Love

by Leo Buscaglia
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1972 - (By 1984 it was in its 39th printing)

(I haven't finished entering the quotes from his book, so it is hard to tell from this page how good his book is, but I highly recommend it.)

Buscaglia led a free, non-credit class at the U. of Southern California in the 60's and 70's called the "Love Class." His book is an outgrowth of the class.

He opens with this introduction

In the winter of 1969, an intelligent, sensitive female student of mine committed suicide. She was from a seemingly fine upper middle class family. Her grades were excellent. She was popular and sought after. On the particular day in January she drove her car along the cliffs of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, left the motor running, walked to the edge of a deep cliff overlooking the sea and leaped to her death on the rocks below. She left no note, not a word of explanation. She was only twenty.

I have never been able to forget her eyes; alert, alive, responsive, full of promise. I can even recall her papers and examinations which I always read with interest. I wrote on one of her papers which she never received, "A very fine paper. Perceptive, intelligent and sensitive. It indicates your ability to apply what you have learned to your 'real' life. Nice work!" What did I know about her "real" life?

I often wondered what I would read in her eyes or her papers if I could see them now. But, as with so many people in and situations in our life, we superficially experience them, they pass and can never be experienced in the same manner.

... I simply wondered what I might have done; if I could have, even momentarily, helped.

p 12 Reflecting love is like two mirrors-- leads to infinity.

p. 16 As experienced human beings we must certainly believe in one thing more than anything else--we believe in change. And so if you don't like where you are in terms of love, you can change it.

You can only give away what you have.

Then he says that love is more like something you share because when you share it you still have it. He says he could teach everything he knows and still know it.

Like smiles - you don't give it, you spread it, (like knowledge)

Academics don't like word "love" -- he says he has to make his speech title more academic sounding, like "Affect as a Behavior Modifier" when he gives talks on love to academics.

He says the word "love" is rarely found in psychology books or any other academic books.

"Love has really been ignored by the scientists."

p 17 He likes a book by Pitirim Sorokim called The Ways and Power of Love.

Samuelson added a chapter to his economics book called "Love and Economics." Later he says that Samuelson said "I know my colleagues at Harvard will say I have lost my mind. But I want them to know that I have just found it.

LB quotes Albert Schweitzer who says we are close together, but dying of loneliness.

p 18 He lists several characteristics of a loving person.

Characteristic 1 - A person who cares about himself. He says it is the most important one. He describes this person as someone who says "Everything is filtered through me, so the greater I am, the more I have to give. The greater knowledge I have, the more I am going to have to give. The greater understanding I have, the greater is my ability to teach others.." [I would add the happier I am, the more my own emotional needs are met, the more loving I will be able to be.]

p 19 If all of life is directed toward the process of becoming, of growing, of seeing, of feeling, of touching, of smelling, there won't be a boring second.

p 20 He says we are losing our uniqueness, we are not persuading people to discover and develop it. Then he has a few things to say about the educational system:

p 20 Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that is the only reason for having anything.

Imagine what this world would be like if all along the way you had people say to you, "It's good that you are different. Show me your differences so that maybe I can learn from them." But we still see the processes again and again of trying to make everyone like everybody else.

p21 He talks about how the art teacher wants everyone to draw a tree the same way. If a boy who has climbed in a tree, and who sees it from a totally different perspective paints one his way she will cry out that he is brain damaged!

p 22 The Animal School

p 31 What did you learn today- fact/feeling or about life. He says make it a habit to ask self later. He says in the future intelligence and happiness will prevail, and that will be heaven.

Quote p 37

p 22

p 76 Most men remain essentially strangers, even to those who love them. (SH- Sounds true, but also hard to totally agree with believe because to love somemone, you must really know them, the real them.)

He says Orestes was alone when he killed Clytemnestra- his mother (?) - an act which feed him

It is true that in the last analysis each man stands alone. Love is also recognizes need No matter how many people surround him or how famous he may be, in the most significant moments of his life he'll most likely find himself alone. The moment of birth is an "alone" world, as is the moment of death. In between these most significant moments there is the aloneness of the moments of tears, moments of struggle for change, moments of decision. These are times when man is faced only with himself, for no one else can ever truly understand his tears, his striving, or the complex motivations behind his decisions. Most men remain essentially strangers, even to those who need to love them. Orestes was alone when he decided to kill Clytemnestra, his mother, the act that freed him. Hamlet was alone when he made the decision to avenge his father's death, the act that destroyed him and virtually all those about him. John Kennedy was alone when he made the famous Bay of Pigs decision, a decision which might have brought another great war upon the world. Most of us will never know the weight of such momentous aloneness, but each time we, too, make a decision, insignificant though it may seem, we are just as truly alone.

The concept of aloneness becomes even more devastating when we equate "aloneness" with "loneliness." These, of course, are two radically different things. One can be alone and never feel loneliness and, conversely, one can be lonely even when he is among people. We have all experienced degrees of aloneness. They have not always been frightening. At times, we've found aloneness not only necessary but challenging, enlightening, even joyful. We've needed to be alone with ourselves to become re-acquainted with ourselves in the deepest sense. We've needed time to reflect, to tie loose ends together, to make meaning of confusion or simply to revel in dreams. We have found that we often do these things best alone. Albert Schweitzer stressed this poignantly in his comment that modern man is so much a part of a crowd that he is dying of a personal loneliness.

Most men seem able to contend with the knowledge of being alone as a unique challenge. But they edge of being alone as a unique challenge. But they do not choose aloneness as a permanent state. Man is by nature a social being. He finds that he feels more comfortable in his aloneness to the degree to which he can volitionally be involved with be involved with others. He discovers that with each deep relationship he's brought closer to himself, that others help him to gain personal strength and this strength, in turn, makes it more possible for him to face his aloneness. So man strives consciously to reach out to others and bring them closer to himself. He does this to the degree to which he is able and to which he is accepted. The more he can ally himself to all things, even to death, the less fearful of isolation he becomes. For these reasons man created marriage, the family, communities, and most recently, communes , and some contend, even God.

There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a newborn infant, for example, can regress, developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idiocy and die. He may do this even if he has a perfect physical environment, a superb diet, and hospital type hygiene. These do not seem to be enough for his continued physical and mental development. The infant mortality rate in well-equipped has been appalling. In the previous two decades, before an understanding of the import of human response on child development was accepted, the statistics of infant mortality in institutions were even more horrible. In 1915, for example, at a meeting of the American Pediatric Society, Dr. Henry Chapin reported a study of ten institutions for infants in the United States where every child under two years of age died! Other reports at the time were similar.

Dr. Griffith Banning, in study of 800 Canadian children, reported that in a situation where children whose parents were divorced, dead or separated, and where a feeling of love and affection was lacking, this knowledge did far more damage to growth than caused by disease and was more serious than all others factors combined.

Skeels, a noted psychologist and educator, reported recently on his most dramatic long-term study conducted on orphaned children where the only variable was human love and nurturing. One group of 12 children remained housed in an orphan-age. Each of 12 children, in a second group, was brought daily to be cared for and loved by an adolescent, retarded girl in an institution nearby. His findings have become classic in the literature. After over twenty years of study he has found that of those in Group I who remained in the institution, without person love, all were at present, if not dead, either in institutions for the mentally retarded or in institutions for the mentally ill. Of those in Group II, who received love and attention, all were self-supporting, most had graduated high school and all were happily married, with only one divorce. Startling statistics, indeed!

In New York city, Dr. Rene Spitz, in the past decade, studied children who lived in two different but physically adequate institutions. The institutions differed mainly in their approach to their charges in the amout of physical contact and nurturing which the children recieved. In one institution the child was in contact with a human person, usually his mother, daily.

In the second institution, there was a single nurse in charge of from eight to twelve children. Dr Spitz studied each child in terms of factors of his development, medically and psychologically. He concerned himself with the child's Developmental Quotient which included such important aspects of personality as intelligence, perception, memory, imitative ability and so on. All else being comparatively equal in the children who had the nurturing, the caring human contact, the Developmental Quotient rose from 101.5 to 105 and showed a continued rising trend.

P81. Those children deprived of nurturing started with an average Developmental Quotient of 124 and by the second year of study the Development Quotient had fallen to a startling 45!

There are several other studies by Drs. Fritz, Ridel, David Wineman and Karl Menninger all of which indicate a positive correlation between human concern and togetherness, and human growth and development. A very interesting and more thorough report on these studies and many of a similar nature can be found in a fascinating article by Ashley Montagu in the Phi Delta Kappa, May 1970.

So it seems the infant does not know or understand the subtle dinamics of love but already has such a strong need for it that the lack of it can affect his growth and development and even bring on his death. This does not change with adulthood. In many cases, the need for togetherness and love becomes the major drive and goal of an individual's life. It is known that a lack of love is the major cause of severe neurosis and even psychosis in adulthood.

there for we say that the love as a learned phenomenon.

p 127 Love always creates. It never destroys

He talks about all the problems in the world that seem impossible to solve and says...

The only question is, What can I do?

128 story of how he helped one Chinese refugee who then helped someone else who then helped someone else.

129 Love is illimitable, deep, infinite

Each day in which we become more observant, more flexible, more knowledgeable, more aware, we grow in love.

Other quotes

A loving person recognizes needs. p 43

He needs people who care, someone who cares at least about him, truly sees and hears him. ... perhaps just one person, but someone who cares deeply.

p 44 We need to be heard. Then example of teacher who doesn't pay any attention to student saying his father hit his mother.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste — waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leo_Buscaglia.

Buscaglia quotes

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=================
Introduction
================= =================
Forward To Love
=================

Love As a Learned Phenomenon

Man Needs to Loved and Be Loved

A Questions of Definition

Love Knows No Age

Love Has Many Deterrents

To Love Other You Must First Love Yourself

To Love You Must Free Yourself Of Labels

Love Involves Responsibility

Love Recognizes Needs

Love Requires One to Be Strong

Love Offers No Apology


Man Needs To Love And Be Loved