Love & Passion Quote by Theodor Reik

Romantic love, Reik suggests, is less a sweet feeling than a mental regime: it doesn’t merely prefer one person, it reorganizes reality around them. Calling the lover a “monotheist” is a sly diagnostic move from a psychologist steeped in psychoanalytic thinking. Monotheism isn’t just belief; it’s exclusivity with moral force. It’s the insistence that one attachment isn’t one option among many but the option, the axis that makes everything else look like error, distraction, or heresy.

The line turns on its double awareness. The lover “knows” other people worship different gods, meaning they can intellectually grasp that others fall in love differently, choose differently, leave differently. Yet they “cannot... imagine” alternatives for themselves. That gap between cognition and imagination is the tell: love as a kind of chosen unfreedom, a narrowing of possibility that feels like clarity. Reik captures the way devotion can masquerade as insight: the beloved becomes not just desired but necessary, not just special but singular.

Context matters here. Writing in an era when psychoanalysis treated love as a site of projection, repetition, and need, Reik frames romance as a modern faith for a secular age. The subtext isn’t anti-love so much as anti-sentimentality: what we call “meant to be” may be the psyche defending its investment. The metaphor also carries a warning. Monotheists don’t bargain with rival deities. They convert, or they crusade.