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A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF THE EMOTION OF LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES.[1]

By SANFORD BELL, Fellow in Clark University.


The emotion of love between the sexes has as yet received no thorough
scientific treatment. No writer so far as I can find has treated it
from a genetic standpoint. The literature upon the subject is
therefore meager. In his recent treatise upon "The Psychology of the
Emotions," Ribot[2] remarks: "The sex-instinct, the last in
chronological order with man and the higher animals, gives rise to
the emotion of love with its numerous individual varieties. Most
psychologists have been very sparing of details where it is
concerned, and one might mention certain voluminous treatises which
contain no mention of it. Is this through exaggerated delicacy? Or is
it because the authors think that their place has been usurped by the
novelists who have so obstinately confined themselves to the study of
this passion? But the novelist's mode of analysis is different from
the psychological mode, and does not exclude it." This author then
devotes one chapter of eleven pages to the treatment of the sexual
instinct, which includes what he has to say upon sex-love. Brief as
this treatment is, it is valuable, both for the facts it presents and
for the problems it suggests. Havelock Ellis, who has perhaps done
more than any other investigator in the field of the normal
Psychology of Sex says in his most recent work:[3] "It is a very
remarkable fact that although for many years past serious attempts
have been made to elucidate the psychology of sexual p