Love: Bondage or Liberation?

Deirdre Johnson is a Training Analyst with the Association of Jungian Analysts and a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She has taught counsellors and psychotherapists for a variety of UKCP and BACP training organizations and has led workshops for Continuing Professional Development in many different environments. She has had her own practice for over twenty-five years. Further work has been within the NHS and in specialist experience with ethnic minorities. She lives in London with her family.

• Preface , Introduction , A Quest for Meaning: The Different Narratives to Describe the Phenomenon of Falling in Love , (A) What we have been: the first love affair , The psychoanalytic discourse: emphasizing the intrapersonal , The relational psychologies discourse: including the interpersonal , (B) What we are: embodied beings , The scientific discourse , (C) What we may be: individuation , The teleological discourse , The religious discourse , Love's Alchemy: Putting It All Together , Various dualisms and their synthesis , Holistic love: what difference does all of this make?

'What is love? Since neither philosophers, psychotherapists, even biologists, can provide a complete answer, do not expect Deirdre Johnson's book to do so. But that is what I love about it. Drawing upon a host of psychotherapeutic, literary and other sources, the author demonstrates in her theme precisely what she describes in her final words: "...love is more than any feeling; more than sexual attraction or primal instinct; more even than the longing of the soul for the divine. It is all these things and also more. It will always remain ineffable, but, as Eros, it manifests as an indefinable energy that binds our disparate inner selves into a coherent whole, that binds each individual self to society, and that binds humanity to the universe that we inhabit."'- Michael Jacobs, author of Psychodynamic Counselling in Action, Our Desire of Unrest and Shakespeare on the Couch