Product Code Database
Dorothy Tennov (born Dorothy J. Tennow; August 29, 1928 – February 3, 2007) was an American psychologist who invented the term "limerence". Her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, has been called the seminal work on romantic love (also called "being in love", or passionate love in psychology) and credited as largely marking the start of data collection on the phenomenon.: "Despite the attempts to define and describe romantic love, no single term or definition has been universally adopted in the literature. The psychological literature often uses the terms 'romantic love,' 'love,' and 'passionate love' .... Seminal work called it 'limerence' (Tennov, 1979). The biological literature generally uses the term 'romantic love' ... or being 'in love' .... In this review, what we term 'romantic love' encompasses all of these definitions, descriptions, and terms.": Data collection largely began with the now classic dissection of this madness, found in Love and Limerence, by Dorothy Tennov. Tennov devised approximately two hundred statements about romantic love and asked four hundred men and women at and around the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to respond with "true" or "false" reactions. Hundreds of additional individuals answered subsequent versions of her questionnaire. From their responses, as well as their diaries and other personal accounts, Tennov identified a constellation of characteristics common to this condition of "being in love," a state she called "limerence.": " Love and Limerence is widely cited in the psychological literature as a classic in the scientific study of romantic attraction."
In 1976, Tennov traveled to Paris, where she interviewed the French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir for a PBS television station, WNED-TV. It was on the flight home from this interview that she is said to have discovered that limerence is not a universal human experience, finding that her longtime friend Helen Payne was unfamiliar with it. This is when she decided to invent a new term ("limerence").
In addition to publishing Love and Limerence (1979), Tennov made a name for herself as a critic of psychotherapy. She commented in 1976 that narcissism was becoming a common diagnosis at the time, because therapists seldom saw clients who had never been to therapy before. According to Tennov, "The people who go are a relatively small group who become therapy junkies."
In 1986, Tennov left her post at the University of Bridgeport to become an independent researcher. She moved to Millsboro, Delaware, in 1987, where she lectured at a local senior learning academy and volunteered at a nursing home. Near the end of her life, she was working on a play, and a book about the public and scientific reactions to the concept of limerence.
|
|
