Reference no: EM131540678
The Role of Love in Personality Theory
Forum Assignment for the Week:
Choose at least three (3) different theoretical perspectives that have been covered in this course to date and discuss how the construct of love is conceptualized by each theoretical framework. How is love defined? What role does it have in development and the human condition? Which view appeals to you the most? Why?
Reply to the following response with 200 words minimum. (please make response as if having a conversation, respond directly to some of the statements in below post.)
Freud's psychoanalytic theory is important because he viewed love as a feeling that comes from sexual instincts. In the oral stage of development the child, the mother becomes the child's first object of love, then in a later stage sexual satisfaction is given by a sexual partner.
The feeling that accompanying mature sexual attraction is love. According to Freud, what a person is willing to do for love, is actually done just for sex, in essence to preserve the continuation of human reproduction.
Erikson focused just on the 6th stage of psychosocial development. He focused on when the person is in their 20's and established identity as an adult as the time when mature love develops for a person.
He also mentions intimacy and isolation, where the person is ready to commit to another person in order to form an intimate relationship, and experience love. He thought that only those who have found their identity as a person would be able to experience true intimacy and therefore real love, and saw love itself to be the result of normal, healthy development in a person.
Shaver had a modern approach that used models of attachment that were learned during someone's childhood that could account for differences that someone's has in the quality of their adult relationships.
Basically, he thought that a child's attachment relationship could be seen in their adult relationships as well. Secure lovers, avoidant lovers, and anxious- ambivalent lovers are the 3 types of romantic attachment styles that Shaver came up with.
Love could be defined by early childhood experiences, or the amount of dopamine we have, or by a biological need to produce. Love does possess a level of commitment to want to have a relationship with the person that you love, not necessarily an intimate relationship but some kind of relationship.
If we take the cognitive approach to love, we would have to classify different types of love. Since our thoughts are so involved with our feelings, there are many different kinds of love.
If I had to pick one, I agree more with Eriksons view, that in our early 20's when we are able to find our identity, we are capable of having a real true love.
Love that I felt when I was 16 is different than love I feel for someone now, but everything is different about it, the person, and the person that I have grown into, the more that I mature as an adult, I am able to seriously narrow down what I am looking for in another person, and what my deal breakers are. Love is defined as a set of feelings that equals a commitment to someone else.