Many here have experienced the strict and ludicrous code of "how to love" by the JW's and the WTBTS. Many of us have forgotten that love existed in the world today way before the WTBTS was even heard of.....below I have posted a little on the History of the Psychology of Love in the hopes that some may read it and remember that this emotion is not exclusive nor elusive for any humans to experience.
There was a life before JW's for some. There is a life post-Jw for all!
Love Conceptions: Historical Background
In "Contributions to the psychology of love," Freud (1910) described the field of love as, up until then, having "left it to the creative writer to depict for us the 'necessary conditions for loving'... In consequence it becomes inevitable that science should concern herself with the same materials whose treatment by artists has given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years." Indeed, my own investigation on love was partially inspired by the spellbinding love literature reviewed by Bergmann (1987) and Singer (1984, 1987). Base on them, I have summarized the following types of love conceptions in ancient mythology and philosophy. This focus is also on the influence of these historical views on modern day love conceptualization.
1. Love as bittersweet
Love has often been characterized as an ambivalent feeling--a blissful joy when one is with the beloved, a painful "sickness" and "torture" when lovers are separated. Often, the lover also feels "possessed" or "trapped." These contradictory feelings are frequently seen in ancient poems, such as by Greek poetess Sappho (circa 630 BC): "Love the looser of limbs shakes me a creature bittersweet, inescapable," and "Mother darling I cannot work the loom for sweet Aphrodite has almost crushed me, broken me with love for the slender boy".
This early insight that love has positive and negative qualities, that it is bittersweet, will help us understand modern day cross-cultural differences in views of love.
2. Love as a god/goddess
In line with the metaphors that lovers were "trapped" or "possessed" by love involuntarily was the thinking that love is a powerful, external force--a god or goddess. Aphrodite and Eros were two love gods created by the ancient Greeks. They, like other gods, had the power to make people have experiences beyond their own control. For example, in Greek myth, Aphrodite forced Helen to abandon home, husband, and daughter for the passion the goddess had induced in her for her abductor, Paris. The other god of love, Eros, whose Latin name is Cupid, as we all know, was conceived as striking his victims with an arrow. The victims were then madly in love without knowing the reason. Being struck or seized by unshakable passion is still part of the popular conception of love today.
3. Love as the need for reunion of the split halves of a single creature
Plato's Symposium, the first known work written specifically to explore the nature of love, caused fundamental changes in the Western way of thinking about love. One of the important themes of the Symposium is that love is based on a person's need to be completed by someone else. Each primeval human was composed of two parts--two males, two females, or a male and a female--and they were powerful creatures. Their power threatened the gods, so the gods had them cut in two. This was proposed to be the origin of homosexual men, lesbian women, and heterosexual men and women, all of whom long to find and reunite with their other half. Only when the two halves become one again, each one returning to his primeval nature, to his original true love, then our race would be happy.
Ana
To love from your soul is truly a gift beyond all measure.
"He to whom emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
A.Eienstein.