Love Sick
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Here, leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Tallis, explores our age-old preoccupation with love and in particular romantic love. Love is rarely described as a wholly pleasant experience and Tallis considers our experiences and descriptions of love and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterise what we mean when we speak about falling in love. Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses (irresistible urges to phone or text), superstitious or ritualistic compulsions (she loves me, she loves me not), inability to concentrate - so much so that it affects your work, delusion, (are his eyes really deep pools of oceanic azure?). Exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode, according to the recognized medical criteria. Drawing on the writings of poets, philosophers, songwriters, zoologists and scientists Tallis shows how throughout time - and particularly in the West, the metaphor of illness and specifically mental illness has been used to describe the state of being in love. And asks why it is that we continue to search out this kind of love, with the ecstasy seeming to blind us to the agony.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idea that romantic passion is a mental illness may not be the most welcome message for Valentine's Day, but Tallis, a British clinical psychologist, acknowledges that it's a condition for which we may never want a cure. Tallis includes a good deal of research testifying to the obsessive nature and destructive power of romance. He begins by tracing the medical diagnosis of love based on physical symptoms to the Greek physician Galen. Leaning heavily on Darwin, Tallis considers the role of love in perpetuating the species: for instance, he notes, hidden ovulation in women (rather than the loudly advertised ovulation of chimpanzees, whose rear ends turn bright red) may secure a man's fidelity, since he doesn't know when she is most fertile. Based on the results of a survey conducted by a marketing consultant, the author surmises that men fall in love more often than women and experience the emotion more intensely. He also cites a study showing a low divorce rate in Asian cultures with arranged marriages as proof that these marriages are more satisfactory than Western marriages. Lauding rationality in the choice of a mate, he makes questionable comparisons between the role of dating services in the West and arranged marriages in the East. He ends this lively but not always convincing study with the unromantic conclusion that amity and mutual understanding must balance passion for love to last.
