Love addiction is a proposed model of pathological passion-related behavior involving the feeling of falling and being

in love Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions. The ''Wiley Blackwell Encyc ...

. A medical review of related behaviors in animals and humans concluded that current medical evidence does not have definitions or criteria on an addiction model for love addiction, but there are reported similarities to substance dependence, such as euphoria and desire in the stimuli (drug intoxication), as well as

anhedonia Anhedonia is a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure. While earlier definitions emphasized the inability to experience pleasure, anhedonia is currently used by researchers t ...

and negative levels of mood when away from the stimuli (drug withdrawal), intrusive thoughts on it, and disregard for adverse consequences. There has never been a reference to love addiction in the ''

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders The ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'' (DSM; latest edition: DSM-5-TR, published in March 2022) is a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders using a common langua ...

'' (DSM), a compendium of mental disorders and diagnostic criteria published by the

American Psychiatric Association The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members are involve ...

. Medical research on love addiction is still ongoing today, and it has not yet been scientifically confirmed whether or not it is an addiction.

History

The modern history of the concept of the love addict – ignoring such precursors as

Robert Burton Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, who wrote the encyclopedic tome ''The Anatomy of Melancholy''. Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burt ...

's dictum that 'love extended is mere madness' – extends to the early decades of the 20th century.

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...

's study of the

Wolf Man In folklore, a werewolf (), or occasionally lycanthrope (; ; uk, Вовкулака, Vovkulaka), is an individual that can shapeshifting, shapeshift into a wolf (or, especially in modern film, a therianthropy, therianthropic mythological hybr ...

highlighted 'his liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love ... a compulsive

falling in love Falling in love is the development of strong feelings of attachment and love, usually towards another person. The term is metaphorical, emphasizing that the process, like the physical act of falling, is sudden, uncontrollable and leaves the ...

that came on and passed off by sudden fits'; but it was

Sandor Rado Sandor Rado ( hu, Radó Sándor; 8 January 1890, Kisvárda – 14 May 1972, New York City) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst of the second generation, who moved to the United States of America in the 1930s. According to Peter Gay, "Budapest produce ...

who in 1928 first popularized the term "love addict" – 'a person whose needs for more love, more succor, more support grow as rapidly as the frustrated people around her try to fill up what is, in effect, a terrible and unsatisfiable inner emptiness.' Even

Søren Kierkegaard Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , , ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on ...

in ''Works of Love'' said "Spontaneous omanticlove makes a man free and in the next moment dependent ... spontaneous love can become unhappy, can reach the point of despair." However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that the concept came to the popular fore.

Stanton Peele Stanton Peele (born January 8, 1946) is a psychologist, attorney, psychotherapist and the author of books and articles on the subject of alcoholism, addiction and addiction treatment. Career Raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Peele received hi ...

opened the door, almost unwittingly, with his 1975 book ''Love and Addiction''; but (as he later explained), while that work had been intended as 'a social commentary on how our society defines and patterns intimate relationships ... all of this social dimension has been removed, and the attention to love addiction has been channeled in the direction of regarding it as an individual, treatable psychopathology'. In 1976, the 12-Step program

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) is a twelve-step program for people recovering from sex addiction and love addiction. SLAA was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1976, by a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Though he had been a member ...

(S.L.A.A.) started hosting weekly meetings based on

Alcoholics Anonymous Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international mutual aid fellowship of alcoholics dedicated to abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism through its spiritually-inclined Twelve Step program. Following its Twelve Traditions, AA is non-professi ...

. They published their Basic Text, ''Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous'', in 1986 discussing characteristics of and recovery from both love addiction and sex addiction. As of late 2012, S.L.A.A.'s membership had grown to an estimated 16,000 members in 43 countries. In 1985, Robin Norwood's ''

Women Who Love Too Much ''Women Who Love Too Much'' is a self-help book by licensed marriage and family therapist Robin Norwood published in 1985. The book, which was a number one seller on the New York Times Best Seller list, ''New York Times'' Best Seller list's "advi ...

'' popularized the concept of love addiction for women. In 2004 a program just for love addicts was created--Love Addicts Anonymous. Since, variations on the dynamics of love addiction have become further popularized in the 1990s and 2000s by multiple authors.

Cultural examples

* In '' A Spy in the House of Love'', the heroine Sabina is said to have seen her 'love anxieties as resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the yielding to the impulse'. As a result, she has subsequently been described as 'feeling like a "love addict" enslaved to obsessive-compulsive patterns of behaviour'. * P. G. Wodehouse features in ''The Inimitable Jeeves'' 'a character called Bingo who on about every third page meets a wonderful new woman who is going to save his life and is better than any woman he has ever met before, and then of course it flops ... a new burst of life, but it does not last'. *

St. Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Afri ...

– 'to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about my ears' – has been interpreted as being, 'fundamentally, what one might call a "love addict"', with a disturbing tendency 'to invest all of himself in relationships and to "forget himself" in the intensity of his affection'.Judith C. Stark, ''Feminist Interpretations of Augustine'' (2007) p. 246 *'' Splendor in the Grass'' oth the poem and the movieare about love addiction Natalie Wood went into a mental institution when her boyfriend left her. :"What though the radiance which was once so bright. :Be now for ever taken from my sight. :Though nothing can bring back the hour :of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; :we will grieve not, rather find :Strength in what remains behind; :in the primal sympathy which having been must ever be; :in the soothing thoughts that spring. :Out of human suffering; :in the faith that looks through death; :in years that bring the philosophic mind." – William Wordsworth

References

External links

* * {{Official website, http://loveaddicts.org/index.html, Love Addicts Anonymous official website Love

History

Cultural examples

See also

References

Further reading

External links