This book made available by the Internet Archive. The idea that love results from a counterreaction to the activity of repressed envy and hostility is so remote to all current concepts of psychology that it is difficult to formulate it in the precise terms of psychological language. It is not doubt or lack of courage that makes us hesitate but the very character of the concept never before formulated. Here are the two conclusions at which we have arrived, and which in my opinion are inescapable. Love is not origmated in the sexual urge but belongs to the realm of the ego- drives. Love is in its essential nature an emotional reaction-formation to envy, possessiveness and hostility. This characterization covers all kinds of love, infatuation and passion, tenderness for one's wife, friendship and love of one's neighbor. All these are founded on the overcoming of envy and the will to dominate, of hostility and jealousy. We understand that the accent has to be laid on the triumph over these unconscious emotions, on the intensity of the counterreaction to them or on the decisiveness of the victory of the opposite feelings. Looking back we wonder how we could have failed to see this for so long. What else could love be? Only consider love's character and its most strongly marked features, those which signify its very nature. They are all expressions of the opposite traits that belong to the realm of envy, hostility and destructiveness. Real love does not know envy. It rejoices in the happiness, achievements and fine qualities of the object. Love is not hostile but the supreme expression of tenderness. The characteristics of the reaction are so marked and so much in the foreground that we cannot even imagine how it could have been different. Victory was so triumphant that it seems as if there had never been a fight. The regime of love is so uncontested and incontestable that no one thinks it was wrested from an enemy. We know many similar reaction-formations in psychology and psychopathology. Frequently an intense emotion is not replaced by a balanced state but swings over into an even stronger opposite feeling. It seems that new reinforcements, gathered during the action, strengthen the coming reaction, that the counterblow becomes more powerful than the original one. Thus an unconscious impulse of cruel satisfaction often turns into pity and compassion. A depression is overcome