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Jesse Prinz on romantic love



I've written before here (as on September 27th) about Jesse Prinz' recent book on the emotions, a book in which he advocates and in the process somewhat revises the James-Lange theory.

Today I'd like to quote a bit of what he has to say about romantic love, drawing on a classic work by C.S. Lewis (who is pictured above).

"To contrast the constructivist approach with evolutionary psychology, it is instructive to ... reconsider romantic love. Some constructionists have endorsed C.S. Lewis' (1936) provocative thesis that romantic love was invented in medieval France....Apparently, during the twelfth century it became very fashionable for Frenchmen to become infatuated with married women of higher social station....It is hard to know which is more cynical [selfish-gene] reductionism or constructionism. On the former, love is an evolutionary insurance policy, and on the latter, it is a French fad that happened to stick."

Prinz doesn't advocate either of those views, but believes they may be in effect reconciled by and subsumed within a somatic theory.

Romantic love is not a single emotion but a blend of several: lust and attachment, primarily, but Prinz also speaks in this connection of our fear of loneliness, and of jealousy. Any of the basic emotions has its somatic trigger. Of course "the love-blend may be fostered by culture."

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