THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE
A human being has met another human being of the opposite sex and
is attracted to him or her by the conscious or unconscious memories
which his or her physical and mental make up brings back. An organic
compulsion drives a man to seek a certain woman who is to be his sexual
mate. We say then that the man is in love. What is the tangible,
observable, measurable meaning of the condition of being in love?
To understand this clearly we must bear in mind the principle which
modern psychology is gradually adopting, that of the unity of the
organism.
=The Organism is a Unit= which cannot, except for reasons of pure
convenience, be split into entities of a contrasted character, such
as body and mind, matter and soul, etc. To every physical phenomenon
corresponds a simultaneous mental manifestation and vice versa. The
body is the tangible aspect, the mind, the intangible aspect of the
organism.
Nor can any scientific distinction be drawn between the so-called
grossness of the body and the spiritual quality of the mind.
Nor can we establish in the body absolute lines of cleavage between
the various organs, heart, stomach, liver or sexual organs. They are
all closely interrelated and there again we find a profound unity of
action. When the nerves of the "life division" of the autonomic nervous
system are set working, the pupil will be contracted, the saliva flow,
the heart beat more slowly, the stomach secrete gastric juice and churn
food, the intestines push digested food toward the rectum, and the
sexual organs fill up with blood.
When the "safety nerves" are in action the pupil is dilated, the saliva
scarce, the heart beats faster, gastric activities cease or become
reversed (vomiting), the intestines either stop their activity or are
affected by diarrhea and the sexual organs are emptied of blood. Any
stimulation applied to any of those organs will produce the specific
stimulation indicated above in ALL THE OTHER ORGANS, tho in
varying degrees.
In other words perfect peace and safety promote all the activities
of the "life nerves," danger and fear promote all the activities of
the "safety nerves." Peace and safety build up the body and assure
the continuance of the race. Danger and fear stop all the activities
which are not directly concerned with fight or flight, hence weaken the
organism and stop the sex life.
Peace and safety represented by the mental and physical fetishes of the
mate toward whom we are driven by an organic compulsion are bound to
produce in us most gratifying results.
The sight, smell and taste of good food, the sight of pleasant objects,
the sound of good music, etc., produce a powerful stimulation.
=Love's Stimulation=, reaching us, as we shall see in another chapter,
thru all the senses and thru a thousand memories, is incomparably more
powerful than that of any other craving.
Nutritious food in sufficient quantities is generally synonymous with
good health. Improper food in insufficient quantities is generally
synonymous with bad health.
The mental connotation of good and bad food, however, is far from being
as important as the mental connotation of love or lack of love. There
are besides the sexual factors, such tremendous egotistical factors in
the love life (as will be shown in Chapter VIII,) that love is the
most powerful stimulus known and the lack of love or the loss of love
the most terrible depressant for the human organism.
=The Successful Lover= has a good appetite, regular heart action,
(hence a healthy complexion); he enjoys sleep undisturbed by
nightmares, is capable of continued effort (good thyroid action), has
firm muscles (regular adrenal section), is self-reliant, etc. In other
words his organism is working on a hundred-per-cent basis and under the
influence of that stimulation he can accomplish tasks which, under any
other circumstances, would appear too difficult, and understand things
which under the influence of a sluggish thyroid or bowels would have
appeared very obscure.
People indifferent to physiology might attribute some of love's magic
results to "inspiration," to "spiritual uplift" and other vaguely
conceived factors of a romantic and sentimental nature.
I am always reminded when encountering such explanations in the
literature of love, of the nuptial flight of the bee.
When a male and female bee fall in love, they both fly to a dizzy
height in the direction of the sun and there perform the sexual union.
To an unscientific mind of the Maeterlinckian type, there might be in
that picture a beautiful symbol of love's exaltation.
The cold blooded scientist, on the other hand, will simply tell us that
erotic excitement in the bee produces a large amount of irritating
phototropic materials which compel the bees to fly toward the source of
light.
At the end of the sexual act, the production of phototropic materials
ceases and the bees come back to earth .... like lovers tired of each
other.
In love the conqueror feels like a conqueror and is a hard adversary
to defeat. Like the amorous bees which can reach, physically speaking,
heights which they would never dream of exploring when out of love, the
successful lover can rise to infinite heights physically and mentally.
=The Unsuccessful Lover=, on the other hand, may be, in extreme cases,
a pitiful individual to contemplate.
The humiliation of defeat and the fear of other defeats, the starvation
of all the senses which the love object would have gratified, produce a
depression which stops temporarily all the life activities.
Appetite is lacking and there may be nausea and vomiting; diarrhea or
constipation replace the normal activities of the intestine, thereby
inducing weakness or autointoxication which, through a vicious circle,
still increase the depression. The heart action is disturbed, which
increases the uneasiness of the sufferer, his breathing is difficult,
causing much sighing, the surface capillaries are emptied of blood,
producing a morbid pallor, etc.
A person in that condition is incapable of continued effort in any
direction. The stoppage of all the life functions induces a sense of
worthlessness. The fear of defeat not infrequently drives the sufferer
to suicide, which is a symbolic attempt at returning to the safest
condition in which the organism ever found itself: death, the return to
uterine life, to _mother_ earth, etc.
It may, if the adrenal cortex, productive of anger and violence
chemicals, has been sufficiently stimulated by suffering, provoke
attempts at vengeance, cause hatred, murderous cravings, which, if
indulged in, land the patient in jail, if repressed with difficulty,
land him in a sanitarium.
=Calf Love.= Those things should be borne in mind by parents
attempting, for instance, to break up some absurd infatuation which is
the more overwhelming as the unexperienced lover is not restrained by
the many social or financial considerations which hover in the mind of
a more sophisticated person in the throes of "erotropism."
Those complications are to be borne in mind too by the psychoanalyst
who must not mistake symptoms of physical deterioration due to
unsatisfied love cravings with gastric or intestinal derangement due
to toxic agents, and who must bend all his energies to separate what
is "purely" sexual, from all the parasitic cravings of an egotistical
nature which make the patient's sufferings more acute.