Page Title

Excerpts from "The Dark Side of Love"

(Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, [c] 1999.)

From New Introduction: "I find it rather astonishing that as a culture we spend as much money as we do on

the

intellectual

development of our children, and no money on the emotional development of our children.

Psychotherapy is the only

system we have developed that addresses the issue of emotional education; there

is no

school, no class that is part of the

standard educational system that one can take to learn how to

become

emotionally integrated. Generally, only the most

disturbed of our children receive psychotherapeutic

help, and

often even these are neglected.

Unfortunately, by the time most people avail themselves of psychotherapy, the therapy serves as emotional

reeducation

rather than primary learning: bad habits need to be unlearned; it is always easier to learn first

than to

unlearn and relearn

later.

My hope is that in understanding more about the emotional needs of children, children will no longer raise

guns to

their

school chums; these children as they grow into husbands and wives will no longer need to

injure each other

through

extramarital affairs; and nations will no longer become divided within themselves...

it is, I believe, the only

hope we have".

(p. xxii)

From Introduction: "In my healing, I was forced to come to terms with my own hate and anger and desire

for

revenge.

Every ugly wish under the sun passed through my mind... This was more than mere anger or

resentment.

This I would call

hate. There was poison in those feelings and wishes...

Along the way (to healing) I noticed a curious phenomenon. I noticed the emotional freedom that came with

allowing

myself to experience all those poisonous thoughts and feelings. I didn't actually do anything to

(boyfriend) but as I let my

anger and hate and wish for revenge fill my being I, seemingly miraculously,

began to

feel better. Paradoxically, my giving

the hate its full expression finally allowed the hate to release its

grip on me.

The more I was able to embrace my hate

without shame, the freer I began to feel."

From The Myths of Love: "The real reason for our pervasive confusion about love has to do not so much

with the

inadequacy of ourselves or our loved ones, but rather with the expectations we bring to bear on

love itself. We

expect too

much of love, and so we are doomed to confusion and disappointment. Love was

never meant to be,

and cannot be, all of

what we want it to be...

"The truth is, no matter our innate talents, our inherited strengths, or our acquired wealths, loving well, with

a full

range of

emotional tonality, is a skill to be learned and a technique to be rehearsed... Learning to love is

developmental task. While

the need to love and to be loved may be instinctual, the ability to love is not...

From Loving Love and Hating Hate: Imagine a young infant's confusion over the fact that the good mother,

who

feeds,

satisfies, and relieves the infant from distress, is the same person who fails, at times, to do all

these things.

Inconsistent

behavior is hard for us to fathom at any age, but it is particularly threatening to an

infant, who is

totally dependent on good

mothering...

When we fail to recognize that people can be both bad and good at the same time, we are stuck thinking in

infantile

terms,

unable to move beyond this good-and-bad splitting mechanism.

How each of us manages our hate is individual and largely dependent on what we learned in childhood.

Mostly we

manage

our hateful feelings badly and with great difficulty... Making hate conscious is the only

way to reduce its

power over us.

From The Dark Side of Mother Love: The most vulnerable members of our society are targeter most for the

destructive

expression of rage and hate. There are, of course, the children. Children are injured--both

physically

and

psychologically--and, with much more frequency than we care to admit, die because of

neglect, abuse, or

outright murder.

Bettelheim discovered a profound and deeply unsettling truth during his time in the Nazi concentration

camps. He

found

that certain Jews formed an identification with their Nazi tormentors and mirrored their

brutal behavior,

directing it toward

their fellow victims. Perhaps the same kind of protective mechanism has

operated on women:

As women have

traditionally felt victimized by those in a more powerful position--the

men--they ahve taken this

rage about this injustice

and created a new class of victims--the children...

From The Dark Side of Marriage: The Death of Dreams: It is in our dreams of marriage that we allow our

fantasies

to roam

most freely. We imagine perfect love and sweet contentment from the eternal

companionship that marriag

epromises. We

don't like thinking of marriage as the time in one's life when we

must give up our dreams. Such

thoughts make marriage

sound depressing. We much prefer to think of

marriage as a time when dreams are fulfilled,

longings realized. Yet, most

married couples, talking honestly

about marriage, will say that the preservation of

their marriage does in fact depend upon

their having to give

up their childhood dreams... to accept the happiness of

compromise rather than to relentlessly pursue

the

unattainable ideal...