Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion

This groundbreaking study has been widely hailed for its focus on a human
emotion generally considered impervious to rational analysis: romantic,
passionate love. Ethel Person views romantic love as a powerful agent of change,
arguing that it is as central to human culture as it is to human existence. This
new edition of Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters emphasizes the relevance of
passion not only to lovers but also to mental health professionals whose
patients often enter treatment because of love-related issues-from the inability
to love or make a commitment to the perils of extramarital love to love sickness
or loss of love. She forthrightly addresses not only the power of love to unlock
the soul but also its inherent paradoxes and conflicts.

Employing a
philosophical perspective in order to understand the existential dilemmas posed
by love, and a cultural perspective in order to understand its cultural
variability, Dr. Person breaks with contemporary intellectual and philosophical
dismissive assumptions about romantic love. She acknowledges love's vital
importance and power, proposing that passion serves an important function not
only for the individual but also for the culture while charging psychoanalysis
with a reductionist emphasis on sexuality and psychopathology that has narrowed
the focus of inquiry into love. Among the issues she discusses are: romantic
love's sources in our early lives, its relationship to imagination and
creativity, and its capacity to enable the lover to transcend the self how
romantic love often demands a reordering of values and promotes personal growth
by exposing the self to new risks and possibilities the transformational
potential of transference love in the therapy process flaws in the common
misperception that women are more influenced by romantic love than men
considerations of homosexual love, love across generations, and love triangles,
focusing on the individual growth that can result from such relationships

Citing accounts of love drawn from literature, film, and real life,
Person focuses on the lover's internal soliloquy and external dialogue with the
beloved that can develop over an individual's life. An uplifting resource for
people experiencing failing or unorthodox romances, Dreams of Love and Fateful
Encounters boldly takes on issues pertinent to lovers, to professionals who
encounter patients for whom key conflicts revolve around romantic love, and to
anyone who has struggled to understand the importance of romantic love in his or
her own life.