A General Theory of Love

Until comparatively recently textbooks on psychology and neuroscience had next to nothing to say about love. Only in the last few years have brain researchers found ways to investigate the active physiology of emotions and feelings beyond the basics of limbic anatomy and a handful of neurotransmitters. At the close of the Decade of the Brain (1990s) three psychiatrists at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine wrote A General Theory of Love (Random House, 2000), outlining new research into brain function which shows how love is a human necessity, although that won't come as much of a surprise to most people. The evidence is that, from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the structure of our brains and establishes life-long emotional patterns. The authors are:

• Thomas Lewis, M.D: assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF School of Medicine.
• Fari Amini, M.D: psychiatry professor at UCSF School of Medicine.
• Richard Lannon, M.D: founder of the Affective Disorders Program at UCSF.

The book explains how relationships function, how parents shape their child's developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws. The first chapter begins with a poem, The Secret. The paragraph that follows explains why:

"Some might think it strange that a book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding - and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating a chasm between them in human minds and lives. The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so. Because of the brain's design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does. Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer's day."

A General Theory of Love - link

Table of Contents:

PREFACE

1. THE HEART'S CASTLE:
   Science Joins the Search for Love.
2. KITS, CATS, SACKS, AND UNCERTAINTY:
   How the Brain's Basic Structure Poses Problems for Love.
3. ARCHIMEDES' PRINCIPLE:
   How We Sense the Inner World of Other Hearts.
4. A FIERCER SEA:
   How Relationships Permeate the Human Body, Mind, and Soul.
5. GRAVITY'S INCARNATION:
   How Memory Stores and Shapes Love.
6. A BEND IN THE ROAD:
   How Love Changes Who We Are and Who We Can Become.
7. THE BOOK OF LIFE:
   How Love Forms, Guides, and Alters a Child's Emotional Mind.
8. BETWEEN STONE AND SKY:
   What Can Be Done to Heal Hearts Gone Astray.
9. A WALK IN THE SHADOWS:
   How Culture Blinds Us to the Ways of Love.
10. THE OPEN DOOR:
    What the Future Holds for the Mysteries of Love.

• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index

• Related blog article:
  The Un-Emotional Brain

I'm the neuroscientist, this evil genius

The title of this post comes from a remark by V.S. Ramachandran during his 2003 Reith Lectures for the BBC. Professor Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego. After each of the five lectures the audience was invited to ask questions. Until recently, there were transcripts of all the Q&A sessions on the BBC site, but now they can only be found at the Internet Archive (archive.org). The following question was put to him at the end of the last lecture:

Question: If and when we fully understand the human brain, what happens to the traditional disciplines like philosophy, psychology, theology, aesthetics that thought that they studied what it was like to be human. Do they just shut up shop and go home?

Ramachandran: Yes. But let me qualify. When you take something like love - somebody says, Oh when you fall in love, these are all the parts of the brain active: the septum is involved in orgasms, these are the peptides released, hypothalamic nuclei, then maybe there is some prolactin for affiliation - and all of this is activated. So you're in love with this young lady and I come along, and I'm the neuroscientist, this evil genius, and I do a brain PET scan or whatever, and I show these are all the parts active. This young lady friend of yours looks at it and says, My God, that's all? It's all this bunch of chemicals? What you should say is, My Dear, this proves it's all real. I really am in love with you. I'm not faking it. Here's hard evidence. So the notion that once you explain it in terms of what's going on in the neurons is somehow going to eliminate love or eliminate philosophy or eliminate psychology, that's not true, obviously.

Like he says, that's not true, obviously. During the introductory lecture he said something which showed how easy it is for reductionist explanations to reach a dead end:

"Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else."

Sensory deprivation experiments show what happens when those specks of jelly are deprived of input from the outside world. Mental activity is the outcome of experiences or sensations from the world outside. To be creative, to make plans for the future, or even to hallucinate, a person needs to have past experiences to draw on. In other words, feelings, emotions, thoughts, ambitions and religious sentiments cannot exist simply because specs of jelly exist. Still, half an explanation is better than none.

Lesson For A Psychologist

Some time after Martin Seligman, an eminent psychologist, first appeared on Oprah's TV chat show something happened which led him to change his ideas about what psychologists should be trying to achieve. As a result, he founded the Positive Psychology movement.

Martin Seligman, a former President of the American Psychological Association, is best known for demonstrating the phenomenon of "Learned Helplessness" by means of experiments on dogs which, it has to be said, were undeniably cruel. He later discovered that he could demonstrate the same phenomenon with student volunteers who undertook tasks that were rigged to cause frustration.

The ingredients which go into his formulation of 'positive psychology' have been known about since the beginning of recorded history. They are central to the ideals of all major world religions. What Martin Seligman has done is to re-introduce them as "personality strengths" that psychologists should investigate. There's a sample book chapter on Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology website. Here is the passage which explains what changed his outlook:

"The notion of a Positive Psychology movement began at a moment in time a few months after I had been elected President of the American Psychological Association. It took place in my garden while I was weeding with my five-year old daughter, Nikki. I have to confess that even though I write books about children, I'm really not all that good with them. I am goal-oriented and time-urgent and when I'm weeding in the garden, I'm actually trying to get the weeding done. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. I yelled at her. She walked away, came back, and said, "Daddy, I want to talk to you."

"Yes, Nikki?"

"Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch."

This was for me an epiphany, nothing less. I learned something about Nikki, something about raising kids, something about myself, and a great deal about my profession."

And what was it he learned?

"Raising children, I realized, is more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these positive qualities.

As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years mostly enduring wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years being a nimbus cloud in a household of sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to my grouchiness, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change."

So there you have it. A top psychologist, President of the APA, learns something new about human nature from his five-year-old daughter - and resolves to change - after spending a major part of his adult life studying what? -- human nature! Martin Seligman deserves a commendation for his candidness.

Many psychologists seek evolutionary explanations for human nature. The feelings and emotions of children reflect the natural adaptations of the most highly evolved primate species on earth. Throughout most of evolutionary history our species lived in close-knit tribal communities. In our modern world it's only after many years of conditioning that children learn to suppress their true feelings in order to adapt to a society in which most people are surrounded by strangers outside their homes, classrooms or workplaces. Most children have to suppress their true feelings in classrooms too, and most adults have to suppress their true feelings in their workplaces. On top of that, many adults have to put their capacity for empathy on hold in order to fit in with the ideological or academic orthodoxies of institutions that offer employment opportunities.

With the decline in supportive community networks since World War II, the requirement to suppress authentic feelings on a regular basis has led to an epidemic of mood disorders. Martin Seligman put it this way in a discussion forum on the Australian ABC radio network:

"In the past, when we failed, as fail we must, there was spiritual furniture we could fall back on for consolation. Our relationship to God, our patriotism, extended families, community, and systematically in the two generations in which depression has increased so drastically, we've seen a waning of all these spiritual furnitures."

• Negative Psychology:
  John B. Watson's parenting advice (on this site).

The Long Dark Night of Behaviorism

What happened to the children of psychologist J.B. Watson, his granddaughter Mariette Hartley, and Deborah, the second daughter of psychologist B.F. Skinner?

I think it was Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis psychotherapy, who coined the phrase "The long dark night of Behaviorism". The Behaviorist approach to experimental psychology was inaugurated by J.B. Watson in a manifesto entitled "Psychology as the behaviorist views it", published in Psychological Review in 1913. He was the editor of the journal at the time and head of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University. Behaviorism became the ruling paradigm in psychology for at least fifty years - until the early 1970s - and probably its best known exponent was B.F. Skinner. To sum up what Behaviorism stood for, I'll quote a passage from Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World Revisited" (published in 1958). Huxley uses the British spelling of 'behaviour':

For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators, Organization Men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men's natures to some kind of manageable uniformity. In the first flush of his Behaviouristic fervour, J.B. Watson roundly declared that he could find "no support for hereditary patterns of behaviour, nor for special abilities (music, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families." And even today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, "as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero. Man's vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice - none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait."

Huxley misquotes slightly. Skinner actually wrote "his original accomplishments in art, science, and morals..." The statement can be found in "Cumulative Record" by B.F. Skinner (Reprint edition: Copley Publishing Group, 1999). In other words, the Behaviorists considered that human behavior was mostly shaped by environmental conditioning and that hereditary factors counted for very little. That was the ruling paradigm in academic psychology for fifty years until the pendulum swung in the other direction. Now, 'evolutionary' psychology and the search for 'genetic predispositions' have taken its place. It seems to be very hard for most psychiatrists and university psychologists to get it into their heads that both factors are fundamentally intertwined.

To most students of psychology B.F. Skinner's name is associated with conditioning experiments on rats and pigeons in 'Skinner boxes', and J.B. Watson's name with the induction of phobias into an infant child known as 'Little Albert' (see: the Little Albert experiment at Wikipedia). What happened to Little Albert later in life is unknown.

J.B. Watson's children

Watson subjected his own children to a harsh upbringing regime - scheduled feeding and no physical affection. His first marriage to Mary Ickes produced a daughter, Mary (a.k.a. Polly), and a son John. Polly made multiple suicide attempts later in life and 'Little John' became a rootless person who often sponged off his father. Little John was plagued by stomach trouble and intolerable headaches throughout his life. He died in his early 50s from bleeding ulcers.

After a scandalous affair with a graduate student young enough to be his daughter, Rosalie Rayner, Watson's wife Mary divorced him and he was fired from Johns Hopkins University. Soon after, he married Rosalie and they had two sons - Billy and Jimmy. In adulthood Billy rebelled against his father's behaviorism and established a successful career as a Freudian psychiatrist. Nevertheless, he too attempted suicide. His first attempt was stopped by younger brother Jimmy. He killed himself at his second attempt. Jimmy suffered chronic stomach problems for years (a legacy of scheduled feeding during infancy?), but managed to do well in life after intensive analysis. An article about J.B. Watson on the website of Clayton State University refers to the suicide:

"Sadly, although B.F. Skinner got to brag that his "baby in a box" grew up healthy and happy, Watson's application of science to child-rearing lacks that testimonial validity: William, the older of his and Rosalie's two sons, committed suicide at age 40, just four years after John Watson's death."

In 1930, when the boys were still young, Rosalie Rayner Watson wrote an article for Parents Magazine titled "I Am the Mother of a Behaviorist's Sons," in which she expressed the wish that her sons would grow up to appreciate poetry and the drama of life. She said: "In some respects I bow to the great wisdom in the science of behaviorism, and in others I am rebellious. ... I like being merry and gay and having the giggles. The behaviorists think giggling is a sign of maladjustment." She died five years later from pneumonia. There's an article about John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in Johns Hopkins Magazine, published by the university where he was professor of psychology: It's All in the Upbringing. John Broadus Watson became a recluse towards the end of his life. He burned all of his papers prior to his death in 1958.

Mariette Hartley - Breaking the Silence

That's not the end of the family saga. Watson's daughter Mary had a daughter in turn, Mary Loretta Hartley (a.k.a. Marietta or Mariette), who later achieved success as the actress Mariette Hartley (www.mariettehartley.com). She is probably best known for her TV commercials for Polaroid in which she played the role of James Garner's wife. However, the circumstances of her childhood were dire. Her rage-filled, silence-prone mother was a secret drinker who repeatedly tried to commit suicide, first one way and then another. Her father, a retired advertising executive, took his own life at the age of 67 after a long period of depression. Mariette was eating breakfast with her mother when they heard the gunshot. These circumstances led Mariette herself into alcoholism and thoughts of suicide until her career hit bottom. She managed to pull through and rebuild her life with help from a friend and mentor. Later on, she wrote a memoir of her experiences, "Breaking the Silence" (Putnam Group, 1990). She has this to say about her grandfather's childrearing principles:

"Grandfather's theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?"

J.B. Watson was the author of a bestselling child rearing manual: "The Psychological Care of Infant and Child." After her recovery, Marietta Hartley became honorary director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and a public speaker and campaigner. She has received humanitarian awards from numerous organizations including, in her home state of California, the California Family Studies Center, the L.A. County Psychological Association and the University of California Brain Imaging Center at Irvine.

Mariette Hartley scripted and performed a solo stage show based on her autobiography. In "If You Get to Bethlehem, You've Gone Too Far," which premiered in January 2006, she portrayed the main characters who shaped her life.

There are lecture notes about John Broadus Watson on the website of Sonoma State University in California which begin with extracts from Mariette Hartley's "Breaking the Silence".

John B. Watson's background

John B. Watson's childhood is documented in K.W. Buckley's biography of his life and work, Mechanical Man. He was raised by a pious mother who hoped that he would become a Southern Baptist preacher. She chose the surname of the most famous Baptist minister of the period, Broadus, as his middle name. In 1894, he enrolled at Furman University, which at the time was a Southern Baptist Academy and Theological Institute. However, a philosophy professor at Furman became his mentor and inspired his interest in psychology, still a branch of the philosophical tradition.

In his later career Watson became a champion of the 'scientific method' in psychology. Yet despite the trappings of science, it appears Watson's advice on child-rearing in "The Psychological Care of Infant and Child" was mostly a recapitulation of the Southern Baptist attitude to children.

B.F. Skinner's daughters

Perhaps it is because of the atrocious consequences of J.B. Watson's child-rearing methods on his own children that an urban myth attached itself to the fate of B.F. Skinner's second daughter, Deborah. His first daughter, Julie, became an educational psychologist (see www.juliesvargas.com). The myth that Deborah had committed suicide arose because of an invention Skinner used as an alternative to a conventional cot -- the 'babytender'. He called it the Air Crib, but it has also been referred to as the 'heir conditioner'. It was something like a large version of a hospital incubator with a plexiglass panel which could be pulled up to seal in the warmth. It provided his daughter, Deborah, with a place to sleep and remain comfortable through the severe Minnesota winters without having to be wrapped in numerous layers of clothing and blankets. Unfortunately, when Skinner wrote an article about the 'baby tender' for the Ladies' Home Journal in 1945, the article was given the title "Baby in a Box." Many people jumped to the conclusion it was a variation of the 'Skinner box' he used for animal experiments. The truth is more benign. Deborah is a successful artist and painter. You can read her account of the story in this 2004 article in The Guardian newspaper. It is her response to Lauren Slater's book "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century."

You can see a large photo of a commercial version of Burrhus Frederic Skinner's "AirCrib" in the Apparatus Collection at the University of Akron's Archives of the History of American Psychology. Most of them were purchased for children of psychologists.