 There are many individualized forms of the pathology of love, which result in conscious suffering and which are considered neurotic by psychiatrists and an increasing number of laymen alike. Some of the more frequent ones are briefly described in the following examples of neurotic love. 1. One or both of the lovers have remained attached to the figure of a parent and transfer the feelings, expectations and fears one once had toward father or mother to the loved person in adult life. The persons involved have never emerged from a pattern of infantile relatedness and seek for this pattern in their effective demands in adult life. 2. Men who in their emotional development have remained stuck in an infantile attachment to mother. These men still feel like children. They want mother's protection, love, warmth, care and admiration. They want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no reason than that they need it. That they are mother's child. That they are helpless. Such men frequently are quite affectionate and charming if they try to induce a woman to love them, and even after they have succeeded in this. But their relationship to the woman, as in fact to all other people, remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of vanity in this type of man, more or less hidden grandiose ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their fantastic expectations, conflicts and resentments start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if she wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme cases if she is not willing to condone his love affairs with other women, or even have an admiring interest in them, the man feels deeply hurt and disappointed, and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman does not love him, is selfish, or is domineering. In a more severe form of pathology, the fixation to mother is deeper and more irrational. On this level, the wish is not symbolically speaking to return to mother's protecting arms, nor to her nourishing breast, but to her all-receiving and all-destroying womb. If the nature of sanity is to grow out of the womb into the world, the nature of severe mental disease is to be attracted by the womb, to be sucked back into it, and that is to be taken away from life. This kind of fixation usually occurs in relation to mother's who, in the name of love, sometimes of duty, want to keep the child, the adolescent, the man within them. He should not be able to breathe but through them, not be able to love except on a superficial sexual level, degrading all other women. He should not be able to be free and independent, but an eternal cripple or a criminal. This aspect of mother, the destructive and gulfing one, is the negative aspect of the mother figure. Mother can give life and she can take life. She is the one to revive and the one to destroy. She can do miracles of love and nobody can hurt more than she. Three. A different form of neurotic pathology is to be found in cases where the main attachment is that to the father. A case in point is a man whose mother is cold and aloof, while his father, partly as a result of his wife's coldness, concentrates all his affection and interest on the son. He is a good father, but at the same time authoritarian. Whenever he is pleased with the son's conduct, he praises him, gives him presence, is affectionate. Whenever the son displeases him, he withdraws or scolds. The son, for whom the father's affection is the only one he has, becomes attached to father in a slavish way. His main aim in life is to please father, and when he succeeds, he feels happy, secure and satisfied. But when he makes a mistake, fails or does not succeed in pleasing father, he feels deflated, unloved, cast out. In later life, such a man will try to find a father figure to whom he attaches himself in a similar fashion. His whole life becomes a sequence of ups and downs, depending on whether he has succeeded in winning father's praise. Such men are often very successful in their social careers, but in their relationships to women, they remain aloof and distant. The woman is of no central significance to them. They usually have a slight contempt for her, often masked as the fatherly concern for a little girl. Four. More complicated is the kind of neurotic disturbance in love occurring when parents do not love each other, but are too restrained to quarrel or to indicate any signs of dissatisfaction outwardly. At the same time, remoteness makes them also unspontaneous in their relationship to their children. What a little girl experiences is an atmosphere of correctness, but one which never permits a close contact with either father or mother and hence leaves the girl puzzled and afraid. Five. Idolatrous love. If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of identity, of eyeness, he tends to idolize the loved person. He is alienated from his own powers and projects them into the loved person who is worshipped as the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss. In this process, he deprives himself of all sense of strength, loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself. Since usually no person can in the long run live up to the expectations of her or his idolatrous worshiper, disappointment is bound to occur and as a remedy, a new idol is sought for, sometimes in an unending circle. What is characteristic for this type of idolatrous love is, at the beginning, the intensity and suddenness of the love experience. This idolatrous love is often described as the true great love, but while it is meant to portray the intensity and depth of love, it only demonstrates the hunger and despair of the idolater. Six. Another form of pseudo love is what may be called sentimental love. Its essence lies in the fact that love is experienced only in fantasy and not in the here and now relationship to another person who is real. The most widespread form of this type of love is that to be found in the vicarious love satisfaction experienced by the consumer of screen pictures, magazine love stories and love songs. All the unfulfilled desires for love, union and closeness find their satisfaction in the consumption of these products. A man and a woman who in relation to their spouses are incapable of ever penetrating the wall of separateness are moved to tears when they participate in the happy or unhappy love story of the couple on the screen. For many couples, seeing these stories on the screen is the only occasion on which they experience love, not for each other, but together as spectators of other people's love. As long as love is a daydream, they can participate. As soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people, they are frozen. Seven. Still another form of neurotic love lies in the use of projective mechanisms for the purpose of avoiding one's own problems and being concerned with the defects and frailties of the loved person instead. Individuals behave in this respect very much as groups, nations or religions do. They have a fine appreciation for even the minor shortcomings of the other person and go blissfully ahead ignoring their own, always busy trying to accuse or to reform the other person. If two people both do it, as is so often the case, the relationship of love becomes transformed into one of mutual projection. If I am domineering or indecisive or greedy, I accuse my partner of it and depending on my character, I either want to cure him or to punish him. The other person does the same and both thus succeed in ignoring their own problems and hence fail to undertake any steps which would help them in their own development. Eight. Another form of projection is the projection of one's own problems on the children. When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former, because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself and not by proxy. The latter, because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.