2004 Presentations (Communicative Events)

The Link between Love and Power

Person, Ethel

In this talk, which is about power and love, I have been influenced by several backgrounds that I want to acknowledge right away. Any practitioner in my field hears a lot about love and love problems, and love has been a major force in my own life. If I talk about my life truly, I always talk about the love relationships in my life. One of the influences on this paper, however, comes not from my personal life, nor from psychoanalysis and what I have learned there, but from what I learned from a political scientist, the late Hans Morgenthau, who taught at Columbia for a while. He was a master theoretician of power and power relations, and occasionally he turned that lens not just on international politics or national politics, but also on everyday, human politics.In this talk, which is about power and love, I have been influenced by several backgrounds that I want to acknowledge right away. Any practitioner in my field hears a lot about love and love problems, and love has been a major force in my own life. If I talk about my life truly, I always talk about the love relationships in my life. One of the influences on this paper, however, comes not from my personal life, nor from psychoanalysis and what I have learned there, but from what I learned from a political scientist, the late Hans Morgenthau, who taught at Columbia for a while. He was a master theoretician of power and power relations, and occasionally he turned that lens not just on international politics or national politics, but also on everyday, human politics.