3 Definitions of Love

William Blake, Adam and Eve Sleeping (1808)

1. “ ‘What is love,’ Skinner wrote, ‘except another name for the use of positive reinforcement?’ ” [Tim Wu, “Bigger Brother,” The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020]

2. “It is Freud’s honesty that rises above his ambitions as a scientist and forces him to acknowledge that this thing called transference-love is a pretty wobbly notion, if not a cover-up for the attraction that develops between a man and a woman who meet every day in a small room and talk about intimate things while one of them is lying down.” [Janet Malcolm, “Lovesick,” The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020]

3. “Love as we experience it is love for the Unattainable Lady, the Iseult who is ‘ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself.’ ” [John Updike, “More Love in the Western World,” The New Yorker, August 24, 1963).