Psychology of Love

Course Description

Love is marvelous; it is a vehicle for great transformation but it can also be deeply troublesome. Love troubles bring us directly in touch with our complexes—the place where we can heal and grow. When we embark on this labor of love, it has a direct influence on our wellbeing and the development of our consciousness. We activate our ability to find love and be in a loving relationship. 

The soul-oriented perspective offered in the course is an opportunity to learn more about yourself, others, and the divine, and to deepen your intimate relationships. J. Pittman McGehee takes us on a tour through the archetypal world and weaves it masterfully together with our life experiences in this practice-oriented course.

Listen to a preview of the course below:

This course is ideal if:

• Deepen your understanding of love and your personal journey.
• Learn about the creative, transformative, and destructive potential of love.
• Discern different kinds of love.
• Gain a Jungian perspective on love and how it affects your personal journey.
• Recognize that a significant relationship with another will introduce you to yourself and offers you the opportunity to experience the transcendent.

Course Overview

Class 1: Overview of Love

In this first class, Pittman McGehee provides an overview of the way we understand and talk about love. According to Pittman McGehee, there are multiple layers over our experience of love as a concept. For instance, love may be perceived as the energy for creating consciousness. Pittman McGehee asks us to look at ancient Greek philosophy where love was a much-differentiated concept. There were three kinds of love: Eros, Philia, and Agape. Eros was a non-rational desire to connect, relate, and create. Philia had a component of friendship—a willingness to know and be known. Lastly, Agape was believed to be the love that let’s be. It had the ability to empower the loved one to be her/his authentic self. 

The Overview of Love is a foundational class for the rest of this course that contains Jungian reflections on the experience of love and the three primary archetypes – Mother, Father, and Other – that guide us in our pursuit of love.   

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Class 2: Mother Love and its Effect on Individuation

In Mother Love and its Effect on Individuation, Pittman McGehee moves from a general understanding of love to the first large archetypal love that we experience—the love of the mother (or its absence). Archetypal indicates that every human being has the same kind of need and longing for a mother. This archetypal mother is our first mother. The second mother is our experience of the actual mother, and the third kind of mother is the internal mother (or mother complex). The relationship with the first two mothers sets us up for the internal mother—the mother complex. 

Consciousness is the conduit to experience healthy relationships, as Pittman shows in this class. In its absence, we end up trying to enact what wasn’t acted on in our primary relationships. Alternately, we find ourselves trying to heal the woundedness of the early relationships in the new ones.

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Class 3: Fatherly Love and its Effect on Individuation

Fatherly Love and its Effect on Individuation will explore the archetype of the father, what fatherly love is, and how the experience of the father influences one’s psychological development. Whereas mothering is about being, fathering is about doing. The primary function of the father is to empower, to help learn separation, to civilize, and to show/model to a child ‘how to’. This class discusses the positive and negative father and how the wounding of the child can affect his or her personal journey in the later years.

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Class 4: Love of the Other and its effect on Individuation

The fourth class in this series is on the love of a significant other—the other that we are, and the holy other. Relationships can be a vehicle for personal growth. We are given this extraordinary opportunity for transformation—at the level of consciousness—when we feel attracted to someone. 

Fundamentally, the love of another offers the opportunity to really know the other and to be known. Secondly, it offers the opportunity to experience the divine. 

But we must remember that our experiences of paternal and maternal love shape the experience of love for another. Love can challenge us to move through the personal into the transpersonal. That is, to love authentically, our ego will need to get out of the way to experience being part of the whole. 

By the end of this course, you will:

• Recognize the creative, transformative and destructive potential of love.
• Be able to distinguish different kinds of love (Eros, Philia, and Agape), and how they can be connected.
• Explain that love creates consciousness and that it can be a resource for wholeness.
• Be able to identify and discuss how your personal journey is affected by your experiences of maternal and paternal love, as well as of love of the other.
• Be able to explain that no one outside you can fulfill your archetypal need for a mother or father.