A psychoanalysis of love: The patient with deadly longing

Freud made some seriously mistaken assumptions about mature love based on h is notion about the role unconscious guilt plays in human affairs. Clinical data are presented here about a young man, who implicated in the suicides of two of his colleagues, was more concerned with the failure of his love a ffair in college than with guilt for his involvement in the suicides. By tr acing the functions of shame-a concept the author contends that Freud faile d to understand properly-in the patient's relationship with his parents, th e author formulates a proactive and optimistic theory of mature love to rep lace Freud's pessimistic and reductionistic explanation.