Don't believe Johnson? Watch the number of men and women who will bare their breasts to Cupid's arrows this holiday season. All in the hopes of finding someone by New Year's.
Of course, the ever-elusive search for romantic love does not rise from something as simple as a desire for a date to the company Christmas party. No, Johnson maintains that men and women are looking--and wrongly--for something much more complex. They are looking for another person to ease their loneliness, soothe their wounds, impart their lives with meaning, complete them as individuals. A very tall order. One, which according to Johnson, is the psychological package our culture has inherited from the very literature of courtly love all the way up to Hollywood.
Utilizing one of the greatest and more tragic love stories, Johnson tells the legend of Tristan and Iseult as an explanation of romantic love and the legacy it has left us. He goes to great lengths to differentiate between being "in love"--or romantic love--and "love." He further unravels how religion has given way to romantic love as a way to experience transcendence in our secular culture. Instead of seeking relatedness through human, earthly relationships, we insist on placing love in the realm of the gods. One after another, we expect to find the meaning of life revealed in another person. And when that doesn't happen, we take that person down from Mt. Olympus only to replace them with another person--a human, no less--in a fruitless cycle of ecstasy and disappointment.
Johnson argues that to appreciate an earthly love, we must give up our projection of what romantic love should be and look inward to find completion. We can only hope to find the meaning of life within ourselves--not another. We must leave transcendence to the gods--to our own inner psychological experience. Only then can we love and honor another person for who they are and not what we wish them to be for the security or transcendence of our ego.
Though the Jungian terminology can be intimidating, Johnson reveals an intriguing redefinition of love in a mostly straightforward manner with a well-known legend as his cipher. The legend of Tristan and Iseult itself is told and then explained as the book progresses. And though the legend unfolds in a mostly male point of view, the tale does contain universal truths of romantic love for both men and women. If there is any true lack in the book, it is that Johnson spends so much time defining and explaining the problem of romantic love that he shortchanges the solution.
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