M. Scott Peck was a psychiatrist and popular spiritual writer back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The book that made him famous was “The Road Less Traveled”. In that book he defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” He describes love as a process of self-evolution, even if the object of one’s love is another. It is through the process of extending oneself that love is manifest. It is the extending of oneself that brings about the slow transformation of the person.
He lays great stress on love as an act of will; that is, it involves both intention and action. We are not forced to love. It is a choice we make when we decide to extend ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth. To underscore this idea, he distinguishes “falling in love” from “love” per se. He describes “falling in love” as some-thing that occurs only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. It is also something that is temporary, it is an emotion that subsides; the feeling of ecstatic lovingness passes. We fall out of love and then end the relationship or choose to continue the relationship. He describes the experience of “falling in love” as a collapse of a section of an individual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden explosive pouring of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic relief from existential loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most people as ecstatic. In a sense, it is a regression to infancy and the initial unity experienced with one’s mother.
Sooner or later reality asserts itself and we discover that the experience of ecstatic union is based on an illusion. Our ego boundaries reassert themselves and we find our beloved to be a stranger, whom we must get to know for himself or herself if we are to remain in any type of relationship with the person.
“Falling in love” is not an act of the will. It is not a conscious choice. Love requires the extension of one’s limits to be open to another person. Falling in love is not an extension of one’s limits (a choice) but a collapse of one’s limits. Real love is a permanently enlarging experience but “falling in love” is not. Peck suggests that “falling in love” is simply a genetically deter-mined instinctual component of mating behavior. That is, it is an instinctual response to certain stimuli that serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as enhance the survival of the species.
He argues that “falling in love” does have some similarities to real love, in that the process of love involves a process of attraction, investment and commitment. Thus, the attraction state of love has similarities to the experience of “falling in love”. However, one must move beyond simple attraction and invest oneself in the object of his attraction. This investment is made in the time and energy one devotes to his beloved. As time passes the investment develops into a commitment.
Peck explains that one cathects with the beloved. That is, while remaining an external reality, over time the person constructs an internal mental model of the beloved allowing that model to blend with one’s identity and transforming it. This process of incorporating the beloved extends the person and enlarges his or her ego boundaries. As we expand our range of cathexis to incorporate a broad range of people and objects, our ego boundaries continue to expand and thin. We are more open to others. It is with the process of cathexis that we move into the realm of love. That process has feelings associated with it, yet the actual process is apart from those feelings. Love is not a feeling.
Peck argues that it is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from nonlove; it is the aim of the action. In the case of genuine love the aim is always spiritual growth. In the case of non-love, it is always something else. Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. It is volitional. A person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love.
The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another, we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth. The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations and actively shift our consciousness. The most common and important way we can do this is by listening.
Trained as a professional listener, Peck brings with him an active understanding of listening. This involves focusing your full and single-minded attention on the speaker. Listening involves a suspension of the mental chatter, as we analyze the speaker and prepare commentary and comebacks instead of really listening. Listening involves valuing what the person has to say.
As a youth I attended a church sponsored conference. One of the speakers was a Native American who had a wealth of knowledge about the spiritual traditions of his heritage. He spoke with a gentle, quiet voice. Given that there were a lot of teenagers at the conference, there was background noise with them moving around, talking among themselves and creating a distraction that made it difficult to hear what the speaker was saying. One of the young people grew frustrated and called out to the speaker to “speak louder”. The speaker stopped for a moment and then gently said into the microphone, “listen better”! That bit of wisdom silenced the crowd and added to the power of the presentation.
If you really want to show your love for someone, you will listen to them. This is a particularly powerful way to show love for your children. If you listen to your children with as much care and effort you would exert to listen to a talk by a great lecturer, you are telling them that you value them. You will also begin to discover that as you are telling them that what they have to say is valuable, they will begin to share with you things that are valuable. Value begets value. Love begets love.
Listening can occur when time is set aside for it and the conditions are supportive of it. It cannot occur when people are distracted by other tasks; such as, cooking, texting, driving, using a computer, watching TV or talking on the phone. This is not an effortless process. Time must be set aside, and the effort of listening made. Love is work and the essence of non-love is laziness.
Risk of loss is inherent in love. In the process of cathexis we open ourselves to another. We extend our boundaries and venture onto unfamiliar ground. There is always the danger that our efforts to open ourselves to others will be rebuffed. There is the danger that the trust we place in another will be betrayed. There is the challenge that a relationship with this person will change you in ways that you don’t want to be changed.
There is also risk of independence. One of the most difficult times in life for a parent is the teen years of their children. After more than a decade of warming to the parental role in which your children are dependent upon you, they hit their teen years and begin to change the relationship dramatically. They are becoming their own people. They are decreasingly dependent upon you and constantly pushing the boundaries of their freedom and independence. Further, parental concern is not misplaced as many teenagers are still very much children. Thus, there is the need to allow independence so that the young people will develop the adult skills and competencies they need, while still providing sufficient guidance and structure to help prevent avoidable disasters along the way.
Yet, it isn’t just the matter of the natural push for independence on the part of children. There must be a healthy independence in adult relationships. Marriages and friendships in which one partner is controlling are not healthy relationships. The controlling party operates from serious insecurities which seem to be addressed only when the environment—both physical and relational—can be kept under his or her strict control. Often the party being controlled submits to it from fear to risk the challenge if independence. Risk taking in such circumstances is an expression of love for oneself and the other because it seeks their growth as persons. It is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and is free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions. Love is not an act of conformity but always a free choice.