Dorothy Tennov

Dorothy Tennov (born Dorothy J. Tennow; August 29, 1928 – February 3, 2007) was an American psychologist who invented the term "limerence". Her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, has been called the seminal work on romantic love (also called "being in love", or passionate love in psychology) and credited as largely marking the start of data collection on the phenomenon.

Early life and education Tennov was born in Montgomery County, Alabama.

Career Tennov was a professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut for twenty years.

In 1976, Tennov traveled to Paris, where she interviewed the French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir for a PBS television station, WNED-TV. It was on the flight home from this interview that she is said to have discovered that limerence is not a universal human experience, finding that her longtime friend Helen Payne was unfamiliar with it. This is when she decided to invent a new term ("limerence").

In addition to publishing Love and Limerence (1979), Tennov made a name for herself as a critic of psychotherapy. She commented in 1976 that narcissism was becoming a common diagnosis at the time, because therapists seldom saw clients who had never been to therapy before. According to Tennov, "The people who go are a relatively small group who become therapy junkies."

In 1986, Tennov left her post at the University of Bridgeport to become an independent researcher. but they later divorced. Their son Randall died of leukemia in 1993. She died in 2007 in Harbeson, Delaware, at the age of 78. Psychotherapy: The Hazardous Cure; Abelard-Schuman; 1975 (ISBN 978-0200040280) Super Self: A Woman's Guide to Self-management; Funk & Wagnalls; 1977 (ISBN 978-0308102736) Love and Limerence; Scarborough House; 1979 (ISBN 0-8128-6286-4) Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love; Scarborough House; 1999 (ISBN 978-0-8128-6286-7) A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It "Limerence": The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov; The Great American Publishing Society; 2005