From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodil… - Thomas Lewis

The purpose behind discerning the nature of love is not to satisfy ivory tower discussions or to produce fodder for academic delectation. Instead, as our work makes all too clear, the world is full of live men and women who encounter difficulty in loving or being loved, and whose happiness depends critically upon resolving that situation with the utmost expediency.

Encountering an early series of consistent instances can implant an erroneous generality in a child's mind. This mental machinery distills and does not evaluate; it cannot detect whether the larger world runs in accordance with the scheme it has drawn forth from the emotional microcosm of a family. Just as grammatical English emerges from our lips automatically, a structured pattern of emotional relatedness emanates from each of us.

Like any other momentous shift in emotion, depression is not an occupation by a foreign army; it is civil insurrection, the subversion of identity's republic from within. A depressed person loses more than energy and appetite — he loses himself and the capacity to make the decisions his former, pre-coup self would have made.