Mapping the Terrain of the Heart: The Six Capacities That Guide the Journey of Love

This book claims it is written for people who have problems in relationships, but it is a book for ALL relationships boyfriend, mother, father, sister and friends. This book will help you with all your relationships. It is not an easy read, but it is a page-turner. During my reading of this book, there were paragraphs so powerful, I had to close the book just to reflect on the paragraph before I moved on. This book is a guide, it is not a 100% solution or answer to your problems. It merely shines a light on the cobwebs in your mind. You will really have to let it guide you as you search within yourself to find your answers for why you are the way you are in a relationship. It is really somewhat interactive, in that it asks you to ask yourself some pretty tough questions. It is thought provoking. It will turn the way you think about relationships upside down. Many issues, I thought I was entitled to, basically painted a grim future.... I am pretty certain, or maybe naïve, that this book has saved me from many future bad relationships, has helped me understand my past relationships with boyfriends, friends and most importantly, family. Thank god, because I ALMOST lost the love of my life, until (as cheesy as this sounds) I read this book.

The first thing that struck me about Mapping the Terrain of the Heart was a sense of having come home to a place that really understood and clarified the beauty alongside the struggles of committed relationships. The next thing that struck me was the sense of hope and direction to be able to thrive in a relationship that has flaws as well as fortune. And finally, I was thrilled to learn how to turn anger into empathy, disappointment into clear-eyed forgiveness, and a developing love affair into a lasting committed relationship with happiness and certainty despite the anxieties that come with human love. I have been reading and re-reading and marking up and highlighting and learning from and gifting this book ever since I was given a copy. This book works! And I am convinced it is due to the writers' encouraging belief that each of us has passion, tenderness and the capacity to love, love long, love well, love brilliantly.

In my personal quest to find romantic intimacy I have read dozens of books. This is simply the most profound, dead-on, flat-out brilliant book I have ever come across. "Mapping The Terrain of the Heart" will help you clarify if your ideals of romantic love are realistic or simply serving as a defense against finding intimacy. It will help you to understand your style of relating - whether you are a "merger hungry" or "merger wary." It will help you understand how you find "chemistry" with some people while others leave you cold. It will help you to understand why what excites you is healthy and how not to simply "find" the right relationship - but to "build" it. In an extremely readable and clear way the authors explain how psychoanalytic theory is a powerfully clarifying microscope for understanding the patterns that you may find yourself limited by. I have been re-reading this book for over ten years now and have come to think of it as my "romantic compass" for finding out if I may be heading for true north, or whether I'm lost in the desert. This book has transformed my knowledge of my self and and of those I have gotten close to. Buy this book, it will help you to find what you're looking for. It really will.

Mapping the Terrain is a wonderful resource for individuals who have difficulty staying in a relationship. It looks at the six capacities of loving; erotic involvement, merging, idealization, integration, refinding, and self-transcendence. This book will help you to identify the barriers to maintaining a relationship, why this happens, and what you can do about it. A great resource for individuals who fall in love but struggle to stay in love.

This is actually a reprint of Mapping the Terrain of the Heart; The Six Capacities That Guide the Journey of Love" (Item # 0201608650). Goldbart and Wallin are the authors of the original work, not editors of an anthology. This is the best description I've ever seen of the tasks to be worked on by couples in a committed relationship. Honeymoons will go sour for reasons embeded in the forming of the relationship. It is wise to know what's ahead, so you can plan for it. At least you will not be surprised by what unfolds. The basis for my opinion is extensive reading in the field and more personal experience than there is room for me to describe. The book is well written but terse; it is not an easy read.