Sue Johnson

Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.

Love has an immense ability to help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.

love as “changeable, transient and accidental.”

We work longer and longer hours, commute farther and farther distances, and thus have fewer and fewer opportunities to develop close relationships.

So it should come as no surprise that people recently surveyed in the U.S. and Canada rate a satisfying love relationship as their number-one goal, ahead of financial success and satisfying career.

It is, then, imperative that we comprehend what love is, how to make it, and how to make it last

We do manage to mate without love!

In the 1940s American analyst René Spitz coined the term “failure to thrive” for children separated from their parents and caught in debilitating grief.

Bowlby insisted the problems were mostly external, rooted in real relationships with real people.

Later, in 1938, as a beginning clinician under the supervision of the noted analyst Melanie Klein, Bowlby was assigned a young hyperactive boy who had an extremely anxious mother.