Why We Love

Attachment does not live in the stomach, where the early psychoanalysts tried to put it; nor does love live in the lexical, rational, neocortical brain, where the philosophers and theologians try to put it. Remove a mother hamster’s entire neocortex and she will seem feeble-minded in a psychologist’s maze, but she can still love and raise her pup. Nor does love live in the hypothalamus that gives impetus to Freud’s “id” and to the eros praised by red-blooded, passionate poets.