Estudio del amor desde Roma hasta nuestros dias.

El Grupo Multimedia nos deja la siguiente información sobre el estudio del amor desde la Antigüedad. Está en inglés, si alguien tiene problemas que se pase por el foro (Dudas)  y se intentarán resolver:


I leave you here a little story of how the meaning of Love has been studied since the ancient Rome to our days.

Good evening gentlemen.2400 years ago, on a night much like tonight, a group of distinguished Athenian gentlemen got together for a dinner and drinking party. Before the party had progressed very far, one of the guests suggested that the evening be spent on a subject not commonly discussed by them. Tonight, I suggest we do the same. Tonight, gentlemen, we shall speak of love.

But, gentlemen, of what kind of love shall we discuss? All of us know that there are many kinds of love. The Greeks had different words to describe them. Agape was used to describe unselfish, all-giving, spiritual love. Storge was used to mean natural affection like parental love. Philia was used to describe a non-sexual, brotherly love. But these are not the kinds of love I wish to discuss. Tonight I want our attention to turn to what the Greeks called eros. This is romantic love…the love that describes a passionate and erotic, all consuming desire, both physical and emotional, for a very specific partner. This is the kind of love that has obsessed men and women since Adam and Eve. It has inspired poets, writers, and musicians down through the ages and across all cultures.

To be specific, however, tonight I want to explore what really happens physiologically to us when we fall in love. Interestingly, there were attempts to understand the physiology of romantic love down through the ages. In the western intellectual world, Plato was the first to try but the baton was soon passed to the medical world where it would remain for the next 2000 years. Because of the scientific revolution in medicine, the subject was essentially abandoned by the early 20th century. But, within the past two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest and subsequent scientific research. And, as I shall argue this evening, the ancient scientific understanding of the physiology of romantic love showed a prescience that is simply astonishing with today’s understanding. But in order to substantiate my hypothesis, I must first acquaint you with what the ancients believed happens when you fall in love.


The first attempt in the western philosophical tradition to understand the nature of love is found, of course, in Plato’s two great Socratic dialogues: the Phaedrus and the Symposium. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells us that love is a “sort of madness”(1) given to man as a “gift of the gods”(2). He continues by saying that when one is in love he is “touched by … madness”(3). In the Symposium, Socrates tells the assembled gentlemen at the dinner party that he has learned that love is always “needy”(4). Plato writes again in the Phaedrus:

In this state of mingled pleasure and pain the sufferer is perplexed by the strangeness of his experience and struggles helplessly; in his frenzy he cannot sleep at night or remain still by day, but his longing drives him wherever he thinks he may see the possessor of beauty.(5)

All of us around this table will recall that, for Plato, eros is ultimately a bridge that leads the lover on a transcendental journey to an understanding of ultimate spiritual beauty. But let’s make no mistake about it, gentlemen, Plato emphasizes that love is something that begins very viscerally…a psycho-physiologic human need or drive if you will, that leads to a sort of madness.

This concept of love being a state where one is out of control and exhibiting physical symptoms is articulated by one of the greatest love poets of the early Western tradition, Sappho. Gentlemen, let us listen to Sappho as she describes romantic love in the following fragment:

For I only, briefly, need glance at you to
Find my voice has gone and my tongue is broken,
And a flame has stolen beneath my skin, my
Eyes can no longer
See, my ears are ringing, while drops of sweat run
Down my trembling body, and I’ve turned paler
Than a wisp of straw and it seems to me I’m
Not far off dying.(6)

Burning skin? Eyes that do not see? Pallor? Ringing in the ears? Madness? Trembling? Inability to speak? It really seems as if Plato and Sappho are describing symptoms of some sort of disease? And, indeed, as Dr. Frank Tillis writes in his book, Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness:

Love is…associated with a wide range of physical ‘symptoms’. Lovers are often described as fevered, or pale and depleted—unable to sleep or eat…for as long as people have been writing about love, they have also been describing it as an illness.(7)

Paradoxically, although many of the symptoms of love do mimic those of an illness, there was a surprising lack of medical writing on the nature of love until we meet the great doctor of Roman antiquity, Galen. In his book, On Prognosis, Galen is called upon to cure Iustrus’s wife of insomnia. Although the woman was not helpful in answering questions as to her medical problem, Galen noted that when the name of a dancer, Plyades, was mentioned in her presence, her “expression and complexion changed” (8) and her “pulse became extremely irregular.”(9) The symptoms did not occur with the names of other dancers. Gentlemen, let us listen to Galen on perhaps the very first medical diagnosis of love in the Western tradition:

On the fourth evening, I kept very careful watch when it was announced that Plyades was dancing. And I noticed that the pulse was very much disturbed. Thus I found out that the woman was in love with Plyades, and by very careful watch on the succeeding days my discovery was confirmed. (10)

Galen was profoundly influenced by the ancient Greek model of disease that traditionally has been attributed to Hippocrates, the father of medicine. Hippocrates and his followers postulated that all disease was simply an imbalance of four bodily humours: yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. (Figure 1) Using this scientific framework, Galen hypothesized that romantic love, because of its physical symptoms, could be understood physiologically using the Hippocratic humoural model. Galen jettisoned the Platonic model, hypothesizing that when one falls in love, the body’s four humours become unbalanced causing the symptoms one sees in lovers in love. Dr. Tallis summarizes:

Galen was happy to follow the Hippocratic tradition…The symptoms of love were nothing to do with divine intervention. He proposed that the lovesick individual, under the influence of a strong passion, experiences a humoral (or chemical) imbalance, which in turn promotes the occurrence of physical symptoms. (11)

With the fall of the Roman empire and Europe’s entry into the Dark Ages, subsequent scientific inquiry on romantic love was passed on to the intellectuals of the Arabic speaking world. As they rediscovered the classical writings of Hippocrates and Galen, Muslim physicians readily embraced the Greek paradigm for the understanding of disease. One of the greatest Arab physicians of the medieval period was Ibn Sina, originally from Iran. In his book, The Canon of Medicine, Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE) agreed with Galen. Ibn Sina writes that the symptoms of love sickness are due to “the result of a chemical imbalance brought about by…obsessing about the loved one.” (12)

As Europe slowly emerged from the medieval period and rediscovered the classical tradition, the physiological understanding of romantic love being caused by an imbalance of the four basic body humours persisted. In Elizabethan England, there was even an attempt to understand why romantic love was more common in the young as compared to the aged using the humoural model. In the book, Not Wisely but Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies, the author Franklin Dickey explains the Elizabethan theory as follows:

…in youth the sanguine humor,…hot and moist, was at its peak; since love gained its mastery by heating the blood, the young, whose blood was hot, were amorous…the old on the other hand, whose temperament was usually dominated by cold and watery phlegm, (and) naturally were able to resist the heat of love more readily (than) could the young. In middle age… the blood was usually tempered with more of the cold humors, black bile… and phlegm. Love could not readily cause…excessive heat....(13)

As we all know at this table, from the middle of the 16th century through the late 19th century, European scientists began to chip away at the ancient Greek humoural model of understanding disease. New findings in anatomy by Vesalius as well as Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood were like battering rams on the established theory. (14) Thomas Willis’s book, The Anatomy of the Brain in 1664, also served to undermine the old foundation because he argued that “psychological problems previously attributed to either supernatural or humoural causes were, in fact, the result of neurological abnormalities.” (15) In the 1800’s when germs were shown to be the cause of many diseases, the old humoural system of understanding disease essentially crumbled. Preoccupied with understanding and treating physical disease, the world of emotions was relegated to a new medical discipline called psychiatry.

Freud, psychiatry’s earliest and most prolific theorist, argued that the sexual drive was one of the most basic human motivators. He termed it Eros or life drive. But for Freud, human romantic love was all about sex. As Dr. Tallis points out:

It is now widely accepted that Freud had little to say about love, largely because of his preoccupation with sex. In Freud’s scheme, love tends to be viewed as a secondary…by-product of frustrated libidinous urges.(16)

Because of Freud’s huge influence, psychiatry concerned itself very little with the phenomenon of romantic love. Psychiatry’s cousin, psychology, also did the same. In a 1958 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, its president, Dr. Harlow stated the following:

So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been better written by poets and novelists.(17)

Yes, gentlemen, as mentioned at the beginning of this paper, by the mid 20th century there was no real physiological understanding of romantic love because the modern scientific world had simply decided to ignore it. 2000 years of cogitation had brought us back to our writers, poets and musicians. Perhaps, Dr. Harlow should have asked Sinatra to summarize the crux of his address by singing the song “How Little We Know” at that meeting in 1958.

However a nearly contemporaneous discovery was made that had profound effects in all fields of medicine. That discovery was the elucidation of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, and, with it, a modern renaissance in basic biological and medical research was begun. The new field most germane to our discussion tonight is that of neuroscience that developed using the tools from biochemistry, molecular biology, and physics. This new discipline seeks to understand the chemical and dynamic workings of the brain. Bioassays of neurotransmitters and new methods of imaging the brain, both in its static state and in its functional state, developed so, that within the past twenty years, the tools were finally in place to allow researchers to take a new and serious look at the physiology of that most human subject, romantic love.