What Is The Clinical Shape of Love?

A famous psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Menninger, said years ago, "Love is the medicine for the sickness of the world." I think all of us can agree with that. Love is big medicine. But it must be the right kind of love.

One weekday, I was speaking to a man whose idea of love is to play around with women. Playing around does not require him to be intimately involved with women. We can call it "playboy philosophy." This sort of "love" suggests that sex is something you do with an object. Find some body that turns you on and "make love."

When someone treats you as an "object" or an "it," that is not the love medicine Dr. Menninger was referring to. It's destructive to you as well as the person who does that to you. It perpetuates going through life using people as objects. This selfish playboy philosophy is all part of the same tragic lie that leaves people emotionally crippled.

Psychotherapists and doctors are filled with patients recovering from psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual damages because they have never been loved with the right kind of love that will truly heal them.