“Moreover, genetic research itself warns that the genes cannot be grasped by simplistic explanations. The timing of their interventions occurs in spurts and lags, their interrelation with environmental circumstances is infinitely involved. So research since the 1980s has focused more and more on separate lives, behavioral differences, nonshared orientations, or what you and I would call individuality.
“Behavioral science concludes ‘that human pairing is inherently random.’ It retreats to the statistical luck of the draw to account for the most important choice of all, because psychology as a science dares not imagine what it cannot measure.
“We can, however, read the recent research as support for the autonomy of the genius. Its fire lights up precisely the companion required, for better or worse, for long term or short, convincing me that this other is a one-and-only and this event is unique. The other styles of loving charted in the research—sharing, caring, practical commitments, and libidinal intimacy—are less selective, less personal. They do not insist upon this particular partner who embodies the image I carry in my heart.
“Without that sense of fate in the choice, the romance of the love doesn’t work. For this sort of love is more like a daimonic inheritance, a gift and curse from the invisible ancestors. The categories of nature and nurture do not reach into the heart or see through its eye. That is why we have had to add to our examination of genetics and environment this coda on love.
“The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone. It is a meeting of images, an exchange of imaginations. When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity.
“The upshot of genetic studies leads in two (!) directions: a narrow path and a broad one. The narrow road heads toward simplistic, monogenic causes. It wants to pinpoint bits of tissue and correlate them with the vast complexity of psychic meanings. The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our western rationalist and positivist mind-set. The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.
“The contrary direction to narrowing nature to brain simplistics is expanding nurture to a far more embracing notion of environment. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there. So why not admit that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us? The ecological vision restores to environment also the classical idea of providentia—that the world provides for us, looks out for us, even looks after us. It wants us around, too. This breathable, edible, and pleasant planet, invisibly serviced and maintained, keeps us all by means of its life-supporting system. Such would be an idea of nurture that is truly nurturing.
“As notions of environment shift, we notice environment differently. It becomes more and more difficult to make a cut between psyche and world, subject and object, in here and out there. I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts’ (T. S. Eliot). Where does the environment stop and I begin, and can I begin at all without being in some place, deeply involved in, nurtured by the nature of the world.”
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 128-154.
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