The power of love

We don’t talk enough about love these days, or at least not about real love. A wise British doctor once wrote, ‘by far the most significant discovery of mental science is the power of love to protect and restore the mind’. So why is love so important to our wellbeing? American psychoanalyst Reuben Fine said that at bottom the psycho-analytic explanation of mental illness is a simple equation: love = mental health; lovelessness = mental illness. In my opinion the same could be said of all illnesses. Across a wide spectrum of therapists, psychoanalysts, client-centred therapists, reality therapists, transactional analysis, behaviourists, doctors, naturopaths, body workers the same equation holds true: we must love and be loved if we are to be mentally and physically wholesome beings. A loveless life is a lonely, barren, joyless treadmill, and Plato talked of this thousands of years ago saying, ‘He whom love touches not walks in darkness’. We have this illusionary idea that life is long and love is short, but the truth is life is short and love lasts forever.

Seventy-five years ago Freud recognised this also when he commented, ‘A strong ego is a protection against diseases, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we might not fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love’.This idea that disease may result from a disharmonious relationship between humans and their environment is far from new, but it has been submerged by the spectacular success of Pasteur’s germ theory. At least Pasteur relented at the end and agreed it was the whole terrain of the body that was responsible for disease, not just an invading pathogen, but his reassessment didn’t go far enough. He failed to include the human factor. Today even the World Health Organisation has caught up declaring, ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.

Certainly we now acknowledge that stress, the type of person we are, how we evaluate and interpret the world and, above all, how we interact and react to others have a profound effect on our health. These factors can alter our brain chemistry in subtle or dramatic ways. So much so, that we can become prone to severe depression, schizophrenia, dwarfism (a failure to grow to any height beyond a few feet) or suicidal tendencies. Stress as noted previously, can affect the immune system, and the fatty lipids in the blood causing a steep rise in cholesterol production. It can also cause gastrointestinal, respiratory and endocrinal chaos. What we frequently forget is that the deprivation of love is a major stressor. Hans Selye the famous Yugaslavian endocrinologist said it himself – ‘Love they neighbour is one of the sagest bits of medical advice ever given’.

People who scoff at the validity of love and pursue the germ theory with cyclopidian passion should look at the tragic consequences of early love deprivation chartered by the Austian-American psychotherapist Reneé Spitz’s work in the 1940’s with institutionalised babies in foundling homes where 37 percent of the children there died before the age of three. He compared this environment to those of a nursery in a penal institution where the mother’s were still present. Here even though the mothers were incarcerated, there were no deaths among the children. Most intriguing was that the conditions of medical care, hygiene and nutrition were superior in the foundling homes where over a third of the children were dying. In this landmark study the children raised by their mothers also had on average a 25 percent higher IQ than the foundlings.

Lack of love can literally kill, but an abundance of love has remarkable powers of healing. The psychotherapist Harold Skeel’s thirty year study of mentally retarded two year olds proved the level of healing love brings. Half the children were raised by substitute mothers, who were themselves mentally retarded. The other half remained behind in the orphanage. Those with surrogate mothers increased their IQ by 28 points, while the institutionalised children experienced a 30 points decrease in their IQs. Thirty years later when he traced both groups, all those children who had had surrogate mothers were self-supporting members of the community, while the institutionalised children were now either dead or still in institutions.

We may run away from love, but love never departs.

Such is the proven power of love to organise, nourish, prolong and preserve life. Love is much more than an emotion. It is the ultimate universal truth. Beneath every pain, problem or suffering, love shines on unchanged at the core of all things. We may run away from love, but love never departs.