Psychoanalysis and Love

Transcriber's Notes
1. Typographical errors were silently corrected.
2. Table of Contents added with hyper-links, for easy navigation.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE BY ANDRE TRIDON Member of The Medico-Legal Society of New York City, The Society for Forensic Medicine of New York City, and The International Association for Individual Psychology of Vienna, Austria.

NEW YORK BRENTANO'S PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1922, by BRENTANO'S All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Life would be much simpler if love among human beings were similar to love among the animals. At mating time, any animal of any species feels automatically attracted to any animal of the opposite sex belonging to the same species. Age, appearance or relationship seem of no account in the animal world. The love activities begin at a definite time of the year, have as their obvious and exclusive purpose the reproduction of the species and, after attaining their goal, end very early in the summer of the same year. An exception may be made for a few wild and domesticated animals which have several mating seasons and for a few survivals of the prehistoric fauna, like the elephants, among which the family group seems more permanent than among more recent biological specimens.
Nor do love activities among the animals result in lasting disturbances of their psychological life. In certain varieties of fish the male never even sees the female whose eggs he fecundates. While we observe at times duels to the death between two males for the possession of one female (elks or moose), animal life seems to suffer few lasting complications from the fact of such conflicts, which, like animal love, are purely seasonal.
A greater regularity of the food supply which has intensified the sex urge among human beings and removed its seasonal character, and the progress of civilization which, for economic reasons, has placed upon the union of male and female a thousand restrictions, has complicated terribly what was merely among animals a periodic biological activity.