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Love or the Black Sun of Personal Relationships
Author(s) -
LAMY LUBOMIR
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2011.00462.x
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , psychology , social psychology , object (grammar) , field (mathematics) , philosophy of love , variable (mathematics) , epistemology , sociology , psychoanalysis , philosophy , mathematical analysis , linguistics , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , pure mathematics
Previous research about love, in the social‐psychological literature, has focused on the antecedents, or causes, of love. Moreover, within the field of Personal Relationships, love is often regarded as implicitly present, and thus, is not treated directly. Here, we address the possibility of a reversal of this perspective, where love is no longer treated as a dependent variable but as an independent variable. We show that this change is necessary to promote the status of love to that of a reliable object of scientific enquiry. We discuss the differences between scientific and naïve conceptions of love, and the necessity of distinguishingbetween an alleged reality of love and the consequences of the mere idea of love.