Sunday, April 25, 2010

Irrational Love as a Psychological Disorder

In my first post I introduced the idea of irrational love. Like other emotions, love can be rational or irrational. Love is assessable for rationality. One of my views of love is that irrational love is unhealthy. It is a mental disorder.

Though unhealthy irrational love is not included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it satisfies the criterion for being a disorder.

The obsessive phases of roller coaster relationships and intense love affairs tend to be irrational. In fact, their chemical profile resembles the chemical profiles of generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Science tells us that the excitement of sexual and romantic love are due in part to increased levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine and low levels of serotonin.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that motivates us to continue to perform certain activities by causing a feeling of profound enjoyment in response to those activities. For example, dopamine helps to motivate us to continue to have sex by causing feelings of extreme pleasure in response to the activity.

It is commonly thought that people who are severely addicted to nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine have altered dopamine pathways that make the pleasure from the drug significantly stronger for them compared to non-addictive personality types.

Serotonin in the stomach regulates intestinal movements. In the brain it regulates mood, appetite, sleep, muscle contraction, memory and learning. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors inhibit serotonin from being absorbed by the body.

Inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin increases the serotonin levels in the brain. This has been found to enhance mood and decrease anxiety. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have been used successfully for many years in the treatment of depression, generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia.

Love can be as addictive as cocaine and speed. A particularly severe form of love obsession is obsessive love disorder. When parents are unable to satisfy a child's emotional needs, he will continue to long for the parent's emotional attention. Consequently he will tend to become attracted to and fixated on unavailable and emotionally inaccessible partners because they are implicitly seen as the parent whose love the sufferer is longing for.

6 comments:

  1. Hi, this is Vince,
    You are a romantic! But rational love?
    What is rational about desire and attachment? I think you mean that love can be expressed rationally or some such.
    If you take a Darwinian stance on love, it is all about procreation: finding a mate who will
    reliably help support the home and you and the baby.
    And I must agree with Darwin. One can argue that without the obsession of romantic love the
    contempt that comes with familiarity would preclude procreation, especially given
    how difficult it is to raise a child.
    And that is why parents bond and love their children so much: only love could overcome the
    disdain for dirty diapers, tantrums, no free time, the expense, the hassle---of children.
    Strong desire and attachment is necessary to do it all.
    You see someone and you want to be with them
    and couple with them ---is that rational? Only from the point of view of survival and procreation could it be rational, I think.
    We are after all, creatures of flesh and
    our basic drives are built in-- eating, sleeping procreation, breathing etc.
    You start a relationship with this person and attachment builds---why? Procreation. I just can't explain it any other way.
    Without procreation there is no way to explain
    why men and women do not just stay friends without all the physical intimacy and possessiveness and plans for the future family etc.
    Think how strong this drive is---why a good chunk of the GNP is supplied by beauty products alone. The drive is central to any individual's life and one is forced to make peace with it one way or another.
    After the kids are born, what? 50% of marriages end in divorce. Another portion are marriages that survive "for the children" or whose net margin of happiness is slim. There are
    substantially happy marriages, I have seen many
    ---but I have seen more divorce.
    So, rational? As a philosopher it makes sense that you would favor the less wild elements of
    desire and attachment and love--the family values, if you will, but to call it rational is a stretch, unless from the perspective of Darwinian evolution. On second thought, if nature is so rational, why do half of all marriages end in divorce ----often before the children are grown?
    I see this blog on love--which I find very entertaining---as your attempt to come to terms,
    to make your peace with this overwhelming drive. And I agree it is so strange to be saddled with such a drive---a basic desire so remote from the rational realm of philosophy.
    Your desire to write generally seems to me
    an indication that there are emotional needs and ambitions for expression not fulfilled by philosophy and I understand that.
    Just as I understood why Bruce Vermazin( right spelling?) a philosopher at Berkeley, wrote a book about the popularizers of the saxophone---the world is wider than philosophy( Feyerabend is a good one for that perspective).
    And the drive for love and family is
    one of those wider and fundamental concerns.
    I don't know what your relationship status is now but if you are concerned about it, this is normal, I think. It is wired in, yes?
    So, I welcome this blog, for I too am amazed at the strength and persistence of this drive.
    I hope you will continue to explore its permutations in print.
    Let me end with this: you are an attractive woman and obviously talented and brilliant and surely there are many smart men who would value such a partner long term. Not a philosophical comment-- but it speaks to a fundament of life.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, this is Vincent,
    You are a romantic! But rational love?
    What is rational about desire and attachment? I think you mean that love can be expressed rationally or some such.
    If you take a Darwinian stance on love--it is all about procreation: finding a mate who will
    reliably help support the home and you and the baby.
    And I must agree with Darwin. One can argue that without the obsession of romantic love the
    contempt that comes with familiarity would preclude procreation, especially given
    how difficult it is to raise a child.
    And that is why parents bond and love their children so much: only love could overcome the
    disdain for dirty diapers, tantrums, no free time, the expense, the hassle---of children.
    Strong desire and attachment is necessary to do it all.
    You see someone and you want to be with them
    and couple with them ---is that rational? Only from the point of view of survival and procreation could it be rational, I think.
    We are after all, creatures of flesh and
    our basic drives are built in. Eating, sleeping
    procreation, breathing etc.
    You start a relationship with this person and attachment builds---why? Procreation. I just can't explain it any other way.
    Without procreation there is no way to explain
    why men and women do not just stay friends without all the physical intimacy and possessiveness and plans for the future family etc.
    Think how strong this drive is---why a good chunk of the GNP is supplied by beauty products and other mating related items alone. The drive is central to any individual's life and one is forced to make peace with it one way or another.
    After the kids are born, what? 50% of marriages end in divorce. Another portion are marriages that survive "for the children" or whose net margin of happiness is slim. There substantially happy marriages, I have seen many
    ---but I have seen more divorce.
    So, rational? As a philosopher it makes sense that you would favor the less wild elements of
    desire and attachment and love--the family values, if you will, but to call it rational is a stretch, unless from the perspective of Darwinian evolution. On second thought, if nature is so rational, why do half of all marriages end in divorce ----often before the children are grown?
    I see this blog on love--which I find very entertaining---as your attempt to come to terms,
    to make your peace with this overwhelming drive
    And I agree it is so strange to be saddled with such a drive---a basic desire so remote from the rational realm of philosophy.
    Your desire to write generally seems to me
    an indication of emotional needs and ambitions for expression not fulfilled by philosophy and I understand that, just as I understood why Bruce Vermazin( right spelling?) a philosopher at Berkeley, wrote a book about the popularizers of the saxophone---the world is wider than philosophy( Feyerabend is a good one for that perspective).
    And the drive for love and family is
    one of those wider and fundamental concerns.
    I don't know what your relationship status is now but if you are concerned about it, this is normal, I think. It is wired in, yes?
    So, I welcome this blog, for I too am amazed at the strength and persistence of this drive.
    I hope you will continue to explore its permutations in print.
    Let me end with this: you are an attractive woman and obviously talented and brilliant and surely there are many smart men who would value such a partner long term. Not a philosophical comment but it speaks to a fundament of life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for your comments Vince! I consider love a mental state that can be considered rational or irrational. In this respect, it's like fear. Fear of flying is irrational. Fear of Ted Bundy following you with his arm in a sling is rational.

    Fear is an emotional state. Love too is an emotional state. So, it's possible that some states of love are rational and some irrational. Perhaps most states of love are irrational. But some more mature forms of love are rational states.

    I don't think love is a kind of desire. Desire and love have different mind-world directions of fit. If you desire to be with a person, you want the world to match the content of your desire. If you love a person, your mind bestows certain attributes on that person.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Brit, Vince here,
    Thanks for your reply----
    Look,
    As with most distinctions (especially when analyzed philosophically) there is great ambiguity between emotion and reason or rationality and between desire and love, between like and love.
    If you want to posit a reasonable, rational love--fine.
    I presumed, however, that your blog was not about old couple's mellow friendship-like affection, the married couple's workaday fondness, Platonic Love or sibling or parental closeness or loving your pet schnauzer. Anthony and Cleopatra and Abelard and Heloise and the rest of your examples don't support it; you are talking about romantic love--you are talking about deep romantic attachment to another---which is a kind of obsession.
    Considerations of fortune, economy, ambition,
    desire, personal satisfaction and so on may abet or hinder the attachment but the attachment is the essence of it, though usually the lover also cares deeply about the well being of the beloved---but so do her parents, sans romance.
    And there is no reasonable process--no ratiocination, no consideration of alternatives and consequences,(or however you define reason)-- unless you want to obliterate the distinction between reason and emotion--- that can be equated with that kind of intense attachment to another person--with its powerfully focused maelstrom of feelings: jealousy, possessiveness, hope, desire and so on.
    Bottom line---attachment is desire, is like intense hunger: you want that person, want to see them, be with them, have them in the most intense way. Such attachment and obsession can go off the deep end--but attachment centrally characterizes all of love generally---and romantic love particularly.
    It is only this kind of intensity which compels a new awareness of the human capacity for depths of feeling and can reveal the existence, before unsuspected, of a chamber of tenderness.
    There's my two cents for now.
    All the best to you, Vince.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Brit,
    Vince here,
    a small bone to pick----

    "---make the pleasure from the drug significantly stronger for them compared to non-addictive personality types." ?

    Pure speculation in my view.
    Based upon the assumption, presumably, that greater indulgence is the result of greater pleasure. Just how do you prove that?
    Just how do you extract the pleasures from each persono and parade them before you to compare their relative strengths? --measure their weight, gauge their length, taste their intensity?
    Unless you declare that pleasure is no longer
    a subjective feeling but merely a seratonin level or a kind of grimace. Unless you make that kind of reduction. Really, a kind of folk psychology assumption--very unscientific, very speculative.
    Is love then not a subjective feeling--
    but merely the overabundance of a chemical?
    Reductionist nonsense to me.
    Safer is to say that some indulge more and more extensively. You can see that at least and
    measure it.
    Anything else is speculation.
    If I tell you that though we eat ice cream with the same frequency and quantity, all the same, I can tell from your face that I love ice cream more than you----------doesn't that sound silly?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Indeed such serious love can result into a serious psychological disorder. Depression is very common and worst is the result of suicide attempts.

    ReplyDelete