Essential Characteristics and Diagnostic Technique of Psychological Types of Love
The paper is aimed at theoretical insight into phenomenology of psychological manifestations of love styles, identified by J. A. Lee, the Canadian sociologist, who used types of love described by ancient Greek philosophers as a basis for his classification. The author employs a number of aspects as the criteria for the analysis of essential characteristics of love styles: differentially expressed features of feelings, self-awareness, social perception, types of human relationships (suggested by J. L. Moreno and M. Buber), ways of realization of inward human nature (described by E. S. Fromm), level of sense of community and compensation mechanism for inferiority feeling (conceptualized by A. Adler). As a result of the theoretical study, the author outlined six psychological types of love: passionate love-admiration (eros), hedonistic love (ludus), love-friendship (storge), practical love (pragma), obsessive love (mania), altruistic love (agape). Theoretical representations of psychological types of love, formulated upon carrying out the phenomenological analysis, and application of substantive deductive construction strategy for psychological inventories enabled the author to design a diagnostic technique for psychological types of love. To test the technique, the author conducted the empirical study that involved 143 participants (89 women and 54 men) aged 18–32 (mean age = 22). The paper gives the reliability indicators for six scales of the diagnostic technique for the psychological types of love and the results of its convergent validation that prove good psychometric applicability of the designed psychodiagnostic tools and their differential diagnostic potential. The study revealed correlations of degree of psychological types of love with some sustainable personality traits (R. B. Cattell’s technique) and indicators of social and psychological adaptability.
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