I just finished doing some reading for a psych essay that I’m doing on Freud’s and humanists’ conception of love. This guy called Theodor Reik, a German psychoanalyst, writing in 1975, says: “Love is not inborn and primal. It is an experience which is acquired in later, individual life. You cannot call love an instinct like hunger or sex. It is the fruit of a late psychical development. Love is decidedly a product of culture.” (Of Love and Lust (London: Souvenir Press, 1975), p. 8 ) I sort of see what Reik is getting at, but I can’t agree with him.
I think the reason why we don’t see infants show love as we culturally understand the term is because we are born sinful creatures, but we are also born creatures made in the image of God, and he is Love (1 John 4:8). And the latter means that we can love because it is an ability that we are capable of, but never in the way God meant it to be because it has been tainted, as has everything, by our sin.
So yeah, I agree with Reik when he says “Love is not inborn and primal” and “You cannot call love an instinct like hunger or sex” (yes, because it doesn’t come naturally for us to give selflessly), but to assert that we learn to love as we mature psychologically and as a result of cultural constructs is a bit of an overstatement in somewhat of a wrong direction. We are capable of love because it is something that is in-built, part of how we are created, but it is hard for us to do (with the assumption here that love is a doing word and not a feeling word) because our ultimate desire is for ourselves and not for others. We do, to a certain extent, learn through our upbringing that it is ‘good’ to love (again, in terms of it being an action), though that notion is probably not true today, and probably wasn’t so much in the 1970s either. Even so–and I realise I’m going around in circles!–loving doesn’t come naturally. We need to consciously make ourselves do it because it is culturally contingent behaviour.
Woah, lots of babbling happening there! Imagine what’s gonna happen when I actually do this essay! Well, what do you think? Do you think love is a culturally learnt behaviour?
life matters 