From the author: This topic has occupied me for a long time both in my practice of working with clients and in my personal life. It seems that something has now taken shape and is “asking” to come out. With this article I open a series of my subjective observations and reflections on the essence of unconditional and conditional love in the context of child-parent relationships. To be continued... WHEN LOVE IS TOO MUCH... Love cannot be cured with herbs. Ovid The Need for Love Let me start with the fact that love is the most important social human need. I believe that a number of other important needs - acceptance, recognition, respect - are forms of the same need for love. Love is a nutrient medium so necessary for human development. For good development, as is known, it is necessary that needs are satisfied. Unsatisfied, frustrated needs lead to various kinds of disorders or developmental deviations. There is a well-known statement in the clinic that all psychopathology is the result of an excess or deficiency. And love is no exception here. I will turn to this thesis a little later, considering options when there is too little or too much love. Unconditional and conditional love In psychology, the traditional division of love into unconditional and conditional. Unconditional love is a term denoting love for someone that does not depend on any or conditions, but based on a stable, holistic image of the other. Such love is associated with accepting another for who he is. In this case, the loved one does not need to do anything special in order to be loved. A person who has had the opportunity to encounter unconditional love in his life grows up with a stable understanding and experience that he will be loved regardless of his actions or qualities, and he is not obliged to perform any actions in order to deserve certain feelings or attitude from the one who loves him. Conditional love presupposes compliance with certain specified conditions of the lover. Conditional love exists only as long as its object meets these conditions. The conditions depend on who loves. Here we are dealing with a certain image of the lover, which must be met in order to receive this love. The important point here is that the described forms of love are necessary and successive stages in human development: unconditional love in the process of development is replaced by conditional love. Why is unconditional love needed? Unconditional love is the basis for the formation of a child’s vital identity. The child sees love-admiration, love-acceptance in the eyes of his mother, reads this through her non-verbal signals, bodily-emotional manifestations and is imbued with it. The result of this interaction process is the formation of a healthy vital identity of the child, which he experiences as “accepting myself as I am.” Vital identity is the foundation for the child’s further development. A child who is well “nourished with unconditional love” grows up with a stable self-image and good self-acceptance. In his future life, he can rely on himself. Why is conditional love needed? Conditional love is no less important, but a little later - at the next stage of the child’s development. During the period when he encounters in his life the tasks of socialization, his entry into the world of people, he inevitably encounters a number of necessary conditions - the rules by which a particular society lives and by which he will have to live in order to be accepted (loved) by this society . Let me use the following metaphor: unconditional and conditional love is like the battery and generator in a car. Unconditional love is a battery, conditional love is a generator. A good battery is necessary to start a car. When the car is started, in order for it to move, it already needs a generator, which, among other things, recharges the battery. Maternal and paternal love Maternal love, as a rule, is unconditional love. Mother loves her childsimply because it is her child. Not because he is somehow special, talented, handsome, smart, obedient... This is her child and therefore he is special, talented, handsome, smart for her... Here we see a situation of maximum acceptance of another: “You are who you are, and this is great!”, which subsequently becomes the child’s internal attitude: “I am who I am and this is great!” Father’s love is different. It's conditional. This is if-love. Love that must be earned. I will love you if you try to be such and such... It is necessary to note the convention of using the terms - paternal and maternal. We are talking here not about gender role affiliation, but about functionality. Not every mother is capable of unconditional love. At the same time, a number of fathers are able to love their children unconditionally. It’s just that more often in life it happens like this: a mother loves unconditionally, a father loves conditionally. Not every woman is capable of unconditional love. Being a mother does not automatically mean being capable of unconditional love. Not every woman-mother is capable of this. And the point, it seems to me, is not only about the maternal instinct, which is supposedly a condition for this very unconditional love. Every woman has a potential maternal instinct. Whether it will be “launched,” in my opinion, depends on whether this woman at one time received as an “inheritance” a gift from her mother in the form of unconditional love. If this is so - the woman herself was unconditionally loved in childhood - she herself turns out to be capable of this kind of love in relation to her children. At one time I was very impressed by one fact. It turns out that hatchery hens are not capable of hatching and caring for chicks. That is, to do what an ordinary chicken that was born naturally can do. These are the kind of chickens that appeared thanks to heating lamps - they were not hatched by a chicken. During the process of their birth and development, all technical conditions were taken into account: the required temperature, humidity, etc. The only thing they did not receive was contact with the mother hen. It is known that the brood hen, in the process of incubating the chicks and subsequently caring for them, demonstrates a lot of love, sacrifice, and care: she practically does not eat or drink while incubating the eggs, and after their appearance she continues to fanatically look after them. So, those chickens that were born thanks to the incubator were deprived of this love-care of their mother-chicken and, having become adult chickens, they themselves turned out to be incapable of motherhood. Sorry for such a comparison, but how can one not remember a woman-mother who, in the process of bearing a child and in the first months of his life, also gives up many things that are familiar to herself, sacrificing them for the sake of her child. A woman’s sacrifice normally ends... Yes, indeed, a good mother limits herself in many ways for the sake of the child. This applies to both her social and biological needs. Maximally embodied in her maternal identity, she, in fact, temporarily abandons a number of her other identities: professional, marital, feminine. All her life energy is devoted to the child. Thus, by showing her unconditional love to the child, she gives him a gift - the ability to love unconditionally. And he, in turn, will be able to pass this gift on to his children. In the same case, if the child does not receive such a gift from his parents, he himself turns out to be unable to pass it on to others; there is simply nothing to give. My rich psychotherapeutic practice is filled with such stories - stories of people who did not receive a parental legacy in the form of unconditional love and continue to demand it from them in their later adult lives. Not receiving it, which is natural, they do not lose hope, continuing to reproach and accuse them, again and again “tormenting the withered mother’s breast, in which there has been no milk for forty years.” And, in fact, there never was. These forms of love are necessary stages for human development. I think that