A Psychoanalysis of Love: The Patient with Deadly Longing

Freud made some seriously mistaken assumptions about mature love based on his notion about the role unconscious guilt plays in human affairs. Clinical data are presented here about a young man, who implicated in the suicides of two of his colleagues, was more concerned with the failure of his love affair in college than with guilt for his involvement in the suicides. By tracing the functions of shame—a concept the author contends that Freud failed to understand properly—in the patient’s relationship with his parents, the author formulates a proactive and optimistic theory of mature love to replace Freud’s pessimistic and reductionistic explanation.