In: Peele, S., with Brodsky, A. (1975), Love and Addiction. New York: Taplinger.
© 1975 Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky.
Reprinted with permission from Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc.

"I never saw a more promising inclination. He was growing quite inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every time they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball he offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to dance, and I spoke to him twice myself, without receiving an answer. Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?"
—JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice

There is an understandable resistance to the idea that a human relationship can be equivalent psychologically to a drug addiction. Yet it is not unreasonable to look for addiction between lovers when psychologists find the roots of drug addiction in childhood dependency needs and stunted family relationships. Chein, Winick, and other observers interpret drugs to be a kind of substitute for human ties. In this sense, addictive love is even more directly linked to what are recognized to be the sources of addiction than is drug dependency.

Almost everyone knows of people who replace romantic relationships with other kinds of escapes, including drug escapes, at least until the next relationship comes along. Immediately after or immediately before an affair, such individuals are deeply immersed in psychiatry, religion, alcohol, marijuana, and the like. Just as some addicts shift between opiate, alcohol, and barbiturate addictions, so we find others using drugs interchangeably with all-consuming systems of belief or social involvements. Consider this testimony by a member of a fanatical religious commune: "I used to do acid, chug wine. I thought it was the answer. But it didn't satisfy, just like everything else. I went to a head shrink.... Nothing ever did satisfy till I came to Jesus." He might have added, "I used to make it with chicks," for other converts are the spurned lovers who in an earlier era would have entered a convent or monastery.

I know of a man who started drinking heavily after a long-time woman friend left him. He wrote about his reactions at the time of the breakup:

Since Linda left I mainly just lie in bed. I'm just too weak to move, and I have the chills all the time.... I've been crying a lot.... I try to calm myself by drinking the scotch my sister left here.... I feel so horrible, so dispossessed—like the real me doesn't exist anymore.

He couldn't sleep, and his heartbeat sometimes sped up frighteningly when he wasn't doing anything. These are symptoms of acute withdrawal. We know they can occur—perhaps quite often in certain groups and at certain ages—when one is deprived of a lover. Popular music sings paeans to the experience as a hallmark of true love: "When I lost my baby, I almost lost my mind . . . Since you left me baby, my whole life is through." What is there about love that produces withdrawal in people we have all known, maybe even in ourselves? Can we envision a kind of love that does not bring such devastation in its wake? Let us look closely at how "love" can be an addiction, and how addictive love differs from genuine love.

In a monograph entitled "Being in Love and Hypnosis," Freud noted important parallels between love and another psychologically compelling process—hypnotism. According to Freud, a person's self-love can be transferred from the person's own ego to a loved object. When this occurs, the other person more and more gains "possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego." The ultimate development of this sort of love is a state where the lover's ego "is impoverished, it has surrendered itself to the object, it has substituted the object for its own most important constituent." Freud goes on to say:

From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, toward the hypnotist as toward the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject's own initiative.... The hypnotist [as a model of a loved other] is the sole object, and no attention is paid to any but him.

Love is an ideal vehicle for addiction because it can so exclusively claim a person's consciousness. If, to serve as an addiction, something must be both reassuring and consuming, then a sexual or love relationship is perfectly suited for the task. If it must also be patterned, predictable, and isolated, then in these respects, too, a relationship can be ideally tailored to the addictive purpose. Someone who is dissatisfied with himself or his situation can discover in such a relationship the most encompassing substitute for self-contentment and the effort required to attain it.

When a person goes to another with the aim of filling a void in himself, the relationship quickly becomes the center of his or her life. It offers him a solace that contrasts sharply with what he finds everywhere else, so he returns to it more and more, until he needs it to get through each day of his otherwise stressful and unpleasant existence. When a constant exposure to something as necessary in order to make life bearable, an addiction has been brought about, however romantic the trappings. The ever-present danger of withdrawal creates an ever-present craving.

Who is the Interpersonal Addict?

Since the person who addicts himself to a lover has essentially the same feelings of inadequacy as the drug addict, why should such an individual choose another person, rather than a drug, for the object of his addiction? One characteristic which distinguishes the two groups of addicts is their social class. Opiate use is found primarily in people in lower social and economic positions, especially racial minorities. Lower-class whites more normally take to alcohol as their escape. Middle-class Americans, on the other hand, while not quite as prone to alcoholism and while certainly not interested in heroin, are no less subject to addictive tendencies; they just express them differently.