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Infatuation, also known as being smitten, is the personal state of being overly driven by an uninformed or otherwise unreasonable passion, usually towards another person for whom one has developed strong romantic or sexual feelings.
Psychologist Frank D. Cox said that infatuation could be distinguished from romantic love only when looking back on a particular case of being attracted to a person but which may also evolve into a mature love. [1] Goldstein and Brandon describe infatuation as the first stage of a relationship before developing into a mature intimacy. [2] Whereas love is "a warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion to another person", infatuation is "a feeling of foolish or obsessively strong love for, admiration for, or interest in someone or something", a shallower "honeymoon phase" in a relationship. [3] Ian Kerner, a sex therapist, stated that infatuation usually occurred at the beginning of relationships, which is "[...] marked by a sense of excitement and euphoria, and it's often accompanied by lust and a feeling of newness and rapid expansion with a person". [3]
The psychologist Adam Phillips has described how illusions of infatuations inevitably resulted in disappointment when learning the truth about a lover. [4] Adolescents often make people an object of extravagant, short-lived passion or temporary love. [5]
"It is customary to view young people's dating relationships and first relationships as puppy love or infatuation"; [6] and if infatuation is both an early stage in a deepening sequence of love/attachment, and at the same time a potential stopping point, it is perhaps no surprise that it is a condition especially prevalent in the first, youthful explorations of the world of relationships. Thus "the first passionate adoration of a youth for a celebrated actress whom he regards as far above him, to whom he scarcely dares lift his bashful eyes" [7] may be seen as part of an "infatuation with celebrity especially perilous with the young". [8]
Admiration plays a significant part in this, as "in the case of a schoolgirl crush on a boy or on a male teacher. The girl starts off admiring the teacher ... [then] may get hung up on the teacher and follow him around". [9] Then there may be shame at being confronted with the fact that "you've got what's called a crush on him ... Think if someone was hanging around you, pestering and sighing". [10] Of course, "sex may come into this ... with an infatuated schoolgirl or schoolboy" [11] as well, producing the "stricken gaze, a compulsive movement of the throat ... an 'I'm lying down and I don't care if you walk on me, babe', expression" [12] of infatuation. Such a cocktail of emotions "may even falsify the 'erotic sense of reality': when a person in love estimates his partner's virtues he is usually not very realistic ... projection of all his ideals onto the partner's personality". [13]
It is this projection that differentiates infatuation from love, according to the spiritual teacher Meher Baba: "In infatuation, the person is a passive victim of the spell of conceived attraction for the object. In love there is an active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love." [14]
Distance from the object of infatuation—as with celebrities—can help maintain the infatuated state. A time-honoured cure for the one who "has a tendre ... infatuated" is to have "thrown them continually together ... by doing so you will cure ... [or] you will know that it is not an infatuation". [15]
The possible effects of infatuation and love relationships on the academic behaviour of adolescent students were examined in research. The outcome shows that most of the participants had distraction, stress, and poor academic performance as a result of love relationships and infatuation. Furthermore, the findings highlighted that this has a detrimental effect on learning behaviour among teenagers who are in romantic or infatuated relationships. [16]
Three types of infatuation have been identified by Brown: the first type is characterized by being "carried away, without insight or proper evaluative judgement, by blind desire"; the second, closely related, by being "compelled by a desire or craving over which the agent has no control" while "the agent's evaluation ... may well be sound although the craving or love remains unaffected by it"; and the third is that of "the agent who exhibits bad judgement and misvaluation for reasons such as ignorance or recklessness". [17]
In psychoanalysis, a sign that the method is taking hold is "the initial infatuation to be observed at the beginning of treatment", [18] the beginning of transference. The patient, in Freud's words, "develops a special interest in the person of the doctor ... never tires in his home of praising the doctor and of extolling ever new qualities in him". [19] What occurs, "it is usually maintained ... is a sort of false love, a shadow of love", replicating in its course the infatuations of "what is called true love". [20]
However, psychoanalyst Janet Malcolm claims that it is wrong to convince the patient "that their love is an illusion ... that it's not you she loves. Freud was off base when he wrote that. It is you. Who else could it be?" [21] —thereby taking "the question of what is called true love ... further than it had ever been taken". [22]
Conversely, in countertransference, the therapist may become infatuated with his/her client: "very good-looking ... she was the most gratifying of patients. She made literary allusions and understood the ones he made ... He was dazzled by her, a little in love with her. After two years, the analysis ground down to a horrible halt". [23]
Infatuations need not only involve people, but can extend to objects, activities, and ideas. "Men are always falling in love with other men ... with their war heroes and sport heroes": [24] with institutions, discourses and role models. Thus for example Jung's initial "'unconditional devotion' to Freud's theories and his 'no less unconditional veneration' of Freud's person' was seen at the time by both men as a 'quasi-religious infatuation' to ... a cult object"; [25] while Freud in turn was "very attracted by Jung's personality", [26] perhaps "saw in Jung an idealized version of himself": [27] a mutual admiration society—"intellectually infatuated with one another". [28]
But there are also collective infatuations: "we are all prone to being drawn into social phantasy systems". [29] Thus, for instance, "the recent intellectual infatuation with structuralism and post-structuralism" [30] arguably lasted at least until "September 11 ended intellectual infatuation with postmodernism" [31] as a whole.
Economic bubbles thrive on collective infatuations of a different kind: "all boom-bust processes contain an element of misunderstanding or misconception", [32] whether it is the "infatuation with ... becoming the latest dot.com billionaire", [33] or the one that followed with subprime mortgages, once "Greenspan had replaced the tech bubble with a housing bubble". [34] As markets "swung virtually overnight from euphoria to fear" in the credit crunch, even the most hardened market fundamentalist had to concede that such "periodic surges of euphoria and fear are manifestations of deep-seated aspects of human nature" [35] —whether these are enacted in home-room infatuations or upon the global stage.
Shakespeare's sonnets have been described as a "Poetics for Infatuation"; as being dominated by one theme, and "that theme is infatuation, its initiation, cultivation, and history, together with its peaks of triumph and devastation"—a lengthy exploration of the condition of being "subject to the appropriate disorders that belong to our infatuation ... the condition of infatuation". [36] In Ivan Turgenev's First Love , a novella from 1860, 16-year-old Woldemar becomes rapturously infatuated with Zinaida, the beautiful daughter of a princess who lives next to his house. Even though she does spend time with him, his intense infatuation is unrequited and he sinks into depression.
In psychology, fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery. Fantasies are generally associated with scenarios that are impossible or unlikely to happen.
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Free association is the expression of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
In psychoanalysis, psychosexual development is a central element of the sexual drive theory. According to Freud, personality develops through a series of childhood stages in which pleasure seeking energies from the child become focused on certain erogenous areas. An erogenous zone is characterized as an area of the body that is particularly sensitive to stimulation. The five psychosexual stages are the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital. The erogenous zone associated with each stage serves as a source of pleasure. Being unsatisfied at any particular stage can result in fixation. On the other hand, being satisfied can result in a healthy personality. Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced frustration at any of the psychosexual developmental stages, they would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder.
Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely concerned feelings from a primary relationship during childhood.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, sometimes titled Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, is a 1905 work by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author advances his theory of sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood.
In psychology, intellectualization (intellectualisation) is a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling. It involves emotionally removing one's self from a stressful event. Intellectualization may accompany, but is different from, rationalization, the pseudo-rational justification of irrational acts.
Heinz Hartmann, was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is considered one of the founders and principal representatives of ego psychology.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego ideal is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become. It consists of "the individual's conscious and unconscious images of what he would like to be, patterned after certain people whom ... he regards as ideal."
Obsessive love disorder (OLD) is a proposed condition in which one person feels an overwhelming obsessive desire to possess and protect another person, sometimes with an inability to accept failure or rejection. Symptoms include an inability to tolerate any time spent without that person, obsessive fantasies surrounding the person, and spending inordinate amounts of time seeking out, making, or looking at images of that person.
Feminists have long struggled with Sigmund Freud's classical model of gender and identity development, which centers on the Oedipus complex. Freud's model, which became integral to orthodox psychoanalysis, suggests that because women lack the visible genitals of the male, they feel they are "missing" the most central characteristic necessary for gaining narcissistic value—therefore developing feelings of gender inequality and penis envy. In his late theory on the feminine, Freud recognized the early and long lasting libidinal attachment of the daughter to the mother during the pre-oedipal stages. Feminist psychoanalysts have confronted these ideas and reached different conclusions. Some generally agree with Freud's major outlines, modifying it through observations of the pre-Oedipal phase. Others reformulate Freud's theories more completely.
Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified. The roots of the concept can be found in Freud's writings. The three most prominent concepts of identification as described by Freud are: primary identification, narcissistic (secondary) identification and partial (secondary) identification.
Fixation is a concept that was originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.
In psychoanalysis, foreclosure is a specific psychical cause for psychosis, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, "the international authority".
Transference neurosis is a term that Sigmund Freud introduced in 1914 to describe a new form of the analysand's infantile neurosis that develops during the psychoanalytic process. Based on Dora's case history, Freud suggested that during therapy the creation of new symptoms stops, but new versions of the patient's fantasies and impulses are generated. He called these newer versions "transferences" and characterized them as the substitution of the analyst for a person from the patient's past. According to Freud's description: "a whole series of psychological experiences are revived not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the analyst at the present moment". When transference neurosis develops, the relationship with the therapist becomes the most important one for the patient, who directs strong infantile feelings and conflicts towards the therapist, e.g. the patient may react as if the analyst is his/her father.
In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex refers to a son's sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, first formed during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. A daughter's attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine Oedipus complex. The general concept was considered by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), although the term itself was introduced in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).