"I never saw a more promising inclination. He was growing quite inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every time they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball he offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to dance, and I spoke to him twice myself, without receiving an answer. Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?" —JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice

There is an understandable resistance to the idea that a human relationship can be equivalent psychologically to a drug addiction. Yet it is not unreasonable to look for addiction between lovers when psychologists find the roots of drug addiction in childhood dependency needs and stunted family relationships. Chein, Winick, and other observers interpret drugs to be a kind of substitute for human ties. In this sense, addictive love is even more directly linked to what are recognized to be the sources of addiction than is drug dependency.

Almost everyone knows of people who replace romantic relationships with other kinds of escapes, including drug escapes, at least until the next relationship comes along. Immediately after or immediately before an affair, such individuals are deeply immersed in psychiatry, religion, alcohol, marijuana, and the like. Just as some addicts shift between opiate, alcohol, and barbiturate addictions, so we find others using drugs interchangeably with all-consuming systems of belief or social involvements.

Consider this testimony by a member of a fanatical religious commune: "I used to do acid, chug wine. I thought it was the answer. But it didn't satisfy, just like everything else. I went to a head shrink.... Nothing ever did satisfy till I came to Jesus." He might have added, "I used to make it with chicks," for other converts are the spurned lovers who in an earlier era would have entered a convent or monastery.

I know of a man who started drinking heavily after a long-time woman friend left him. He wrote about his reactions at the time of the breakup:

Since Linda left I mainly just lie in bed. I'm just too weak to move, and I have the chills all the time.... I've been crying a lot.... I try to calm myself by drinking the scotch my sister left here.... I feel so horrible, so dispossessed—like the real me doesn't exist anymore.

He couldn't sleep, and his heartbeat sometimes sped up frighteningly when he wasn't doing anything. These are symptoms of acute withdrawal. We know they can occur—perhaps quite often in certain groups and at certain ages—when one is deprived of a lover. Popular music sings paeans to the experience as a hallmark of true love: "When I lost my baby, I almost lost my mind . . . Since you left me baby, my whole life is through."

What is there about love that produces withdrawal in people we have all known, maybe even in ourselves? Can we envision a kind of love that does not bring such devastation in its wake? Let us look closely at how "love" can be an addiction, and how addictive love differs from genuine love.

In a monograph entitled "Being in Love and Hypnosis," Freud noted important parallels between love and another psychologically compelling process—hypnotism. According to Freud, a person's self-love can be transferred from the person's own ego to a loved object.

When this occurs, the other person more and more gains "possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego." The ultimate development of this sort of love is a state where the lover's ego "is impoverished, it has surrendered itself to the object, it has substituted the object for its own most important constituent." Freud goes on to say:

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, toward the hypnotist as toward the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject's own initiative.... The hypnotist [as a model of a loved other] is the sole object, and no attention is paid to any but him.

Love is an ideal vehicle for addiction because it can so exclusively claim a person's consciousness. If, to serve as an addiction, something must be both reassuring and consuming, then a sexual or love relationship is perfectly suited for the task. If it must also be patterned, predictable, and isolated, then in these respects, too, a relationship can be ideally tailored to the addictive purpose. Someone who is dissatisfied with himself or his situation can discover in such a relationship the most encompassing substitute for self-contentment and the effort required to attain it.

When a person goes to another with the aim of filling a void in himself, the relationship quickly becomes the center of his or her life. It offers him a solace that contrasts sharply with what he finds everywhere else, so he returns to it more and more, until he needs it to get through each day of his otherwise stressful and unpleasant existence. When a constant exposure to something as necessary in order to make life bearable, an addiction has been brought about, however romantic the trappings. The ever-present danger of withdrawal creates an ever-present craving.

Who is the Interpersonal Addict?

Since the person who addicts himself to a lover has essentially the same feelings of inadequacy as the drug addict, why should such an individual choose another person, rather than a drug, for the object of his addiction? One characteristic which distinguishes the two groups of addicts is their social class. Opiate use is found primarily in people in lower social and economic positions, especially racial minorities. Lower-class whites more normally take to alcohol as their escape. Middle-class Americans, on the other hand, while not quite as prone to alcoholism and while certainly not interested in heroin, are no less subject to addictive tendencies; they just express them differently.

As a rule, other human beings play a role in the middle-class person's lifestyle that they do not for the lower-class person. Lee Rainwater, who reports such social class differences in Family Design, found that sexual relationships in the lower class tend not to involve as great a degree of life-sharing. To take an extreme case, Chein's analysis of New York City heroin addicts shows that they are distrustful of people; drugs are the only things in their lives they feel they can rely on.

Even the middle-class English opiate addicts whom Edwin Schur studied in Narcotic Addiction in Britain and America are generally alienated from other people. And perhaps an explanation for widespread drug abuse among young dropouts from the middle class is that the disruptive nature of their living habits leaves them with only fragmental and temporary relationships. But though this inability to form strong interpersonal ties characterizes drug and alcohol addicts no matter what their social class, weakened and unstable social networks are more common among economically and otherwise deprived groups.

Hence individuals in these settings more frequently succumb to heroin addiction and debilitating alcoholism while people (mainly lovers) serve the same purpose for those who are better off. In either case, the combination of dependency and manipulativeness that Chein observed in heroin addicts lies behind the addict's exploitativeness. Unsure of his own identity, the addict sees other people as objects to serve his needs. But for the drug addict, using people is only a means to other ends; for the middle-class addict, possessing people is the end.

Rainwater makes these differences clear in an article entitled, "A Study of Personality Differences Between Middle and Lower Class Adolescents." There he states that "The lower class person . . . is less dependent on people, and more oriented toward those gratifications which can be achieved without complicated cooperation of other human beings."

Among the middle-class children in the study, a distinct pattern emerged which explains how people can be the drugs of middle-class addiction. Two-thirds of the middle-class children (as compared to only one-fifth of the children from lower-class families) showed evidence of a "social dependency constellation." The latter can be defined as the need to cling to one human object for love and support. That object may not even be a true person, but only a conception of a person.

When people are economically comfortable but still sense a large deficiency in their lives, their yearnings are bound to be more existential than material. That is, these yearnings are tied into their basic conception of and feelings about themselves. D. H. Lawrence describes such a case in his novel Women in Love. The character is Gerald Crich, the well-to-do son of an industrial magnate. When his father dies, Gerald's world begins to fall around him, and he experiences the spiritual catastrophe which leads him to a relationship of desperation with Gudrun Brangwen.

But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all around him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul. His will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being, unbroken and unchanged. But the pressure was too great.... For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness....

The emotional state Lawrence depicts is very much like what R. D. Laing calls schizoid alienation, in which an individual is so detached from his or her experience that he cannot get from it a sense of himself as an integrated being. The schizoid person doesn't feel that he is the person living his life, the personality occupying his own skin. In The Divided Self, Laing suggests that schizoid alienation is not only a common contemporary form of madness, but also a prevalent feature of life in modern society. The "ontological anxiety"—uncertainty about our very existence—that Laing speaks of is what makes some of us compulsively seek relationships.

Gerald Crich is a fictional example of someone who lacks a well-developed core being, a secure sense of himself. A person feeling this inner emptiness must strive to fill it. 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 result is a full-fledged addiction, where each partner draws the other back at any sign of a loosening of the bonds that hold them together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham

To show concretely what it means to be hooked on a lover, we can take a well-known example—F. Scott Fitzgerald's love affair with Sheilah Graham. In the period following his wife Zelda's final emotional breakdown, Fitzgerald felt that his life's promise had in large part gone unfulfilled, and that he had exhausted his spiritual and emotional energy. All his life he had tried and failed to achieve a firm sense of his place in the world.

He aspired to a social standing he never had possessed, a financial standing he could never gain, and a literary standing that was often questioned in his lifetime. In The Far Side of Paradise Arthur Mizener shows that all things seemed to conspire to deny psychological peace and security to Fitzgerald, who had written of himself, "Generally—I knew that at the bottom I lacked the essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self respect."

After his initial success as a writer, Fitzgerald and Zelda entered a downward spiral that was relieved only a few times before his death in 1940. During this period he had difficulty sustaining his work, which he and Zelda frequently interrupted with their drinking and moving around, and with their generally taxing pursuit of pleasure.

In the aftermath of such periods of abandon, Fitzgerald would be stricken with remorse. To allay this guilt and consciousness of failure, he would then often embark on another bout of drinking and abandonment. By the end of the twenties, the frantic emptiness of his existence had begun to claim a horrible toll. Zelda suffered a breakdown which finally led to institutional confinement. Fitzgerald himself began to have physical and mental collapses and many more uncontrolled alcoholic binges.

His finances, with which he was always preoccupied, became an even bigger problem. When he was finally able to complete his last novel, Tender Is the Night, it was not well received at its publication in 1934. The period following this shock to his confidence, during which his personal tragedies also increased unbearably, was more painful than any that had come before. His alcoholism reached unmanageable bounds.

In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts, leaving, but not deserting, Zelda in a sanitarium in North Carolina. In July of that year, he met Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. She became his mainstay for the rest of his short life, helping him to stay on the wagon for the most part and to remain relatively content while he did a creditable stint as a screenwriter and was at work on a novel.

Though it was some salvation for a tormented soul, their relationship, as described in Sheilah Graham's book Beloved Infidel, portrays the distorted, addicted form human intimacy can take when it is wrapped around a misshapen life.

In the first place, Fitzgerald did not entirely relinquish chemical help in the absence of his drinking. Sheilah Graham relates that ". . . he was once more on his Coca-Cola and coffee regimen," and that he relied on "sleeping pills and, to wake him in the morning, benzedrine." But his main stimulant and sedative was his love.

Although he had been dramatically attached to Zelda (as one of the faults of Dick Diver, a character who embodies his own downfall, Fitzgerald listed "the desperate clinging to one woman"), it was now—when his original enthusiasm for life had been so thoroughly extinguished—that he shed all of life for one woman and demanded the same sacrifices from her. Graham writes:

By early 1938 we were virtual recluses in Hollywood. I attended few evening events or industry parties. So that I could be with Scott [and still write her column], Jonah Ruddy for a weekly fee covered these occasions for me. We rarely went out: it was enough for us to be together, and when we were not together hardly an hour went by that Scott did not make me aware of his presence. He telephoned me five and six times during the day.

Once, when she wanted to make a trip to New York, Fitzgerald remonstrated:

"But who are the people you see . . . ? They're not real. I have been there. I have given all that up. What can you get from such people? What can you get from New York?"

"Oh . . ." I could not find the words. "New York excites me. It thrills me."

"Sheilah, what you are looking for, you have found. You are looking for love, for someone to understand you. You have me. I love you and understand you. There's no need for you to go to New York."

Moreover, when her best friend was coming to Hollywood from New York, Fitzgerald insisted that they go away the weekend she was to arrive, and that the friend move into her own apartment immediately. He even went to the point of picking an apartment out for her and putting down the deposit. When the friend arrived at Sheilah's residence, she found an apologetic note and a key.

Graham comments: "This Scott made me do to my best friend. He was jealous of her. He was so obviously unhappy, I could not refuse him." Perhaps even more extreme was the way Fitzgerald and his lover reacted to a prospective visit by her boss, John Wheeler:

As the day of Wheeler's arrival approached, Scott grew more and more glum. He would not be reassured. And as had happened many times before when I found myself in difficulty, inspiration came. The night before Wheeler arrived, I went into the Good Samaritan Hospital for a minor operation, something my doctor had said could be done "any time—no hurry about it." I chose this time so that I would be too ill to see John Wheeler. Scott took me to the hospital, reassured at last.

While she found Fitzgerald's grasping behavior peculiar at times, Graham did not find it unattractive. She regarded these last two stories as examples of "Scott's unceasing tenderness." Her own attitude was characterized by her feeling that "my living began when he arrived." She relates her desire for enclosure by her lover:

I looked into his face, searching it, trying to find its mystery, its wonder for me, and I said, almost prayerfully, "If only I could walk into your eyes and close the lids behind me, and leave all the world outside—"

He held me close and I clung to him....

The relationship was an addiction. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham sealed themselves off from the outside world by neglecting their work and by dropping all their other personal relationships in Hollywood. Each seemed to feel that all experience was only valuable, or allowable, if it was mediated by the other.

The belief which underlay this feeling—and all of the relationship—was expressed by Graham when she said that "my living began when he arrived." If there is a need to participate in every aspect of another's life, its conclusive form is the complete control of or reliance on another, so that one person does not exist without the other's being there, too. This is the essential similarity to drug addiction, where a person feels he is living only when he is on the drug. The ultimate statement of the desire to be consumed by love is in the last passage quoted from Graham, where she wanted to crawl into Scott's mind, lose her consciousness in his, and form one human entity out of two incomplete beings.

In their interactions, Fitzgerald claimed most of the prerogatives. He retained the right to return East to visit Zelda, and to have his daughter visit him, at the same time that he denied these things to Sheilah. He also generally insisted on keeping up his work schedule (when he wished) while disrupting hers. Fitzgerald's personal domination was characteristic of the relationship even where he helped his lover, as when he tutored her in history and literature.

Such male domination, while hardly constituting the only form an addictive relationship can take, is not uncommon in these relationships. But it shouldn't be interpreted as an indication that the one partner is more in control of himself, or of the situation, than the other. Fitzgerald's need for Graham was every bit as strong as hers for him. Consider Erich Fromm's description, in The Art of Loving, of mutual need within an unequal relationship:

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.

The intensity of Fitzgerald's need is shown by his behavior when Graham finally broke up with him during one of his alcoholic binges. Eventually he succeeded in getting her back by vowing to give up drinking, but first he attempted a number of futile ploys that clearly revealed his desperation. For example, he phoned her all night, and he threatened to kill her.

His most hateful act was to send a telegram to her boss with the intention of destroying her career.

SHEILAH GRAHAM TODAY BANNED BY EVERY STUDIO . . . SUGGEST YOU SEND HER BACK TO ENGLAND WHERE SHE BELONGS STOP DO YOU KNOW HER REAL NAME IS LILY SHEIL?

Deeply insecure about her origins, Graham had imparted her real name to Fitzgerald alone of all the people she knew in Hollywood.

There is no way to discount the malice behind this attack on her livelihood and personal identity. Fitzgerald may have been insanely drunk, but his behavior reflects an antagonism that could only be directed toward someone whom he hated. Could this be the way he felt toward the woman to whom he was totally devoted a few days before? The process on the other side, in Sheilah Graham's thoughts, was the same:

I was not sorry for Scott's predicament . . . Let Scott suffer. The more I thought about it the angrier I became. I'll fix him. I took the first editions he had given me of his books—each with an inscription in it—and deliberately tore them from cover to cover . . . I don't want to see his name again, I don't want to hear his name again, I don't want to be reminded of him. I hated this man. He had betrayed me.

Naturally, she had good cause to act this way, and perhaps her attitude was momentary, a fit of pique. Yet it still represents complete alienation from that with which she formerly felt as one.