If you still feel you are a novice when it comes to love, you ought to enrol yourself in Dr Megan Pie’s love class, yes you read that right!
According to a report published in The Guardian, Dr Megan Poe teaches an undergraduate course on love, designed by her at New York University.
Interestingly, the course is a great hit and the number of students enrolled in the course has tripled in just two years. The 42-year-old psychiatrist and associate professor is based out of Brooklyn, and runs a private therapy practice in downtown Manhattan.
“The class is called ‘Love Actually’, and the first semester is majorly based on human experience of love. The architecture of the course moves in two psychological directions: horizontally and vertically. The vertical trajectory expands out from the individual to encompass family love, collective love, and then universal love. The horizontal trajectory looks at the types of loving relationships you encounter across a lifespan”, suggests the report.
So, how did the course come about? The professor explains to The Guardian, “I was asked to give a lecture on “Love & Intimacy” at NYU and afterwards some students came up and asked if there was a course on the subject. Based on their interest, I began to design one with the help of three child psychiatry fellows, and I quickly realised I already had a lot of the course material. I’d been collecting it my whole life, in fact. The course is run out of NYU’s child and adolescent mental health studies department, the largest undergraduate child development program in the country. They have classes on all different aspects of the psyche – there’s a class on happiness, for example, and another on sleep.”
Talking about the forms of love to look at, Megan answers, “We look at parent-infant love; friendship; self-love; love of things; love between a mentor and a student or the kind of love that can exist in therapy – a kind of loving, holding environment that allows the person to self-actualise. A big part of the class is expanding students’ ideas of what love is and what’s contained inside that concept. Romantic love gets its air time, too.”