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Infatuation, also known as being smitten, is the personal state of being overly driven by an uninformed or otherwise unreasonable passion, usually towards another person for whom one has developed strong Romantic love or sexual feelings.
Psychologist Frank D. Cox said that infatuation could be distinguished from romantic love only when looking back on a particular case of being attracted to a person but which may also evolve into a mature love.Frank D. Cox, Human Intimacy (2008) p. 72. Goldstein and Brandon describe infatuation as the first stage of a relationship before developing into a mature intimacy.A. Goldstein and M. Brandon, Reclaiming Desire (2009) p. 232. Whereas love is "a warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion to another person", infatuation is "a feeling of foolish or obsessively strong love for, admiration for, or interest in someone or something", a shallower "honeymoon phase" in a relationship. Ian Kerner, a sex therapy, stated that infatuation usually occurred at the beginning of relationships, which is "... marked by a sense of excitement and euphoria, and it's often accompanied by lust and a feeling of newness and rapid expansion with a person".
The psychologist Adam Phillips has described how illusions that occurred during infatuation inevitably resulted in disappointment when learning the truth about a lover.Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 40. Adolescents often make people an object of extravagant, short-lived passion or temporary love.
Admiration plays a significant part in this, as "in the case of a schoolgirl crush on a boy or on a male teacher. The girl starts off admiring the teacher ... then may get hung up on the teacher and follow him around".Eric Berne, Sex in Human Loving (Penguin 1970) p. 108. Then there may be shame at being confronted with the fact that "you've got what's called a crush on him ... Think if someone was hanging around you, pestering and sighing".Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock (London 2000) p. 347–348. Of course, "sex may come into this ... with an infatuated schoolgirl or schoolboy"Berne, p. 108–110. as well, producing the "stricken gaze, a compulsive movement of the throat ... an 'I'm lying down and I don't care if you walk on me, babe', expression"L. J. Smith, Night World Vol II (2009) p. 51. of infatuation. Such a cocktail of emotions "may even falsify the 'erotic sense of reality': when a person in love estimates his partner's virtues he is usually not very realistic ... projection of all his ideals onto the partner's personality".Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 86.
It is this projection that differentiates infatuation from love, according to the spiritual teacher Meher Baba: "In infatuation, the person is a passive victim of the spell of conceived attraction for the object. In love there is an active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love."Meher Baba (1967). Discourses. Volume I. San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented. p. 159. .
Distance from the object of infatuation—as with celebrities—can help maintain the infatuated state. A time-honoured cure for the one who "has a tendre ... infatuated" is to have "thrown them continually together ... by doing so you will cure ... or you will know that it is not an infatuation".Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy (London 1974) p. 101.
The possible effects of infatuation and love relationships on the academic behaviour of adolescent students were examined in research. The outcome shows that most of the participants had distraction, stress, and poor academic performance as a result of love relationships and infatuation. Furthermore, the findings highlighted that this has a detrimental effect on learning behaviour among teenagers who are in romantic or infatuated relationships.
However, psychoanalyst Janet Malcolm claims that it is wrong to convince the patient "that their love is an illusion ... that it's not you she loves. Freud was off base when he wrote that. It is you. Who else could it be?"Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (London 1988) p. 149.—thereby taking "the question of what is called true love ... further than it had ever been taken".Lacan, Fundamental p. 123.
Conversely, in countertransference, the therapist may become infatuated with his/her client: "very good-looking ... she was the most gratifying of patients. She made literary allusions and understood the ones he made ... He was dazzled by her, a little in love with her. After two years, the analysis ground down to a horrible halt".Malcolm, p. 79.
But there are also collective infatuations: "we are all prone to being drawn into social phantasy systems".R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Penguin 1972) p. 38. Thus, for instance, "the recent intellectual infatuation with structuralism and post-structuralism"Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (1980) p. xxviii. arguably lasted at least until "September 11 ended intellectual infatuation with postmodernism"David Stoesz, Quixote's Ghost (2005). as a whole.
Economic bubbles thrive on collective infatuations of a different kind: "all boom-bust processes contain an element of misunderstanding or misconception",George Soros, The New Paradigms for Financial Markets (London 2008) p. 64. whether it is the "infatuation with ... becoming the latest Dot-com company billionaire",Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times (2001) p. 25. or the one that followed with subprime mortgages, once "Alan Greenspan had replaced the tech bubble with a housing bubble".Gregory Zuckerman, The Greatest Trade Ever (London 2010) p. 83. As markets "swung virtually overnight from euphoria to fear" during the 2008 financial crisis, even the most hardened market fundamentalist had to concede that such "periodic surges of euphoria and fear are manifestations of deep-seated aspects of human nature"Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (Penguin 2008) p. 520–523.—whether these are enacted in home-room infatuations or upon the global stage.
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