by JUDITH SHULEVITZ
ILLUSTRATION/Andy Martin
The early science of love looks a little shocking in retrospect. Experiments meant to demonstrate that mammals attach themselves to mothers because they need love, not just food, all too often required outright torture. Researchers snatched baby creatures away from mother creatures and put them in cages to prove that life without love was a sad, diminished thing. The science of sexual attraction made use of more benign methods, but until more women entered the field and started asking different questions, the experiments tended to produce stunning affirmations of Western patriarchal stereotypes. Whatever the results, however, this work did make scientists appreciate the central importance of love for life. Love or the lack of it turned out to affect not just psyches but also bodies; not just brains and genitals but also hormones and the expression of genes; not just the well-being of individuals but also the flourishing of societies.
Today, biology is said to be powered by love. A rat will grow up fat and sassy if well-licked by its mother, nervous and underdeveloped if licked poorly or not at all. Culture is sometimes seen as an artifact of love, too, or at least of what Darwin called sexual selection. Sporting matches or music competitions, among other costly and apparently useless displays, have been reinterpreted as the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail, ways of signaling genetic excellence.
In “All About Love,” Lisa Appignanesi, who has written extensively on the history of psychoanalysis, turns her back on the ever-growing scientific literature on love, largely out of disgust with the way sociobiological theories get used to defend a conservative social order: “I’ll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it’s used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting,” she writes. What she wants to know is how we humans experience love individually, psychically — love being neither purely bodily nor purely mental but irreducibly both. In the words of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it’s the “imaginative elaboration of physical functions.”
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