Excerpts from “A General Theory of Love” by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
Excerpts from “A General Theory of Love”
by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses—a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began.
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Evolution has given mammals a shimmering conduit, and they use it to tinker with one another’s physiology, to adjust and fortify one another’s fragile neural rhythms in the collaborative dance of love. We call this mutually synchronizing exchange limbic regulation. The human body constantly fine-tunes many thousands of physiologic parameters—heart rate and blood pressure, body temperature, immune function, oxygen saturation, levels of sugars, hormones, salts, ions, metabolites. In a closed-loop design, each body would self-monitor levels and self-administer correctives, keeping its solitary system in continuous harmonious balance. But because human physiology is (at least in part) an open-loop arrangement, an individual does not direct all of his own functions. A second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and more—inside the body of the first. The reciprocal process occurs simultaneously: the first person regulates the physiology of the second, even as he himself is regulated. Neither is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete. Together they create a stable, properly balanced pair of organisms. And the two trade their complementary data through the open channel their limbic connection provides.
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That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own—not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain.
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Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.
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As a neural network sees more of the world, its ensuing quirks and kinks confound and complicate the human experience of love.
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Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see.
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The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable—the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. In the vistas of imagination, the self is a proud ship of state—subject to the winds and tides of circumstance, certainly, but bristling with masts and spars and beams, fairly bursting with solidity. We would scarcely imagine that identity could be as fluid as the seas that supposed self rides upon. E. E. Cummings paints a lover’s power to render identity in this way: your homecoming will be my homecoming— my selves go with you, only i remain; a shadow phantom effigy or seeming (an almost someone always who’s noone) a no one who, till their and your returning, spends the forever of his loneliness dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning feeling their stars have risen through your skies . . .
The reach of limbic Attractors stretches beyond the moment. The sine qua non of a neural network is its penchant for strengthening neuronal patterns in direct proportion to their use. The more often you do or think or imagine a thing, the more probable it is that your mind will revisit its prior stopping point. When the circuits are sufficiently well worn such that thoughts fly down them with little friction or resistance, that mental path has become a part of you—it is now a habit of speech, thought, action, attitude. Ongoing exposure to one person’s Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another—it also strengthens them. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain’s open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.
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We all embody an emotional force field that acts on the people we love, evoking the relationship attributes we know best. Our minds are in turn pulled by the emotional magnets of those close to us, transforming any landscape we happen to contemplate and painting it with the colors and textures they see.
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Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul. People differ in their proficiency at tracing the outlines of another self, and thus their ability to love also varies. A child’s early experience teaches this skill in direct proportion to his parents’ ability to know him. A steady limbic connection with a resonant parent lays down emotional expertise. A child can then look inside someone else, map an emotional vista, and respond to what he senses. Skewed Attractors impair a person’s ability to love freely and well. His heart’s gaze, in the manner of one whose eyes do not properly focus, will have the unsettling habit of looking beyond and behind the person in front of him. A heart thus displaced falters in its efforts to meet another’s rhythms, to catch another’s tempo and melody in the duet of love. Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other’s emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state of togetherness. The neurally ingrained Attractors of one lover warp the emotional virtuality of the other, shifting emotional perceptions— what he feels, sees, knows. When somebody loses his partner and says a part of him is gone, he is more right than he thinks. A portion of his neural activity depends on the presence of that other living brain. Without it, the electric interplay that makes up him has changed. Lovers hold keys to each other’s identities, and they write neurostructural alterations into each other’s networks. Their limbic tie allows each to influence who the other is and becomes. Mutuality has tumbled into undeserved obscurity by the primacy our society places on the art of the deal. The prevailing myth reaching most contemporary ears is this: relationships are 50-50. When one person does a nice thing for the other, he is entitled to an equally pleasing benefit—the sooner the better, under the terms of this erroneous dictum. The physiology of love is no barter. Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. Such a relationship is not 50-50—it’s 100-100. Each takes perpetual care of the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both thrive.
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Reason’s last step, wrote Blaise Pascal, is recognizing that an infinity of things surpass it. As a new millennium commences, science is beginning to approach that pinnacle of perspicacity. Although our culture may oppose them at every turn, people can still manage to lead successful lives, if they cultivate the connections their limbic brains demand. No matter what humanity’s future holds, we will never shed our heritage as neural organisms, mammals, primates. Because we are emotional beings, pain is inevitable and grief will come; because the world is neither equitable nor fair, the suffering will not be distributed evenly. A person who intuits the ways of the heart stands a better chance of living well. A society of those who do so holds a promise we can only guess at.
I loved this book so much when I first read it two decades ago, and it’s been one of the texts that has influenced what I understand about how love works…plus the capacity of the author’s to render biological ideas so lyrically appealed! The teachings about limbic regulation, physiology, relationality, attachment all relate to other teachings by John Bowlby and Dan Siegel. I also think the teachings are relevant to institutions and organizations, that the 50-50 myth operates at the level of teams, communities, partnerships, board relationships — and the concurrent reciprocity of 100-100 is what real organizational health looks like, not transactional accounting.
Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, A General Theory of Love (Random House, 2000), reissued by Vintage in 2001.
