in them an unbearable blend of despondency and grief. Then follows an episode of self-harm—a prick, a burn, an incision into the skin. Beneath and within the abused epidermis, palpitating pain fibers send their drumbeat signal to the brain, warning of damage. These messages release pain's counterweight: the blessed, calming flow of opiates, and thus, surcease of sorrow. Chronic self-mutilators provoke the lesser pain to trick their nervous systems into numbing the unendurable one.

Chapter 6

William Baxt in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, hoped to augment human diagnostic proficiency by enlisting a computer assistant capable of learning to distinguish heart attacks from the varied conditions they resemble. Baxt fed the program details from the case histories of 356 patients. In the next 320 chest pain cases, physicians made the right call four fifths of the time. The computer scored 97 percent.
The de facto division of labor between man and machine usually splits along pleasing lines. Computers typically excel at the tireless repetition of algorithms—the menial mental labor that human beings have little inclination to undertake. Supercomputing inroads into championship chess rely on mechanical combinatorial might, not clever strategy. Prodigious calculators they may be, but our smartest machines can't make sense of a simile, summarize a sitcom plot, or take the dog for a walk.
A human being has dual hearts—the first, a pulsating fist of muscle in the chest; the second, a precious cabal of communicating neurons that create feeling, longing, and love. The two hearts intersect for a moment here because the program that so brilliantly assessed cardiac endangerment is a neural network—poetically named, for it is neither neural nor network, but a series of mathematical statements that model the brain's own computing agility.
The modus operandi of the neural network is unique. Standard computer software runs on the expertise, routines, and contingent responses that human masterminds script in advance. Such a program cannot handle any situation that the writer cannot foresee; once written, the program itself does not change. The meticulously crafted core of a neural network, on the other hand, learns from experience and transforms itself—a capacity created by small-scale software modeling of the communication that occurs among organic, brain-dwelling cells. Before a neural network can compute a solution, it first absorbs information from intensive training sessions. That learning phase gradually alters the program's innards. Neural networks (also called parallel-distributed processing or connectionist models) excel at gleaning subtle patterns that hundreds of variables jointly determine. The best neural networks are more astute at diagnosis than doctors, better at forecasting weather than meteorologists, and more profitable stock pickers than mutual fund managers.
A neural network is machine intuition. After a connectionist program delivers its answer, one cannot obtain meaningful knowledge about the processing details—why it says Patient A suffered a heart attack but Patient B did not. Examining the network yields minimal information about the basis for its conclusions. Because a neural network taps into the brain's own data-processing mechanism, it arrives at sophisticated, unanalyzable inferences—as does humanity's emotional heart.
Think the word dog, and the circuits encoding for German shepherd and golden retriever warm up in your mind, and those for walk and bone and flea a little less so. The strong activation of dog leaves mutual fund in hibernation (except in the unlikely event of an idiosyncratic bridge—today Fido ate your brokerage statements, say). Computer-based neural networks operate this way, and so do human beings. Showing a person the word dog actually makes him respond more quickly to words like bone and flea, while reaction time to mutual fund remains unchanged.
One manifestation of these orchestral evocations is the immediate selectivity of emotional memory. Gleeful people automatically remember happy times, while a depressed person effortlessly recalls incidents of loss, desertion, and despair. Anxious people dwell on past threats; paranoia instills a retrospective preoccupation with situations of persecution. If an emotion is sufficiently powerful, it can quash opposing networks so completely that their content becomes inaccessible—blotting out discordant sections of the past. Within the confines of that person's virtuality, those events didn't happen. To an outside observer, he seems oblivious to the whole of his own history. Severely depressed people can "forget" their former, happier lives, and may vigorously deny them when prompted by well-meaning guardians of historical verity. Rage affords hatred an upper hand that is likewise obtuse, sometimes allowing a person to attack with internal impunity those he has forgotten he loves.
As a neural network sees more of the world, its ensuing quirks and kinks confound and complicate the human experience of love.
Hebbian machinery reinforces these connections: If we show it a third and then a fourth similar item, the process repeats: these items, too, utilize many of the same neurons, and the links between them grow ever stronger.
In a neural network, new experiences blur the outlines of older ones. The reverse is also true: the neural past interferes with the present. Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see.
Einstein's relativity theory proved that a local concentration of mass warps space, angling the arrow flight of nearby objects, even bending the trajectory of light. The fabric of space, he said, is not a rigid plane like a billiard table or a bowling lane, impervious to the presence of the bodies traveling its surface. Instead, space is like a taut sheet of rubber indented by matter—dimpled lightly by the pea-size mass of a planet, a deep concavity stretching out from the enormous density of a sun.
Science has a way of supplanting myths with no less fantastic truths: transference exists because the brain remembers with neurons. Any system that undertakes Hebbian processing carries out the same distortion, whether the system is living or machine. Computer-based neural network programs are structures whose memory mechanism reduces experience into compact, occasionally fallacious expectancy. So, too, are we.
Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong course is not easy to slow. As a life lengthens, momentum gathers. A wistful aside from two neuroscience researchers: [In] scientific work, we find that new theories are understood only by the graduate students, whose intellectual identities are then wholly transformed. . . . In contrast, the senior professors are burdened with such connectional inertia that when they encounter new ideas there is no apparent effect, other than an occasional vague irritation.
In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.
Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Chapter 7

As Heracleitus wrote several thousand years ago, "We do and do not step into the same river. We are, and are not."
A child makes constant use of his limbic link to adjust his impressions. The drama plays out a dozen times each summer afternoon at a local park. A toddler lurches across the grass with a determination that his unsteadiness renders positively quixotic. Inevitably gravity catches up with inexperience; he teeters and falls. At once he checks a parent's face: if she shows alarm or concern he cries, and if she is amused he may smile at her, even laugh. He trusts her assessment of his tumble more than his, and he does so with good reason. He can feel his pain and fright and disappointment but cannot gauge them. If his tumble is big enough to be awful or small enough to be negligible, he may realize that. But at all levels in between, he holds his emotions open to an expert's interpretation. A limbically attuned mother can tell a fearsome fall from a harmless one. When a child senses his mother's fear, his anxiety rises or falls in harmony with hers. He looks to his mother as a piano tuner looks to the sound of pure C. After he compares what he feels with what his mother shows, a child's emotional read on the world moves closer to hers.
In Woody Allen's film Deconstructing Harry, an actor develops a sudden case of the blurs. At first his film crew thinks the lens is dirty, but they clean the camera and determine that the outline of the actor himself is smudged. "I don't know how to tell you this, but you . . . you're out of focus," a coworker tells the mortified player. "Mel—now, look—I want you to go home, and get some rest. See if you can just sharpen up," advises his director. At home, matters are not improved: "Daddy, you're all blurry!" says his dismayed child.
Allen's ability to concretize the abstractions of the human condition, rendering them simultaneously immediate and ludicrous, is central to his comedic gift. Fuzzy people exist, he tells us in this scene, people whose selves, not their bodies, are painfully indeterminate. Such a person enters psychotherapy because he does not know who he is. To people who do know, the predicament sounds improbable. But a person cannot know himself until another knows him. Omit skilled limbic resonance from the life of a child, and he will emerge with a psyche as indistinct as the blurry habitus of Allen's character
If a parent actively hates a child, if she affirmatively knows him in the punishing clarity of her fury—that child will fare better than one who languishes in the dim ether of emotional ignorance.
A relationship that strays from one's prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love's common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a "nice" relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect. Consider the young man described in the last chapter wrestling with the present-day reenactment of the long-ago love with his fiery, critical mother. As an adult, he faces a binary universe. If he connects with a woman, she turns out to be his mother's younger clone. But a supportive woman leaves him exasperatingly empty of feeling—no spark, no chemistry, no fireworks.
A newspaper column with advice for parents recently advocated letting older and younger children settle disputes without parental interference, so that they might learn what people do in the real world. The children in the unfortunate households where parents apply this pearl will unerringly distill the timeless lesson of the unsupervised boarding school or playground: justice is weak; might and intimidation triumph.
The young man with a fondness for faultfinding lovers is in even more trouble than he thinks. First, he must contend with the mental mechanism that leads him with uncanny precision to a woman who is herself critical. Second, his presence will magnify whatever minatory tendencies his current paramour may possess. Ditto for her: she has chosen her man because he matches an Attractor of hers, and she will enhance the matching virtues and vices.
Unfortunately, the brain's biology and its mathematics both oppose adult emotional learning. The plasticity of the brain—the readiness of neurons to sprout fresh connections and encode new knowledge—declines after adolescence. And later learning is energetically unfavorable within a neural network. New lessons must fight an uphill battle against the patterns already ingrained, because existing Attractors can easily overwhelm and absorb moderately novel configurations. The nature of neurovirtuality ensures that it trims the ambiguity from reality, and portrays largely what has already been seen. And so, left to his own devices, a child who knew and loved a deceitful, selfish, or jealous parent does not often learn to love differently at age twenty, forty, or sixty.

Chapter 8

"Where id was, there ego shall be" was Freud's battle cry, a magisterial encapsulation of the talking cure as prolonged explanation. Freud saw insight and intellect vanquishing the mind's dark undergrowth like conquistadors beating back jungle to build a city. Speech is a fancy neocortical skill, but therapy belongs to the older realm of the emotional mind, the limbic brain. Therapy should not seek to overrule the primeval forces predating civilization, because, like love, therapy is already one of them. People do come to therapy unable to love and leave with that skill restored. But love is not only an end for therapy; it is also the means whereby every end is reached. In this chapter we will examine how love's three neural faces—limbic resonance, regulation, and revision—constitute psychotherapy's core and the motive force behind the adult mind's capacity for growth.
Human physiology finds a hub not only in light, but also in the harmonizing activity of nearby limbic brains. Our neural architecture places relationships at the crux of our lives, where, blazing and warm, they have the power to stabilize. When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations: groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together, those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapists on the planet.
A therapist who fears dependence will tell his patient, sometimes openly, that the urge to rely is pathologic. In doing so he denigrates a cardinal tool. A parent who rejects a child's desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown to adulthood, are frequently among those who come for help. Shall we tell them again that no one can find an arm to lean on, that each alone must work to ease a private sorrow? Then we shall repeat an experiment already conducted; many know its result only too well. If patient and therapist are to proceed together down a curative path, they must allow limbic regulation and its companion moon, dependence, to make their revolutionary magic.
Many therapists believe that reliance fosters a detrimental dependency. Instead, they say, patients should be directed to "do it for themselves"—as if they possess everything but the wit to throw that switch and get on with their lives. But people do not learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator, and they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner does not experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates and becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one's shoes. The effortful beginnings fade and disappear from memory.
A psychiatrist's office should bear a placard analogous to the posted minimum height for roller coasters: YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS TRUSTING TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
A psychiatrist's training and education, his credentials, his years of practice, establish nothing absolutely. An authority can be wrong, and a novice correct (if by accident), on any issue. A seasoned professional, while more likely to be right on topics falling within his domain, can neither prove nor guarantee his rectitude where two virtualities meet. Psychiatry runs on the same elixir that fuels the rest of medicine: a fervent wish that somebody else knows better. People who trust a little can gamble and learn to trust more; people who have no faith from which to leap are out of luck. Mental health is a substance that attracts itself as readily as money or power: the more you have, the more you can get.
If any agency can build or destroy the bridges between neurons, strengthen or weaken them, then neural knowledge can change. But the brain has multiple learning systems, and all information does not change in the same way. Seven plus three equals ten, wrote Augustine, not now but always. "In no circumstances have seven and three ever made anything else than ten, and they never will. So I maintain that the unchanging science of number is common to me and to every reasoning being." Suppose Augustine spun in his grave, and the rules of mathematics underwent a convulsive shift that sent seven plus three hurtling all the way to eleven. Anybody could read this update in the morning newspaper and modify additions immediately. The neocortical brain collects facts quickly. The limbic brain does not. Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another person's Attractors reaching through the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another.
A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patient— it can't be done. If a patient's emotional mind would support good relationships, he or she would be out having them. Instead a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into whatever relationship the patient has in mind—even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in him. He has no alternative
Patients are often hungry for explanations, because they are used to thinking that neocortical contraptions like explication will help them. But insight is the popcorn of therapy. Where patient and therapist go together, the irreducible totality of their mutual journey, is the movie.
When therapy modifies how someone lives a relationship, it corrects whom he may join in love. Decision cannot effect such an alteration. Knowing that a recurrent partner haunts you doesn't adjust a heart's direction. Many people suppose that therapy gives people a clear picture of a tormenting amour so they can spot and thereby avoid future deadly incarnations. Not so. You can't tell someone with faulty Attractors to go out and find a loving partner—from his point of view, there are none. Those who could love him well are invisible. Even if the clouds parted and a perfectly compassionate and understanding lover descended from heaven on a sunbeam to land at his feet, his mind would still be tuned to another sort of relationship; he still wouldn't know what to do. A wise therapist, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot, would advise him to wait without hope, because his hope would be hope for the wrong thing, and to wait without love, because his love would be love of the wrong thing.
How do some illnesses disappear, while others arise de novo with a flourish of psychopathological vitalism? Popular prejudices alternately obscure and exaggerate the prevalence of emotional ailments. But those seeking treatment have enough to worry about without being saddled with predetermined pathology. To perceive another person with the least error that virtuality will permit, a therapist must retain above all his childlike capacity for wonder, his readiness to discover something wholly astonishing under this leaf, behind this tree, or in this mind. Those who have lost this quality will find patients like Reader's Digest condensed books—where, by purging the particular, the stories are strangely identical.
Freud's enviable advantage is that he never seriously undertook to follow his own advice. Many promising young therapists have their responsiveness expunged, as they are taught to be dutifully neutral observers, avoiding emotional contact more fastidiously than a surgeon shrinks from touching an open incision with his un-sterilized hand. The result is lethal. If psychotherapy were just lengthy discourse, blankness would be merely a bore.
Psychotherapy is as specific as any attachment. When Lorenz imprinted goslings, they followed him but not other Austrian ethologists. A golden retriever outside a grocery store has only his owner in mind. And a patient attaches to the therapist he has. The unsettling corollary: a therapy's results are particular to that relationship. A patient doesn't become generically healthier; he becomes more like the therapist. New-sprung styles of relatedness, burgeoning knowledge of relationships and how to conduct them, unthinking moves in the ballet of loving—all shift closer to those in the mind of the healer a patient has chosen.
Denying access to services, whether they are effective or not, is now the raison d'être of the insurance industry. Pesky legal entanglements, however, impede those carriers from a straightforward stiff-armed rebuff—patients must be discouraged, diverted, connived by gentler means. And thus insurers have taken up extolling the virtues of the shrinking morsels they are willing to provide. "Who needs psychoanalysis for eight years if you can get your needs met in 20 sessions?" trumpeted Michael Freeman, president of the Institute for Behavioral Health Care, in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article.
The brevity of minitherapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly masters didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. But while most can omit Ravel and Dante from their lives without sacrificing happiness, the same cannot be said of emotional and relational knowledge. Their acquisition requires an investment of time at which our culture balks.
Despite the insignificance of complicated canons and calculated technique, all therapies are not created equal. Some are compatible with the human heart and work within its architecture to maximize health. Others, including the short and sputtering treatments now prevalent, flout limbic laws and thwart potential. That waste is painful to witness, because the limbic connectedness of a working psychotherapy requires uncommon courage. A patient asks to surrender the life he knows and to enter an emotional world he has never seen; he offers himself up to be changed in ways he can't possibly envision. As his assurance of successful transmutation he has only the gossamer of faith. At the journey's end, he will no longer be who he was, and his guide is someone he has every reason to mistrust. What Richard Selzer, M.D., once wrote of surgery is as true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.

Chapter 9

Ferber relies on Freud's questionable habit of attributing to infants and toddlers an adult awareness of swirling sexual motives. Young children, Ferber declares, find parental sleeping accommodations "overly stimulating." He goes on to intone: "If you allow him to crawl in between you and your spouse, in a sense separating the two of you, he may feel too powerful and become worried. . . . He may begin to worry that he will cause the two of you to separate, and if you ever do he may feel responsible." The mistake here is "adultomorphism"—presuming that children are grown-ups viewed through the wrong end of a telescope: tiny, mute, fully outfitted with mature sensibilities and concerns. If a baby thought like a twenty-year-old, then perhaps he would suffer the ailments that, for Ferber, incontrovertibly follow a night in bed with his folks: confusion, anxiety, resentment, guilt.
On the other side of the aisle are evolutionary psychologists and cross-cultural sociologists, who point out that the American habit of sleeping separately is a global and historical singularity. Almost all the world's parents sleep with their children, and until the last sliver of human history, separate sleep was surpassingly rare. The burden of proof thus falls upon our culture to justify its anomalous nighttime practices. Robert Wright, a prominent proponent of evolutionary psychology and a champion of common sense, refutes Ferber:
The family bed debate dances around an American conundrum: we cherish individual freedoms more than any society, but we do not respect the process whereby autonomy develops. Too often, Americans think that self-rule can be foisted on someone in the way a traveler thrusts a bag at a bellhop: compel children to do it alone, and they'll learn how; do it with them and spawn a tentacled monster that knows only how to cling. In truth, premature pressure stunts the genuine, organic capacity for self-directedness that children carry within them. Independence emerges naturally not from frustrating and discouraging dependence, but from satiating dependence. Children rely heavily on parents, to be sure. And when they are done depending, they move on—to their own beds, houses, and lives.
A dog possesses no instinct to stay off the couch; if you wish him to abandon the comfort of plush pillows, you have to train him. A rat has no intrinsic desire to run a maze, but the right combination of lures and punishments can make him do so. Children need no forcing or foot shocks or food pellets to instill independence. "The one thing in the world of value," Emerson observed, "is the active soul—the soul free, sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn."That second effusion of life is the work of childhood; love and security are the patient midwives whose ministrations bring forth a new soul.
These questions revolve around an inconvenient center of gravity: the specificity of a child's limbic needs. If he wants only respite from boredom, any colorful distraction suffices; if he requires just the reassurance of a protective presence, any adult will do. But decades of attachment research endorse the conclusion that children form elaborate, individualized relationships with special, irreplaceable others. Investigations into the biology of that bond suggest that its preciousness emerges from neural synchrony between child and parent, and that adult neural patterns will impress themselves on a malleable brain. If so, then some of the situations in which our children currently dwell will not produce the same result as the luxuriously prolonged immersion within a small circle of devoted caretakers.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: the difference between a caretaker who tunes in to a child and one who almost tunes in is as great as the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Government is the machine that transforms cultural attitudes into policies. "What a society honors," wrote Aristotle, "will be cultivated."We need only glance at our social programs to catch the direction of prevailing winds. On one side, conservatives dismantle welfare so that single mothers must set children aside and return to work—not the labor of raising children, but the real work our culture values and upholds. On the other hand, liberals champion child care initiatives calling for an expansion in institutionalized surrogate care. Caught in the middle, American parenthood is beleaguered, belittled, and besieged.
Relationships, including romantic ones, are fantastic concatenations of limbic energies. Humanity has had eons to become familiar with these ancient forces, but today it seems we apprehend their essence less than ever. Loving relationships plainly perplex our limbically incognizant culture. Bookstores bulge with so many how-to relationship primers that it seems nobody knows how. That ignorance extracts a painful pound of flesh. "Fathers and teachers," wrote Dostoyevsky, "I ponder the question, 'What is Hell?' I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love." Too many of our citizens spend their lives in that purgatory, searching vainly for a redemption that eludes them. What don't they know? What doesn't our culture teach them?
The unequivocal limbic no takes our culture by surprise. The modern American is genuinely puzzled when affiliations evaporate from inattention. Every new second of togetherness reestablishes the terms of a relationship. But cultural mythology imbues social ties with the clumsy durability of things—once attained, always attainable; once established, easy to get back to weeks, months, years later. The truth is only slightly less dire than the words of playwright Jean Giraudoux: "If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows—it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes too late."
In love twists together three high-tensile strands: a potent feeling that the other fits in a way that no one has before or will again, an irresistible desire for skin-to-skin proximity, and a delirious urge to disregard all else. In the service of that prismatic blindfold, in love rewrites reality as no other mental event can. "Whoso loves," wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "believes the impossible."
Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved's soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul.
Because relationships are mutual, partners share a single fate: no action benefits one and harms the other. The hard bargainer, who thinks he can win by convincing his partner to meet his needs while circumventing hers, is doomed. Withholding reciprocation cripples a healthy partner's ability to nourish him; it poisons the well from which she draws the sustenance she means to give. A couple shares in one process, one dance, one story. Whatever improves that one benefits both; whatever detracts hurts and weakens both lives.
America's antidrug czars have encouraged us to believe that addiction exists because street drugs fasten on to the average mind like the giant kraken of seafaring legend: one tangential brush with this vile sucking beast and a healthy kid's mind disappears into the black depths forever. The evidence refutes this notion. Contemporary chemists (some in basements and barns) have concocted potent pharmacological snares and have enhanced the power of native ones. But examine the figures for cocaine, thought to be the most powerfully addictive substance known. Of all humans who try cocaine, less than 1 percent become regular users—the other 99 walk away. As Malcolm Gladwell has argued, this staggering imbalance points to a problem not in the juices of coca leaves, but inside the brains of the tiny fraction who find its effect on their emotions irresistible. America expends billions to protect our borders against the influx of small packets of limbic anesthesia. Those sums might be better spent ensuring that our children harbor brains minimally responsive to such agents.
Debates on solving America's drug epidemic typically alternate between conservatives demanding longer prison sentences and liberals calling for more treatment programs. Both sides are reluctant to admit that neither approach has come anywhere near to ridding this country of our gargantuan problem. Consigning users to a penal system that combines a plentiful supply of drugs and the incentive to use them is not a convincing prescription for amelioration. Treating addiction has proved substantially more effective, when legislators are in a mood to fund it—and, since addicts lack lobbyists, that is not very often.
An addict's bulwark against relapse involves more communion than cogitation, as Alcoholics Anonymous and its multiple variants demonstrate. Gathering like people together to share their stories imbues a wordless strength, what Robert Frost called in another context "a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but a momentary stay against confusion." The limbic regulation in a group can restore balance to its members, allowing them to feel centered and whole. But even the solidity of the omnipresent clan is no panacea. Too often users return to the ephemeral reprieve that drugs offer.
Natural limbic inclinations include loyalty, concern, and affection. "When you love," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." Within their designed environment—a family—these impulses make fertile ground wherein healthy relatedness takes root and grows. The workplace bears strong resemblance to the home—indeed, for most of humanity's history, the work environment was the home. In both settings, one encounters amiable companions, authoritative overseers, shared travails.
Corporate malfeasance shocks many, but corporations operate outside attachment as surely as armies do. Misdeeds—even savagery—are inevitable. When the tobacco industry delivers death more efficiently than any war machine in history, it does so to our own people—because our own is a limbic, not a corporate, precept. When the Johns Manville Corporation covered up the lethal effects of asbestos, the company sent to their unknowing deaths not strangers, but hundreds of their employees. Any reptile would have done the same. Assuming mutuality where none exists is a mammal's grave and occasionally fatal error. In the Manville litigation, Charles H. Roemer, former chairman of the Paterson Industrial Commission, recounted a luncheon meeting he had with Manville's president, Lewis Brown, and his brother Vandiver Brown, Manville's corporate attorney. The latter ridiculed other asbestos manufacturers for their foolishness in notifying workers about the terminal illness they had contracted on company time. Mr. Roemer's testimony: "I said, 'Mr. Brown, do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they dropped dead?' He said, 'Yes. We save a lot of money that way.' "
America produces remorseless killers in bulk. One hundred years ago, Jack the Ripper riveted the attention of the Western world by doing away with five people. This culture would barely notice such modest exploits—so many have surpassed the quaintly amateurish Ripper that we cannot remember their names, much less their crimes. Squadrons of soulless assassins do not germinate by chance. These avenging Phoenixes arise from the neural wreckage of what once could have been a healthy human being.
What doctors once knew, but cast aside for an extended gadgetry fling, is that patients come looking for both healer and expert. Illness arouses the ancient attachment machinery; it awakens a limbic need. When they go to the doctor, patients hope for the illuminating test, the correct diagnosis, the appropriate remedy. They also want someone who connects with them in spite of their suffering; they wish for a warm hand on their shoulder and the security of speaking with one who has been through this before. A dying patient described it this way: I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time. I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once, be bonded with me for a brief space, survey my soul as well as my flesh to get at my illness. . . . I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. Without such recognition, I am nothing but my illness.
Medicine's movement away from limbic considerations abruptly accelerated in the 1990s, as solo practitioners and fee-for-service physicians congealed into the large corporate mass known as managed care. The emotional revamping was drastic: medicine was once mammalian and is now reptilian.
The administrative framework of medicine formerly permitted at least the possibility of human relationships between the participants, even if technology tended to get in the way. But the corporate takeover of the doctor-patient relationship fatally compromised medicine's ailing emotional core. A corporation has customers, not patients; it has fiscal relationships, not limbic ones. Like crocodiles incapable of an aversion to cannibalism, HMOs prosper whether or not customers are consumed in the process. Individual doctors can care about patients, but all too often they do not have authority to implement the decisions that could protect those patients from harm. In today's market, ER meets Jurassic Park. "Caveat emptor" has given way to "Horrescat emptor"—let the buyer be scared.
As patients have learned the hard way, HMOs and managed care outfits profit by spending less than subscribers pay in. They pursue this end with efficiency and ruthlessness. Doctors are bribed and bullied into not treating patients, while service rationers sequester themselves behind a thicket of bureaucracy so dense that it thwarts all but the most tenacious self-advocates. Many physicians are reluctant to air their discussions, but in private they are bursting with tales of corporate abuse. If you think that patients are not falling ill from preventable diseases, losing organs and limbs to deliberate delay, and dying from systematic inattention, then think again.
A Kentucky physician at a managed care organization confessed to causing a patient's death by denying him the operation he needed to live. She had feared for her job if she approved the procedure; after she made the correct corporate decision, she was promoted for administrative thrift. "The distance made it easier," she said, "like bomber pilots in war who never see the faces of their victims." The New York State Health Commissioner discovered a short while ago that an HMO was using its data on cardiac surgery death rates to improve the selective routing of patients to New York hospitals. Did the insurer send its patients to the most dependable institutions? Of course not. Instead, administrators used the statistics to bargain for basement-rate prices from the most lethal centers. Then, coaxing along cherished dividends, they diverted patients to the cheapest facilities available, where those customers were likeliest to suffer and die.

Chapter 0

Our culture teems with experts who propose to tell us how to think our way to a better future, as if that could be done. They capitalize on the ease of credibly presuming, without a pause or backward glance, that intellect is running the show. Not so. Reason's last step, wrote Blaise Pascal, is recognizing that an infinity of things surpass it. As a new millennium commences, science is beginning to approach that pinnacle of perspicacity.

ack

While I knew little about psychiatry and less about people, I was able to recognize that the seminars Dr. Amini and Dr. Lannon led were remarkable—a psychoanalyst and a biological psychiatrist teaming up, with amity and respect, to discuss psychotherapy, development, mood disorders, and love. Readers unfamiliar with the divisive quality of academic psychiatry may not appreciate the rarity of such a pairing—comparable, say, to finding a Montague and a Capulet taking turns quaffing beer out of a single stein in the local pub.

nts

See, for instance, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, 1997. Pinker, evolutionary psychology's most articulate advocate, on friendship: "Once you have made yourself valuable to someone, the person becomes valuable to you. You value him or her because if you were ever in trouble, they would have a stake— albeit a selfish stake—in getting you out. . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship"
"Science does not describe and explain nature": Heisenberg, 1999, p. 81.
"We say, 'I will,' and 'I will not,' and imagine ourselves": Wolfe, 1994,
Bowlby's therapist stands up and denounces him: Karen, 1994. (Karen's book—Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love—is one of the very few books that we routinely recommend to people wishing to understand more about how relationships function. It has informed the material in this chapter and is well worth reading.)