The Role of Love in Personality Theory

Forum Assignment for the Week:

Choose at least three (3) different theoretical perspectives that have been covered in this course to date and discuss how the construct of love is conceptualized by each theoretical framework. How is love defined? What role does it have in development and the human condition? Which view appeals to you the most? Why?

Reply to the following response with 200 words minimum. (please make response as if having a conversation, respond directly to some of the statements in below post.)

Out of all of the perspectives in our textbook, the three perspectives that I chose are Humanistic-Existential, Erich Fromm, and Abraham Maslow.

The first one I am going to talk about is the humanistic-existential perspective. This perspective has a few things that describes it. For example, the theories shows how much potential someone has, showing the best of them, etc. Another thing that was mentioned was in order for someone to really love others, they have to truly love themselves first.

For the second perspective is Erich Fromm. Fromm's theory of love actually came together with the combination of humanistic-existential and psychoanalytic perspective. From his perspective, he sees love differently than the other psychologists since he sees it as a special characteristic that actually humanizes men and women (Friedman, 2010). The different types of love he described are the following: Motherly, brotherly, erotic, immature and mature love.

All of these are basically self-explained; the motherly love is a forever-lasting love from the mother, brotherly is a friendly type, erotic is toward someone in specific and has a short-term intimacy that satisfies the needs sexually, immature love is the taking of love overwhelms the giving of love (Friedman, 2010), and mature love being the type of love that has care for each other.

Abraham Maslow is the last perspective that I choose for this week's forum. Like other psychologists, they had more than two examples of love. As for Maslow, he only has two types: being love and deficiency love.

Being love (also referred to as "B-Love") is a type of love that is unselfish and is caring for others. One of their caring actions is helping their partners toward actualization (Friedman, 2010). As for the other type, deficiency love, also referred to as "D-Love", is the opposite of B-Love. D-Love describes someone as being immature and needy and selfish.

They all have a semi share of appeal, but the one that is in the lead is the humanistic-existential. What really caught my eye was the line that said that before loving someone else hard, you have to love yourself first. I have been hearing that from my mother and other family members, especially since I'm getting older.

Now after all of those years, I can see how that is important because when I was with my boyfriend (ex now), I didn't really love myself because I was having self-esteem issues with myself, so I wasn't able to give him the love that he should've deserved.