Book description
Here, leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Tallis, explores our
age-old preoccupation with love and in particular romantic love. Love is
rarely described as a wholly pleasant experience and Tallis considers
our experiences and descriptions of love and why the combinations of
pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to
characterise what we mean when we speak about falling in love. Obsessive
thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and
persistent images and impulses (irresistible urges to phone or text),
superstitious or ritualistic compulsions (she loves me, she loves me
not), inability to concentrate - so much so that it affects your work,
delusion, (are his eyes really deep pools of oceanic azure?). Exhibiting
just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of
Major Depressive Episode, according to the recognized medical criteria.
Drawing on the writings of poets, philosophers, songwriters, zoologists
and scientists Tallis shows how throughout time - and particularly in
the West, the metaphor of illness and specifically mental illness has
been used to describe the state of being in love. And asks why it is
that we continue to search out this kind of love, with the ecstasy
seeming to blind us to the agony. Dr Frank Tallis is a published
novelist and a practising clinical psychologist. He has written a number
of non-fiction books including the definitive textbook on obsessive
compulsive disorder, about which he is Britain's leading authority. He
lives in London.
