Love And Intellect

Thanks to a power-outage, I had watched about a fourth of Hitchcock's Spellbound in my teens before the screen went dark. They were showing the movie on television. I had meant to check out the rest of it at some point and it happened a few weeks ago when I came upon a copy at the public library. It has been nearly that long since I read some of the writings of Freud. My general recollection of the experience is comparable to the kind that reading Kafka's Metamorphosis left in it's wake. Visceral but not particularly pleasant.

As much as I admire Kafka as a writer, I find it very hard to read his writing because of its profoundly depressing quality. I pretty much never returned to Freud after the initial encounter. One quote by the character of Dr Brulov, a psychoanalyst in Spellbound "We both know that the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of intellect" got my attention. I don't know how a man's brain operates when he is in love, but I know from personal experience and that of many other women of my acquaintance, that Brulov is exactly right about women.

I have been appalled (not to mention ashamed) at my ability to completely take leave of commonsense, rationality and reason - faculties that becomes painfully acute after falling out of love. Innately smart and sensible women will act in ways incomprehensible to their family and friends when they are hopelessly in love. Often their behavior at the time is totally incompatible with their personality. It is only after they emerge from that phase of the relationship, they begin to display their more familiar traits.