Love addiction is a proposed model of pathological passion-related behavior involving the feeling of falling and being in love. 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'' (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 involv ...

. 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's dictum that 'love extended is mere madness' – extends to the early decades of the 20th century. Freud's study of the Wolf Man highlighted 'his liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love ... a compulsive falling in love that came on and passed off by sudden fits'; but it was Sandor Rado 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 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 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 (S.L.A.A.) started hosting weekly meetings based on Alcoholics Anonymous. They published their Basic Text, ''Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous'', in 1986 discussing characteristics of and recovery from both love addiction and

sex addiction According to proponents of the concept, sexual addiction, also known as sex addiction, is a state characterized by compulsive participation or engagement in sexual activity, particularly sexual intercourse, despite negative consequences. The c ...

. 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'' 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 ''A Spy in the House of Love'' is a 1954 novel by Anaïs Nin. Alongside her other novels, ''Ladders to Fire'', ''Children of the Albatross'', ''The Four-Chambered Heart'' and ''Seduction of the Minotaur'', it was gathered into a collection known ...

'', 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 Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, ( ; 15 October 188114 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeve ...

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 – '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 ''Splendor in the Grass'' is a 1961 American period drama film produced and directed by Elia Kazan, from a screenplay written by William Inge. It stars Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty (in his film debut) as two high school sweethearts, naviga ...

'' oth the poem and the movieare about love addiction

Natalie Wood Natalie Wood ( Zacharenko; July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981) was an American actress who began her career in film as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles. Wood started acting at age four and was given a co-starring r ...

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