Developmental psychology is a field of study hardly known until the twentieth century. Before figures like Sigmund Freud, philosophers seemed not much to have noticed that the inner life of the child has a determining impact upon the love life of the adult. Exceptions include thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But it wasn’t until Freud developed notions such as infantile sexuality, and followers of his including Jean Piaget and Melanie Klein developed practices of infant observation, that it became clear just how profoundly the first few years shape our subsequent experiences of and attempts to love. My sense is that the philosophy of love has yet fully to embrace these new discoveries, perhaps because, during the same period, philosophy came to inhabit a silo of knowledge isolated from psychology, which itself became pre-occupied with behavioural investigations, as opposed to the psychodynamic. That time appears now to be passing.
The developmental insights can usefully be summarized by arguing that our capacity for love emerges in, broadly, three stages. At each stage, a different relational dynamic becomes possible, one deeper and more expansive than what was previously known. However, the transition between each mode is painful because it requires letting go of the security that comes with the former familiar love. A life will tend to go well – an individual will be more likely to flourish – if they can wisely utilize and spontaneously enjoy each kind of love. Conversely, things will tend to become stuck and troubled, perhaps seriously damaged, when a to-and-fro movement between the loves is blocked.
The three loves begin with self-love or, to give it its seemingly darker, more technical name, narcissism. In life, this is our first love, as the evidence is that it is the kind of love with which we are born. On the whole, it serves us well because it ensures we survive. It selfishly demands the nourishment and security, both physical and psychological, that the newborn child needs. However, there is a downside. Narcissism has little or no felt appreciation that other human beings exist as separate entities in the world. So, unless it is transcended, this love leaves us lonely and isolated, worried by the existence of others and untrusting. We must love ourselves but in such a way that we can get over ourselves and be comfortable in our own skin. Then narcissism serves us well because it means we can embrace a world apart from ourselves.
That leads to the second kind of love, the love that discovers there is another person in the world and this person is both loveable and returns love. Typically, it is thought that it begins to dawn on the very young child that it has a mother, or a primary carer, who is devoted to it. The infant is encouraged in play to explore the little intimacies that this other person longs to share and it develops the capacity for a healthy attachment to this other. The bodily warmth of their twosome nurtures in it the wonderful realization that it is not alone. The child grows in love, develops a stronger sense of itself through this relationship and, all being well, lays down capacities that will serve it well when, as a young adult, it falls in love and discovers once more that there is another person who might love them and whom they might love.
The second love supports a happy state of affairs, one that can be regarded as the pinnacle of love, particularly in its grown-up form: romantic love. But, in fact, it is a crucial part of the developmental story that this is not the end of love. Left in that phase, romantic love is as limited and limiting as self-love. The two lovers are stranded, struggling to find fulfilment in each other, when, in truth, fulfilment for human beings requires far more than love focused on just one other person.
So the individual must make another transition, which again is difficult. However, if once more it navigates the shift well enough, a third even more tremendous experience of love comes into conscious view. It is the love that can welcome a third dimension into its embrace. It is the most expansive and open, and with it the individual can throw him- or herself wholeheartedly into life.
The first experience of this third love is likely to occur when the now not quite so young child realizes mother has other interests and loves, not least the individual she relates to as her beloved. That comes as a shock to the child, although it may then sense that Dad loves him or her as well as Mum, and that their threesome enables all kinds of experiences that were inconceivable before. One of the most astonishing is when the child notices it can observe two others loving, as he or she watches on, which leads to the sense that he or she too is being watched. Internalized, this is the basis for self-awareness and self-consciousness, and the sense that the centre of life is not focused on me, or between me and another, but is dispersed throughout fields or networks of shared connection.
Life is much more promising, and complex, and at times frightening, than the infant could have possibly imagined. With this third love, the child – and then adult – develops the confidence and trust required to enter into mature love and so to become a friend; to pursue wider interests and passions; all in all, to reach out into life in all its fullness.
In fact, and although he showed little interest in the inner lives of infants, Plato described a developmental process that can be related to modern psychology: in works like the Symposium and the Phaedrus, he provides a vivid description of the way that love works. It has the remarkable quality of revealing an experience of life that far transcends the first taste of love that awoke us to its allure. By committing to live a life in pursuit of love, Plato says, life will become far more for us than we might imagine. Love carries within itself a tremendous transformative potential. The individual who loves well enough – be it as a beloved, a friend, a parent – is changed as they love. Love itself seems to overcome inherent limitations, often to a surprising degree. When that change goes well, people find their capacity for loving expanding too. They sense more and more of life.
Plato argued that love moves us because of the magnetic force known as beauty: the beauty we discern in our beloved is love’s “promise of happiness” should we manage to make a life together. It works in two ways.
First, our appraisal of beauty draws us to them or it, although what Plato also noticed is that at this stage, we do not know precisely what we will find should we get there. This is partly because beauty awakens us from afar: its task is to draw us towards who or what is not yet known. But there is a more radical aspect to beauty’s promise, too, because love itself creates a new future out of the relationship as it unfolds. It is not just that the beloved is at first a stranger to us. Something new happens when lovers get together. To put it another way, we bet on love when we respond to beauty, a bet that is “a stab at the future” as the philosopher Alexander Nehamas puts it. This insight, Nehamas argues, is Plato’s most startling: love is creative, working reflexively in the fit and friction of the relationship that is uniquely the lovers’ own. “What is mine is thine, and thine is mine,” as the old phrase has it, not only because they will now share what separately they had before but because something comes into being that is forged within and belongs to their relationship.
Plato stressed that love is a tricky path to follow, one of great toil, likely setbacks, and possible failure. Human beings find themselves in something of a bind when it comes to love because the love that spontaneously arises within the individual is inevitably limited and flawed for the reason that human beings are limited and flawed creatures. We are always, in a way, failures in love.
It is a truth that chimes with developmental psychology. There are the anxious experiences that must be borne for the infant to transcend their narcissism and grant that mother has interests other than itself. Though it is a struggle not without hope, Plato would add. To switch back to his description: if courageous and capable, the individual is likely to undergo a transformation in which the first yearnings for another human body subtly shift and begin to speak to them of a deeper desire.
A common adult manifestation of this movement is the perhaps surprising wish to have children with a person to whom you are attracted. Children, Plato explains, are a product of love’s spiritual desire for more from life: sexual relationships in human beings stirs up a longing that teenage lovers would never have dreamed of – a desire to overcome their egoism, felt as a longing to have and hold a new life sprung from their love.
It’s one form of adult love celebrated by Plato. Children can prove to be a great satisfaction. But they have a tendency to have a life of their own and routinely disrupt the hopes and longings of parents. So, individuals strive for other ways of embracing more from life, Plato continues, ways of transcending the boundaries of their own limited existence. There are the sciences and arts, friends and work, wealth and fame. Though, again, you do not have to look too hard to feel that they are likely to offer only fragile satisfaction as well.
There is an element in some of these activities that can mitigate the risk to a degree – that is, when they contribute to the common good. Plato suspected that this is why people seek to make contributions to the societies in which they live. That can take many forms. Individuals become artists not only for reasons of self-expression but to make public works. Engaging in research and science not only scratches a personal itch about what one wants to know but contributes to the accumulation of knowledge that links the individual to wider concerns. Others may devote their loves to upholding justice, caring for others, or laying down their life for their country.
Another aspect of love that builds in a degree of resilience is creativity. Plato points out that the love of friends, wealth or discovery may be possessive – as in, this is “my friend,” “my money,” “my insight.” But creativity may also take on a different tone, not possessive but generative. Possessive energies are transformed from being self-serving to being collaborative.
You can tell because when individuals collaborate on some project that they love, or when their collaboration is a commitment to each other born of love, the results are exponential. What they give birth to is more than either alone could have conceived. The beautiful ideas of one combine with those of another and a third thing is born. The lovers will themselves be changed by this process, as parents are when they have children. They will love something new that they could not have anticipated before their work of love began and it will take them out of themselves.
We are now a long way from the youthful desire for another body, or even the search for friends. Such is the transformative potential of love. But is there a fourth step to add to developmental psychology’s three? Does love afford another dimension of existence that, when we follow its path is opened up to us?
Certainly, many human beings have believed so, calling that dimension “God,” or “the transcendent,” or “infinite compassion.” The writer of the late fourteenth-century spiritual guide The Cloud of Unknowing talked of a “dart of longing love” that can penetrate these clouds of our unknowing. The Buddhist tradition has developed sophisticated practices that build lives of compassion which, in turn, promises a kind of awakening called enlightenment.
Plato believed so too. He made an observation something like this. What links the later creative activities of mature love with the first romantic urge is that they promise a kind of reversal. It is not we who must cling to love out of an act of desperation, but, rather, to mature in love is to discover that love is already flowing through us, has in a sense already made us. To borrow from developmental psychology: the young infant did not know its parent was there, though she or he was. Later, it did not know that the parent was supported by the love of others, though that is revealed when the child awakens to the reality of a third. The creative life is like that, too. It is born of the passion of others, always already “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
I like the analogy of the philologist, Owen Barfield: to be human is to be like an Aeolian harp. These musical instruments consist of a wooden box and sounding board, over which strings are stretched across a bridge. They look a little like a violin without the neck. Also, they are not played by a bow, as the violin is, but rather by the wind. Aeolian harps are placed in openings across which the wind may blow, perhaps at a window: Aeolus is the god of the wind. As the air current sweeps across the strings, so the music from the harp is heard shifting and evolving, rising and falling. The analogy is that we are the harp, and the wind is the love required to make the music. We have a creative part to play in the harmonies that emerge, though without the movement of the pre-existing love there could only be silence.
Still, the fragility persists. Love is always a scary force. In taking us out of ourselves, placing our lives in the love of others, it places our wellbeing in their hands, too. When things go well, this fires our creativity, our capacity to give, our passion for life. When we are let down or betrayed, love generates rage, envy, desolation, the desire for destruction. You are far more likely to be murdered by someone you love than by a stranger. It is friends who can hurt you the most, not people you don’t know.
For Plato, though, and other philosophers and theologians influenced by him, there is a way out of this terrible ambivalence. Mature love teaches us not to strive for and cling to what we think we desire, or only to turn to the love of others. It alerts us to a love that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, to deploy the formula of Augustine, the Christian theologian and philosopher. This can, at the last, always be relied upon. Augustine called that love God, the place in which the restless heart can find rest. The sufferings of life do not cease: love still calls us to love. Only now there is the sense that the hurt and struggle can be redeemed. Love’s greatest revelation is that the process of self-renunciation it leads us upon – and which developmental psychology has described so well in relation to early life – opens up a fourth dimension: a sense of divine love that underpins all the earlier growth and struggle. The revelation is summed up in the formula from the Christian tradition: God is love. The most basic truth in life is not that we yearn for more when clumsily we love, though we do, but that the constant, unclouded love of God yearns for us. Plato never puts its quite like that, though is clear that he felt love was the energy that can propel us towards intimations of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Parallel intuitions can be found in other wisdom traditions too.
Such insights are the opposite of the implicit assumptions we lived by when we were born into the world and struggled to grab and possess life, in the desperate need to survive. The truth we might eventually come to is that love’s desire is most deeply satisfied by letting go, by allowing, by receiving. It is not about trying to control life. That is a necessary strategy for a time, and at certain times, in order that we might make something of ourselves as human beings. We all do it. And yet, a different kind of presence can come through too. It was the most lovely of all. “What do I love when I love my God?” Augustine asks at the end of his Confessions. Is it the glories of creation, the intensity of existence, the wonder of the heavens, the silence of eternity? “I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things,” he continues, “and their beauty was all the answer they gave.” This is a love that does not seek to possess, or even to create, but to contemplate. It is the only final response to the natural desire for more. It is an extension of the observation that love thrives best when we do not gaze into each other’s eyes but turn together towards life. The promise is a kind of love that engages not just life, but the ground of being itself.
It seems to me that what has been learned of love from developmental psychology – the dynamic and momentum it gives to the unfolding of love in life – can naturally be continued to point in this divine direction. Ultimately, love is not from us. It made and makes us. Human love is the experience that inevitably oscillates between poles of possessing and releasing, struggle and rest, surface and depth, body and soul, pain and pleasure, terrestrial and celestial. And yet, without the higher poles, it may be mistaken for being defined by the possessing, struggle, surface, body and pain.
The divine element is, of course, the tricky element in a secular age. The desire to invest in family and friends, in work and creativity, is straightforward to accept – if often hard to pull off in life. That love might lead us on an erotic quest towards God may feel like a step too far. Perhaps family and friends, work and the like are enough. Maybe there is nothing more in life than life and so it is futile to seek the divine. Spiritual love is deluded love.
However, I suspect that this is a possibility that cannot be decided upon by reason or psychology, by myth or evidence alone. Ultimately, it can only be answered by the ever-expansive journey into life called love. That path is itself epistemologically revealing. It is integral to love’s transformative potential. To use Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, though she did not mean it in this way, there is such a thing as “love’s knowledge.” If there is a way back to God, only love will finally reveal it to us.
