A writer asks fascinating questions: Why don't psychologists and psychiatrists study love? What is the effect of the lack of studies? Excerpt:
I reached for the fourth and final psychology textbook, Psychology of Behavior. Its eighteen chapters thoroughly cover human behavior: human consciousness, evolution, nervous cells and structure, psychopharmacology, methods of research, ethical issues, vision, audition, chemical senses, control and movement, sleep, reproductive behavior, emotion, memory, ingestive behavior, relational learning, schizophrenia, affective disorder, anxiety disorder, autistic disorder, hyperactivity disorder, stress disorder and drug abuse.
Love? Not there. But, checking the book's index, if you want to know about sex, there is no end in sight: hormones, chromosomes, activational effects, gender development, sexual maturation, arousal, prefrontal cortex, hormonal control, human sex, sex of lab animals, neural control, sexual dimorphism, prenatal androgens, sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN), orientation, heredity”¦my fingers wore out just listing all the ways we have to study sex. . . .
What does it say about the likelihood that we can recover from love sickness, if our most elite educators study more about our sexually dimorphic nucleus than about our ability to love one another?
What does it say about our future, if those who study to fill the exploding market of jobs for psychiatrists and psychology can memorize the psychopharmacology of modern drugs, but have only read two pages in their college text about love as a prejudice?
And what does it say about our children and their love future when we have saturated their world with so much of sexual orientations and so little of love?
As for me, I'd just assume the psychologists and psychiatrists leave their mitts off the subject. What are they going to learn from a $5,000,000 study? That love requires a concern for another? That when we're selfless we best serve ourselves? That paradox will baffle the empiricists for decades.
Just leave the subject to B16's encyclicals.
