Anique Adman 

Professor Cohl  

FIQWS 10105 HA10 

15 October 2018  

Sick From Love  

I’d rather have a broken arm than have a broken heart. Love is an emotion that everyone experiences at some point in their life. Most experiences of love can be blissful and others can leave a bruise on one’s heart from failing. Figuratively speaking, when love fails for someone they would refer to it as heartbreak, even though the heart cannot actually be broken. Most of the times, we see heartbreak through one of our friends, family member, ourselves or even literature. When heartbreak is depicted in literature it often leads to something known as “love sickness”, which is when one is missing their beloved so much that they are unable to function properly. Lovesickness is brought up in literature frequently when one’s beloved has no love towards them or shows no affection at all.  

“For doctors since Hippocratic times, lovesickness was not so much about love as about what we would call fixation.”(Bynum,B) Victims of love sickness would find themselves being unable to get rid of their own obsessive thoughts about something/someone that they wouldn’t be able to obtain.  The thought would consume their minds so much that one would even forget to eat or wouldn’t be able to sleep a night causing insomnia. Hippocrates constructed the theory of the humors, which are four bodily liquids, which are blood (which is responsible for erotic desire, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (which causes melancholy, loss, dejection, love, suffering). Blood and Black bile are the two humors mixed in order to create love. When all of the humors are perfectly balanced person will be healthy, but when there is in imbalance between the humors this can lead to an illness. When one was filled with too much blood, they would drain it because they could get rid of any excess black bile that would be found in one’s system.  

In the case of 19th century Russian Literature, the lovesicknes illness is very prevalent. There’s a novella named Nevsky Prospect in which a named Piskarev falls in love with a woman at first sight. “God what divine features! The loveliest brow, of a dazzling whitness, was overshadowed by beautiful, agate-like hair.” (253) Him falling in love with this girl so fast due to her beauty caused him to look at her as the virgin mary, so pure and chaste. At first, he didn’t care to be loved by her he just wanted to follow her and see where she lived. However, after following her it is discovered that she is a prostitute which leaves Piskarev completely baffled because his first impression of her was that she looked pure. “Piskarev looed her up and down with astonished eyes, as if still wishing to make sure that it was she who had so bewitched him and swept him away on Nevsky Prospect.” (256) He had such a strong fixation with her that he couldn’t stomach the thought of her being a prostitute so he decided to leave her right where she stood and went home. As time goes on, Piskarev grows an even stronger infatuation with the thought of her from the first time he saw her and starts to become delusional. The love that he experiences for her is known as mania, which is love that is destructive and he’s practically in a state of denial. He isn’t aware of the kind of love that he feels for her because he has yet to even come to terms with the real her. When he dreams of her, he dreams of her as a wife and he becomes instantly amused with the thought of that potentially becoming a reality. Nevertheless, the harsh reality stills stands and he will never be able to pursue his desired future with her.  

One would say that Piskarev is experiencing lovesickness because he wanted to stay in a state of delirium, by taking opium to sleep in order to continue dreaming about who she was or at least who he thought she was. The cause of his death was in fact the dreams that he was having  about his beloved. Prior to going to sleep he would be unhappy and would have full knowledge about what was going on. Once asleep he would be truly happy because all of his good thoughts about her would cloud his mind. Him being so delirious leads him to go to the brothel and proceed to ask the female to marry him. Completely humiliated and heartbroken by her answer, he goes back to his house and slits his throat ending his own life.  

Some may say that Piskarev used drugs to further enhance his emotions and the love that he thought was there. “Recent brain studies show extensive parallels between the effects of certain addictive drugs and experiences of being in love. Both activate the brain’s reward system, can overwhelm us so that we forget about other things and can inspire withdrawal when they are no longer available.” According to Brian D. Earp, a cognitive scientist at Oxford University, being in love and being addicted to drugs are relatively the same thing. Some people can know that they are in a bad relationship yet stay due to the infatuation that they have with the person. This relates to love sickness because in most cases, the lover knows that their beloved doesn’t have feelings for them, but they ignore it. Just like when someone has a drug addiction, they know in the back of their mind that it’s bad for them, but they drug makes them feel good, so they ignore it.  

In modern times, we associate lovesickness with laying down in our bed listening to sad songs reminiscing on the good memories we had with our beloved in order to deal with our heartbreak. “Creating physical distance and not spending time with the person is a good start. A modern trick is to stop looking at the person’s Facebook photos.”  However, some cases of lovesickness are deeper and more delusional. “I have often found myself sitting in front of lovesick patients, whose psychological pain and behavioral disturbances are equal in severity to any of the symptoms of a major psychiatric illness. Such patients are usually embarrassed to disclose their thoughts; lovesickness is supposedly transitory, adolescent, inconsequential or ridiculous.” Psychotherapist Frank Tallis explains one of his major cases about a female named Megan who was married but had an underlying passion for her dentist. After he does a quick procedure on her Megan, she feels as though the way he was gentile with her showed that he had feelings for her rather than thinking that he was just insuring that his patient would feel as comfortable as possible while having this procedure. “After her operation, Megan obsessed about Verma, her dentist. Her sleep was disturbed, and she couldn’t concentrate at work. She yearned to be near him.” Megan was also suffering from manic love, because Verma was married and had no intention of being with Megan at all. She even took it as far as writing long letters to him in hopes that he would recognize the love that they shared, with was all made up in her head.  Megan even wanted to meet up with Verma to express her feelings in person, but he was only focused on her recovery. After calling him office multiple times hoping to hear his voice his dental secretaries begged for her to stop, so she desperately tracked down his home phone number trying to reach him better. His wife answered and insisted that Megan stopped calling and went to go get some help. Verma even took into upon himself to tell Megan that she had to stop trying to contact him and get help because her actions weren’t healthy.  

So delirious, Megan had convinced herself that Verma was saying those things in order to just please his wife and make sure that his relationship would still be intact. “Megan was suffering from a rare but well-documented mental illness called De Clerambault’s syndrome, which was first described in detail by the French psychiatrist Gaeten de Clerambault in 1921; it is diagnosed in a fraction of the 0.2% of the people who suffer from delusional disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association.” In Tellis’s research, he states that, De Clerambault’s syndrome is when a woman falls in love with a man which whom she knows nothing about and convinces herself that he has the same feelings for her. After being placed on Pimozide, which is a medicine to help with schizophrenia, the dosage however wasn’t enough, and Megan still carried on with her actions causing Verma and his family to move to Dubai. Through all of this, she finally realized that she would never be able to gain the love from him that she wanted. “Her grief was palpable. She had finally allowed herself to contemplate the possibility that Verma didn’t love her, that they would never be together.” Realizing that the love won’t work out is usually the last step for unrequited love, which most people accept and move on or take more drastic measures, such as suicide.  

Based upon research, through 19th century Russian Literature and studies from modern times, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love could in fact produce an illness.  Some people may even look at love as a drug because too much of it can bring about a great deal of agony. Love can be beautiful but can also bring about great pain.

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