Dr. Fariborz Amini, 73; Psychiatrist Wrote of Love’s Ties to Childhood

Dr. Fariborz Amini, a psychiatrist who wrote about the relationship between love and childhood memories, has died. He was 73.

Amini died of complications from a heart attack June 13 at Marin General Hospital in Marin County, according to his wife, Elizabeth.

A professor emeritus at UC San Francisco, Amini wrote “A General Theory of Love” with his fellow psychiatrists Thomas Lewis and Richard Lannon. The book questions familiar words of wisdom by Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher who wrote, “The heart has reasons that reason does not comprehend.”

Amini and his partners agreed, but they wanted to explain why Pascal was right. They began with the basic idea that emotions are a communication device, like spoken words. Parents teach their children how to express emotions and feelings but sometimes, later in life, a person needs to learn a different way.

“We watch emotional behavior in our family and we develop our own emotional language there,” Lannon, an associate professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and longtime colleague of Amini, said Monday. “We bring this learning to anyone we meet.”

Using new neurological and pharmaceutical data, the doctors related Pascal’s insight to psychotherapy. Years of experience confirmed for them that early lessons in emotional behavior do not always help in adult life.

Reason cannot explain emotional feelings, the doctors wrote, because the brain is divided into three different sectors. The reptilian brain controls basic physical functions, like breathing. The neocortex governs thinking and reasoning. The limbic system controls emotions, instincts and implicit memory, including the memory of how we were nurtured from infancy.

The problem is, “the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in minds and lives,” the doctors wrote.

Drawing on Greek myths and romantic poetry, they took on the question of heartbreak, which often brought patients to them. Like it or not, Amini and his partners argued in the book, all of us respond best to the kind of love our brains have already practiced -- rough, two-timing, or tender.

The scientific explanation for this involves neurons in the limbic system that constantly fire off and forge connections. Over time, with repetition, these connections form strong links. Though we might never realize it, what we are attracted to as adults was set in near concrete during childhood. “No individual can think his way around his own attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought,” the doctors wrote.

To change that, Lannon said, “we coach a person gradually, by treating them with emotional consistently and empathy. We can’t change a person by telling them what went wrong. They have to experience the difference repeatedly.”

His findings caused Amini to change the way he conducted psychotherapy sessions. Though he was trained in psychoanalysis, in which the patient does most of the talking and the therapist rarely comments, in recent years he talked more freely with his patients and answered questions if they asked. “He said that not to do so was like playing a sport with one hand tied behind his back,” Lannon said.

Born in Tehran, Amini came to the United States at the age of 19. He graduated from UC Berkeley and from medical school at UC San Francisco. He also trained at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Michigan and at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society.

He joined the faculty of Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute at UC San Francisco in 1963, where he was director of numerous clinics over the years. He was named professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco in 1983.

His views on how people learn emotional behavior influenced his ideas about early childhood education. “My husband felt that emotional language is the first one an infant learns,” his wife, Elizabeth, a psychiatric nurse, said Monday. “It sets a tone for the rest of a person’s life.”

Early experiences have an effect on a person’s self-esteem, respect for others and ability to handle stress, among other things, she said.

As a result of his theory, she said, “he was not an advocate of day care.” For a young child to spend long hours in the care of several staff members attending to other youngsters is emotionally chaotic for the child, she said. There have been studies to suggest quite the opposite. He knew it, but “he felt he should say what he believed,” she said.

Amini married twice and had three daughters from each marriage. In addition to his wife and daughters, he is survived by seven grandchildren