Love and Aggression: Shades or Poles?

Love and aggression are some of those perennial phenomena that have captured our imagination since ages. Conventionally, the two have been portrayed to be antagonistic, love, as soothing and pleasurable, while aggression, as unpleasant and destructive.

Investigation of neurobiological basis of love highlights the involvement of pleasure and reward processes, limbic lobes and certain frontal areas, oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, serotonergic signalling and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms coupled to nitric oxide autoregulatory pathways (Esch and Stefano, 2005). On the other hand, imbalance between prefrontal regulatory influences and hyper-responsivity of the amygdala and other limbic regions, evident through insufficient serotonergic control, excessive catecholaminergic stimulation, subcortical imbalances of glutamatergic/ gabaminergic systems, as well as pathology in neuropeptide systems have been implicated in aggression (Siever, 2008). The overlap between the two apparently opposite phenomenon is evident. The current symposium attempts to conceptualize love and aggression in their multiple shades, in the light of the various theories, as well as taking help from something more objective like the different physiological processes and the proposed molecular and neuronal mechanisms. There have been innumerable ways to conceptualize love and aggression...right from psychoanalytical to evolutionary and of late, cognitive and behavioural theories. Theories to postulate how these happen, why these happen. Its true...we are now able to understand partly how these happen, what are the so called biological mechanisms...pathways, circuits, neurotransmitters...how they change or bring change during the experience of love or an act of aggression...but to understand those in their entirety is far beyond our reach.