The psychology of Tristan and Iseult
Tristan and Iseult (or Isolde) is a medieval romance story, considered "the quintissential courtly romance" (Love Sick, p. 97).
Tristan is raised by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, and it falls upon him to escort King Mark's bride-to-be, the beautiful Princess Isolde, from her home in Ireland to the king's castle. While crossing the Irish Sea, they both mistakenly drink a love potion, and subsequently fall in love. The love potion - a potent symbol of love's madness - neatly excuses Tristan's betrayal of his uncle.
In Gottfried's version, the bemused Tristan complains: "I do not know what has come over poor Isolde and me, but we have both of us gone mad in the briefest space of time, with unimaginable torment - we are dying of love . . ."
Tristan and Isolde (against their better judgement) become clandestine lovers and, in doing so, stir the gods of tragedy. Much of the ensuing drama concerns their attempts to avoid discovery, and eventually they must separate. Tristan is wounded by a poisoned spear and, as his life ebbs away, he calls for Isolde. She rushes to be with him, but arrives too late and can do nothing to save him. Clasping his dead body, she gives up her spirit and dies. (Frank Tallis, Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, p. 97)
This can be understood as a story about mutual limerence. Tristan and Iseult is an early work in the same tradition which later inspired Romeo and Juliet.
Initially, Tristan and Iseult don't even like each other, because Tristan kills a relative of Iseult earlier in the story. The love potion is meant for the wedding of Iseult to King Mark, and it's served to Tristan and Iseult by mistake. Both later marry other people when they're actually obsessed with each other: Iseult is married to King Mark, and Tristan is later married to a different character who is also named Iseult (for symbolic reasons, according to analysts). The story follows the characters as they're unable to break free from the effects of the potion. A number of episodes occur where they swear to never see each other again, and then continue having their affair anyway.
One famous author, Denis de Rougemont (mentioned in Tennov, p. 292), can be understood as essentially arguing in his 1939 book Love in the Western World that limerence came into being via this story, using a kind of clumsy linguistic determinism argument (de Rougemont, p. 173). The strange thing in de Rougemont is that he seems to be aware it's a real state (likened to addiction, de Rougemont, p. 168), and he seems to be aware that it was described by earlier authors, merely being looked upon with a different attitude—e.g. viewed as a sickness by the Greeks and Romans, and not a legitimate basis for a relationship (de Rougemont, p. 60). However, his idea that romantic love came from literature became influential in Dorothy Tennov's era. John Alan Lee (1975, 1998) uses de Rougemont's writings in his explanation of how the mania love style (similar to, or the same as limerence) came to be viewed as a legitimate basis for relationships in Western culture, although Lee does not advocate linguistic determinism. Lee is a socialist who talks more about social conditions. (Actually, Lee advocates something like the childhood trauma theory of limerence, because in his research he found that the mania love style was associated with an unhappy childhood. He believed the troubadour poets who invented courtly love had this background, stated in The Romantic Heresy.)
Denis de Rougemont also views the conflict as essentially religious (from a Christian POV), with literature that idealizes limerence (courtly love and so on) being a kind of pagan heresy.
The courtly and romantic cultural traditions (which are disparate but intersecting) probably did influence Western attitudes towards limerence, but not necessarily the specific story of Tristan and Iseult, and not in the way de Rougemont believed. According to Irving Singer (2009, pp. xviii–xix, 283–286), de Rougemont's account of history is a "kind of propagandistic inaccuracy", and the 18th-century Romantics were more influential. Courtly romance was more about the idealization of extramarital relations (i.e. limerence affairs) rather than marrying for love. The idea that people should marry for the experience of falling in love (or that limerence should lead to a relationship) really emerged in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, but courtly romance was a kind of precursor that had been floating around for awhile in art and culture.
Also see How does Dorothy Tennov define limerence? for some more information about these intersecting concepts.
Obviously then, Tennov is one of the first authors who fashioned a proper evolutionary argument for "romantic love" (in the sense of this kind of thing), and her general idea became the mainstream one: that the infatuation period of a relationship keeps a couple together while they raise an infant. Limerence is a result or by-product of this evolution. People came to fall in love outside of relationships somehow. (Whether it always worked like that, or if limerence came afterwards is unknown based on my reading, but it seems to me that co-option theory suggests romantic love ought to be one-sided, because a mother needs to attach to her baby no matter how it behaves. Romance is weird!)
Another work fashioned in the image of de Rougemont is We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (originally 1983), by the psychoanalyst Robert Johnson. Johnson is a Jungian psychoanalyst, making his theories somewhat unintelligible to an unfamiliar reader. This involves narrative analysis and key concepts like projection, the shadow, and archetypes like anima (female) & animus (male).
For a Jungian interpretation of limerence, see the following videos:
Jungian psychoanalysis tries to explain the phenomenology of human psychology through symbolism. Johnson believes that myths have some kind of transcendental power beyond being entertainment. Thus, he argues (somewhat unconvincingly) that there's something special about the Tristan myth which foreshadowed the historical developments in the Western psyche. Johnson has interesting things to say in this book, but this type of psychology is obviously considered unserious in 2025, from a scientific perspective. People who like this type of psychology might say it's a symbolic language for talking about psychodynamics, or like an analogy.
Despite our ecstasy when we are "in love," we spend much of our time with a deep sense of loneliness, alienation, and frustration over our inability to make genuinely loving and committed relationships. Usually we blame other people for failing us; it doesn't occur to us that perhaps it is we who need to change our own unconscious attitudes—the expectations and demands we impose on our relationships and on other people.
This is the great wound in the Western psyche. It is the primary psychological problem of our Western culture. Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness. For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves. Romantic love, if we truly undertake the task of understanding it, becomes such a path to consciousness. (p. xii)
A myth is the collective "dream" of an entire people at a certain point in their history. It is as though the entire population dreamed together, and that "dream," the myth, burst forth through its poetry, songs, and stories. But a myth not only lives in literature and imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behavior and attitudes of the culture—into the practical daily lives of the people. (p. 2) Tristan and Iseult is a symbolic blueprint of our Western psyche at a critical turning point in our psychological development. It shows us the conflict and illusions, but also the potentialities, inherent in the situation. (p. 5)
People familiar with the psychology of Jordan Peterson (who at one time was also a Jungian psychoanalyst with a therapy background, before he became political and famous) might be familiar with this idea that myths hold psychological potency. (They can, just not in the way Johnson assumes, I don't think.) Actually, Jordan Peterson has commented on limerence, with analysis very similar to Johnson:
The obsession is not based in reality; it is "the projection of an ideal," says psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson: "Relationships are built on negotiated reality - not fantasy. True love is when you stop idealising and start serving - when you move from projection to participation." "Limerence is an inevitable byproduct of human romantic idealism," Dr. Peterson explains.
Robert Johnson's advice in his book (being a therapist) about what makes a healthy relationship is perfectly good, despite the sort of wishy-washy mythological psychoanalysis.
Johnson has complaints similar to Tennov about semantic confusion: in his words, between "romance" and "love". His distinction throughout the book is very reminiscent of Tennov's distinction between limerence and love (or limerence and affectional bonding, further distinguished by Tennov).
The problem with this book is that you need to understand Jungian psychoanalysis to understand what he's actually arguing: generally that love based on a fantasy isn't reciprocal, and that "passion" (which in this sense is really a result of drama & uncertainty, as in limerence theory) usually has to settle down for people to actually be happy in their relationships.
In our culture people use this phrase, "romantic love," indiscriminately to refer to almost any attraction between man and woman. If a couple is having a sexual affair, people will say they are "romantically involved." If a man and a woman love each other and plan to marry, people will say it is a "romance," but in fact, their relationship may not be based on "romance" at all. It may be based simply on love, which is completely different from romance! Or a woman will say, "I wish my husband would be more romantic." But what she actually means is that her husband should be more attentive, more thoughtful, and show her more feeling. We are all so caught up in the belief that romantic love is "true love" that we use the term for many things that are not romantic love at all. We assume that if it is love, it must be "romance," and if it is romance, it must be "love."
The fact that we say "romance" when we mean "love" shows us that underneath our language there is a psychological muddle. Our confusion in language is the symptom that tells us we have lost the consciousness of what love is, what romance is, and what the differences are between them. We are confusing two great psychological systems within us, and this has a devastating effect on our lives and our relationships. (pp. 43-44)
Tristan and Iseult have not only thrown out sexual faithfulness, they have given up all loyalty, all commitment, all duty, save one—their dedication to passion.
But a commitment to passion is not a substitute for commitment to a human being. In our culture we have these two feelings completely confused. We are all committed to finding passion, we are all committed to being eternally "in love"; and we imagine that this is the same thing as being committed to a person. But the passion fades; the passion migrates to someone else we feel attracted to. If we are committed only to follow where passion leads, then there can be no true loyalty to an individual person.
Almost everyone is looking for "committed relationship." Most people sense that this is what they need, and people talk and read about "relationship" incessantly. But for all our talk about "commitment," we are sabotaged by our assumptions before we begin. We assume that the single ingredient that we need for "relationship," the one thing it cannot do without, is romance. But in fact, the essential ingredients for relationship are affection and commitment. If we look clearly, we begin to see that romance is a completely different energy system, a completely distinct set of values, from love and commitment. If it is romance that we seek, it is romance that we shall have—but not commitment and not relationship.
A man is committed to a woman only when he can inwardly affirm that he binds himself to her as an individual and that he will be with her even when he is no longer "in love," even when he and she are no longer afire with passion and he no longer sees in her his ideal of perfection or the reflection of his soul. When a man can say this inwardly, and mean it, then he has touched the essence of commitment. But he should know that he has an inner battle ahead of him. The love potion is strong: The new morality of romance is deeply ingrained in us; it seizes us and dominates us when we least expect it. To put the love potion on the correct level, to live it without betraying his human relationships, is the most difficult task of consciousness that any man can undertake in our modern Western world. (pp. 102–103)
Tristan and Iseult are "in love," yet we wonder if it is with each other. They are entranced, mesmerized, in love with a mystical vision—but of something separate and distinct from their human selves, something they see through the magic of the wine. Their "love" is not ordinary human love that comes by knowing each other as individuals. The symbol tells us that this is a love that is "magical," "supernatural"—it is neither personal nor voluntary; it comes from outside the lovers and possesses them against their will. It reminds us of what people often say: "They are in love with love." (p. 51)
The myth says that romantic love has the same qualities as the love potion. But the love potion is both natural and "supernatural." Partly it is wine and herbs from the earth, symbolizing the ordinary human side of romantic love. But partly it is magic spells and sorcery. What is it in romantic love that is evoked by these symbols?
We know there is something inexplicable in romance. When we look at the feelings that rampage through us, we know that it is not just companionship or sexual attraction, and it is not that quiet, devoted, unromantic love that we often see in stable marriages and relationships. It is something more, something different.
When we are "in love" we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves had been returned to us; we feel uplifted, as though we were suddenly raised above the level of the ordinary world. Life has an intensity, a glory, an ecstasy and transcendence.
We seek in romantic love to be possessed by our love, to soar to the heights, to find ultimate meaning and fulfillment in our beloved. We seek the feeling of wholeness. (p. 52)
One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being "in love."
We begin to understand why this is so. Iseult the Fair is anima. It is the divine love that Tristan seeks in her; unconsciously he seeks passage to the inner world. Tristan can not make an ordinary human relationship to Iseult the Fair because she is anima and must be experienced as inner person, as symbol. (p. 133)
Romantic love, true to its paradoxical nature, fools us: It looks as though it aims at making a human relationship to a person. After all, one is not mediating in a template; one is "in love" with a human person. Or is one? It is difficult for us to see the difference—the vast difference—between relating to a human person and using that person as a vehicle for one's projection. (p. 138)
This pattern in romantic love replays itself constantly in the lives of modern people. A man in a relationship or marriage feels vaguely dissatisfied: Life doesn't have enough meaning, or he misses the ecstasy and the "rush" that he used to feel. Instead of realizing that he is longing for the divine love, for the inner experience of anima that is his own responsibility, he finds fault with the woman. (p. 140)
Human love, symbolized by Iseult of the White Hands [Iseult of the White Hands is Tristan's actual wife whom he cheats on, and a different character from the titular character also named Iseult, or Iseult the Fair], is utterly different from what we call "falling in love." For a man to love in the human way of the earth feminine means for him to direct his love to a mortal human being, not at the idealized image that he projects. It means for him to be related to the actual human being, to value her, to identify with her, to affirm her value and her sacredness as she is, in her totality—with her shadow side, her imperfections, and all that makes her an ordinary mortal. To be "in love" is different: It is not directed at a woman; it is directed at anima, at a man's ideal: his dream, his fantasy, his hope, his expectation, his passion for an inner being whom he superimposes over the external woman. (p. 141)
[Tristan and Iseult's] only concern is to use each other to break free completely from the ordinary earth, to fly to that magical, imaginal world where "great singers sing their songs forever." They do not actually love each other. They use each other as vehicles to have the intense, passionate experiences they long for.
This, whether we admit it or not, is what romantic love is. In Tristan and Iseult the egotism, the use of each other to create the passion for its own sake, is so blatant, so naive, and so childlike that it is unmistakable. But our own versions of this are scarcely more subtle. It simply never enters our romantic heads that there is something strange about seeking a so-called "love" for the sake of my fulfillment, my thrills, my dreams coming true, my fantasy, my "need to be loved," my ideal of the perfect love, my security, my entertainment.
When we genuinely love another person, it is a spontaneous act of being, an identification with the other person that causes us to affirm, value, and honor him or her, to desire that person's happiness and well-being. In those rare moments when we are loving, rather than focused on our own egos, we stop asking what dreams this person is going to fulfill for us, what intense and extraordinary adventures he or she is going to provide. (pp. 141–142)
There is much to be learned by looking at the poetry and the romances of our ancestors, for they had the grace to state bluntly the truths that we are unwilling to face. If we can open our minds and learn from them to say what is, then we can begin to understand what forces are at work in us. It is no coincidence that all romantic literature, from Tristan and Iseult to Romeo and Juliet and up to the present, is filled with suffering and death. The very nature of romance seems to require that it be lived in the face of impossible odds, terrible obstacles, and inhuman adversities. Finding their their romance impossible in this physical world, many of the archetypal lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, choose to die together. (pp. 147–148)
So, don't project fantasies, hopes and ideals onto a person. Johnson advocates for what he calls "human love", which he says is more ordinary.
People become so wearied of the cycles and dead ends of romance that they begin to wonder if there is such a thing as "love." There is. But sometimes we have to make profound changes of attitude before we can see what love is and make room for love in our lives. (p. 189)
Human love is so obscured by the inflations and commotions of romance that we almost never look for love in its own right, and we hardly know what to look for when we do search. But as we learn love's characteristics and attitudes, we can begin to see love within us—revealed in our feelings, in the spontaneous flow of warmth that surges toward another person, in the small, unnoticed acts of relatedness that make up the secret fabric of our daily lives.
Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds. Love is the inner god who opens our blind eyes to the beauty, value, and quality of the other person. Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well as the admirable qualities. When one truly loves the shadow just as one loves the rest. One accepts the other person's totality. (pp. 190–191)
In its very essence, love is an appreciation, a recognition of another's value: It moves a man to honor a woman rather than use her, to ask himself how he might serve her. And if this woman is relating to him through love, she will take the same attitude toward him. (p. 192)
This is why we have taken exception to romantic love, and this is the main distinction between human love and romantic love: Romance must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism. For romance is not a love that is directed at another human being; the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies. In a very real sense, it is a love not of another person, but of ourselves. (p. 193)
Stirring the oatmeal is an humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks[.] To "stir the oatmeal" means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything. (p. 195)
When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life together. They transform even the unexciting, difficult, and mundane things into a joyful and fulfilling component of life. By contrast, romantic love can only last so long as a couple are "high" on one another, so long as the money lasts and the entertainments are exciting. "Stirring the oatmeal" means that two people take their love off the airy level of exciting fantasy and convert it into earthy, practical immediacy.
Love is content to do many things that ego is bored with. Love is willing to work with the other person's moods and unreasonableness. Love is willing to fix breakfast and balance the checkbook. Love is willing to do these "oatmeal" things of life because it is related to a person, not a projection.
Human love sees another person as an individual and makes an individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama. (p. 196) Human love necessarily includes friendship: friendship within relationship, within marriage, between husband and wife. ... in romantic love there is no friendship. Romance and friendship are utterly opposed energies, natural enemies with completely opposing motives. (p. 197)
Johnson, however, believes there is still a redeeming value in projections. I take this to mean he is advocating self-love and self-care.
When we are focused on our projections, we are focused on ourselves. And the passion and love we feel for our projections is a reflexive, circular love that is directed inevitably back to ourselves.
But here, again, we run headlong into the paradox of romantic love. The paradox is that we should love our projections, and that we should also love ourselves. In romance the love of self becomes distorted; it becomes egocentric and its original nature is lost. But if we learn to seek it on the correct level, the love of self is a true and valid love: It is the second great stream of energy that flows into romantic love, human love's archetypal mate, the other face of Eros.
We need to revere the unconscious parts of ourselves that we project. When we love our projections, when we honor our romantic ideals and fantasies, we affirm infinitely precious dimensions of our total selves. The riddle is how to love one's self without falling into egotism. (pp. 193–194)
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