Sigmund Freud wrote: "From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist just as towards the loved object. There is the same absorption of one's own initiative. ... The hypnotist is the sole object, and no attention is paid to any but him."

When someone goes to another for the sole purpose of filling a void in himself, the relationship quickly becomes the very center of his life. It offers him solace found nowhere else in his life — a marked difference from what is offered to him elsewhere — so in the end, it overtakes him totally. (A tsunami of the soul, completely submerging the selfhood.)

When constant exposure to something or someone is necessary to make life bearable, the condition of addiction is present, however romantic the setting. The person who addicts himself to a lover has the same feelings of inadequacy as the drug addict. Individuals with weakened and unstable social networks are more common among economically and otherwise deprived groups. Individuals in these settings more frequently become heroin addicts and alcoholics. But the same purpose is served by people/lovers for those better off economically. For the drug addict, using people is only a means to other ends. For the middle- or upper-class addict, possessing people is the end.

The emotional state described by D.H. Lawrence in "Women in Love" is very much like the schizoid alienation limned by R.D. Laing. The individual is so detached from his experience that he cannot get from it a sense of himself as an integrated person living his life, the personality occupying his own skin. In "The Divided Self," Laing suggests that such alienation is a common feature of life today and the spur that pushes many of us to compulsively seek relationships.

Someone who lacks a well-developed core, a strong and defined sense of himself, is pushed/forced to fill that emptiness. In relationships, this can only be done by subsuming someone else's being inside yourself or by allowing someone else to subsume you. Often, two people simultaneously engulf and are engulfed by each other. The end result? Full-fledged addiction, wherein each partner draws the other back at the very slightest sign of their bond's loosening.

Full and wondrous credit goes to author Stanton Peele, who, together with Archie Brodsky, penned "Love and Addiction."

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