Love requires an expert
it has no use for ignoramuses.

            Swahili lyric (contemporary, tr. Jan Knappert)

It's fair, at least, to say that we can learn about love from experience, from our mistakes.
Often what we learn, though, is something we've already been told a million times, but somehow never before had it sunk in.
And even when we come to feel we know it, still we can scarcely formulate it as science.

The curious earmark of psychology, unlike any other of the sciences, is that in attending to one's proper object of study, the scientist's mind is attending to mind itself.
To interpose a microscope or a measuring rod must be misguided.

When we hark back to something that happened last week, something we've heard about, something we've read, by examining our image of the situation at that time we can put easily into words how that particular event is special, how it feels different from other events: it may touch the heart, hurt one's feelings, make us livid with rage, teach something important and real.

The natural language of storytelling is richly endowed for specifying the particular details that make clear why things work out as they do.
Stories are the true popular vehicle of psychological insight.
The proper language of psychology must therefore be literary language.
Storytelling is a skill we all share, but also one that can be refined and perfected to any Nth degree.
The writings of the greatest storytellers will attain a degree of literary immortality.

So much of what we do and feel we are unable to speak about, are effectively unaware of.
Our goal here is articulacy-- if we can't speak out about our feelings we are just dumb, inarticulate.

The duality of substance and style in literature has been long debated.
Beauty is truth, said Keats, and truth beauty.
But can't one speak truth awkwardly, dangle a pretty lie?
Surely the pretty lie when pierced looks hollow and flat, while the awkward truth comes to shine brighter and brighter, as we gradually find words that say it well.
The deeper the beauty, then, the deeper the truth.
Our aesthetic ear is more than half determined by our subtle intuitions of substantial reality.
And the solemn majesty of the greatest art grows from a rare lucid inner clarity confronting the deepest mysteries of life.

Poetry is an art of metaphor.
One searches for sharp, fresh, vivid images that ring true.
In trying to summarize any situation we sort out its main lines and try to find a single image that shows these most clearly.
This skill is the greatest hallmark of art, none too common.
Yet once a fine metaphorical image is found, other readers can grasp it easily-- the human mind is perfectly prepared for metaphorical reasoning.

It might be objected that literary expressions have no real referents, that they exist in some realm of pure subjective delusion.
At some point, western intellectual culture seems to have lost its faith in words, in the power of poetry.
But I think we can come to a deep knowledge of the neuron and the gland only through the subtle guidance of our natural poetic intuition.

The chasm between the mystically-tinged poetry of love and love's endocrinology may seem unbridgeable, it may seem that any bridging would ultimately have to bring love low.
The outlines of an escape from this threat, though, were proposed in 1974 by Thomas Pynchon in his binding-buster Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon, trained as an engineer, put little effort into advancing his storyline but instead lavished unparalleled attention on many and various questions about the logical relations between the sciences and art. Among many other insights, Pynchon suggested a basis for a new, mystical view of organic chemistry:

[quotes][doctrine of signs]

That even these tenuous links can have been so clearly postulated encourages one to hope that the brain's whole intricate biological mechanism of enzymes and ion-barriers will eventually be vivified for psychological scientists with a poetic, spiritual dimension.

The literature of romance has special ways of speaking about the heart.
Physiology has denied the intelligence of the heart-muscle, but subjectivity finds in that quarter an unmistakeable epic of subtle discriminations:
The heart skips a beat, is troubled, suffers pangs, breaks, is stolen, is given, swells full to bursting with joy.
The neurons that drive the heart are far older than those in the brain.
They began some hundred million years ago to dwell on many subtle biological problems of kinship, altruism and sexuality.
That this groundwork would have been supplanted entirely is not nature's way, they must rather have been built upon, brain serving heart and not vice versa.
We need desperately to remember the functions of our hearts, to reclaim our inwards, our instincts, to conceive a new Theory of the Heart...

If one accepts that literary language may serve as a useful tool in psychological study, what then is the next step?
One might begin to take a broad inventory of literature, of common sense, starting surely with the classics, picking out from them short paragraphs and single sentences that speak tellingly of human emotions, human events.
[the accumulation of evanescent detail]
Trying to build a systematic structure out of these well-worn cliches and stunning artistic insights, a thesaurus of emotional nuances, an analytic anthology of human thought.
Even a simple thesaurus of single words, if thoughtfully arranged, could make a useful object of contemplation, a jumping-off point.
Out of such a solid foundation one could then try to draw those natural lines that bring into focus the elemental structures of our psychological makeup.
We might call this technique literary behaviorism.
There is nothing in current psychological methodolgy that offers any improvement over this, nothing.
We may expect it eventually to deliver on the unfulfilled promises of the phenomenological psychologists, to build a science on the raw materials of subjective observation.
We begin as scientists should with the accumulation of detailed observations.

If we wish to know the human spirit we must come to terms with all the breadth of it, nothing explained away, nothing generalized out of existence.
Let all our human inclinations speak for themselves.
Seeing all sides, inside and outside, good and evil.
There is no place for generalizations in psychology at this early point, no place for judgments.
Detail is all.

That a work is patently fiction is no reason to doubt that its descriptions are relevant to human psychology.
Psychology has no choice but to be a science of the subjective: the mind is the organ of subjectivity.
(Some quotes may be more revealing of the nature of the speaker, though, than the truths of their subjects.)
Proofs of our theories should come later, but for now we seek simply to generate theories we may later test.

Since the criteria for selecting our one-sentence "nuances" must anyway first be wholly subjective, we may try aesthetic interest as a workable place to start.
We are pleased as we read a story with those instants where the author brings up something unexpected and yet true, so true.
We feel that tingle in the spine that Nabokov called the only real criterion of Art.
While clarity and plausibility serve as our twin guiding lights, we will pursue every literary extract that evokes anything like this shiver.
Though this method may lead us to overlook some important areas, especially regions so familiar as to have faded from current interest, in the process of analysing the extraordinary we trust we will be able to bring back into perspective also the merely ordinary.
We will, with some regret, pass by those nuances phrased so as to resist neat extraction.
But these are surprisingly few, anyway.

In advance of taking on the full breadth of psychology, this work accepts the narrowed focus of stories about romance, none too narrow for all that.
A simple broad structure emerges immediately-- desiring, being desired, rejecting, being rejected, accepting, being accepted, ceasing to love, never ceasing.

The book that follows explains simply, rationally, and, as it were, mathematically the various feelings which succeed each other to become, in their entirety, the passion called love.

            Stendhal "Love" (28)

            Stendhal (28)

            Marguerite Yourcenar (xx 1903-87) Coup de Grace (1939)