A General Theory of Love
by Adam Jacobs
“Fathers and teachers,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “I ponder the question, ‘What is Hell?’ I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.” —A General Theory of Love
All general unified theories, like love itself, are going to be magnanimous and breathtaking in the reach of their diameter; far and wide the circle goes and still the center holds. “A General Theory of Love,” written a decade ago by Drs. Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D., has such a focal eye still staring into the present day. Though the book is sometimes like a pretty tornado of effusive language lost in its own opaque whirl, it is vivacious and sincere.
Because love is part of us and we are part of the physical universe, “love has to be lawful,” the authors say, and so “like the rest of the world, it is governed and described by principles we can discover but cannot change. If we only know where and how to look, we should be able to find emotional laws whose actions a person could no more resist that he could the force of gravity if he fell off a cliff.”
The authors, psychiatrists by profession, look for love in the brain, using as their template the triune brain—reptilian, neocortical, and limbic. The reptilian brain knows itself, and the neocortex knows the abstract, but it is the limbic brain that loves another. The limbic brain of amygdala, thalamus, and hippocampus maketh mammals of us, giving us the distinction of sweet motherhood, playful brotherhood, and love.
It is this receptive and giving brain that obeys the law that “people cannot be stable on their own—not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be… We recognize instinctively that healthy humans are not loners.” How we then relate and regulate each other is buried, like gravity, in the core of the limbic brain, amidst its vast intertwining neurons, fleshed out in the memories, emotions, and vibrations of the past. The authors detail, with anatomy, diagrams, and experiments, how the future—and who and how we can love—is attracted back towards the past, like a river flowing forward as its waves ripple back.
It is not until the end of the story—as it seems in life, in general—that the book rapidly coheres and creates some of the most stunning vistas of the possibilities of therapy, relationships, and love. In the closing chapters, the authors, done with the explication of the previous 200 pages, can give way to their personal connection to what deeply inspires their work. It is here in the calm of the conclusion that there is passionate satisfaction—how to provide for children, the yearning beneath drug use, the pathology of corporation, and how to heal the ancient mission of healing the sick. What emerges from behind the theory of the book is a visionary eye and a rhapsodic heart. “A good deal of modern American culture,” the authors finally conclude, “is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” But no matter what “humanity’s future holds, we will never shed our heritage as neural organisms, mammals, primates.”
A General Theory of Love (Random House, 2000) is available for purchase on Amazon.com. Contact Adam Jacobs at bowofrain@gmail.com.
