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I have written on love addiction elsewhere: it involves the feelings of one person who feels small and incomplete, desperately “needing” another’s power and seeing that power as the only road to completeness. This is co-dependency, with masochism and sadism as its props. This is where “love” can go if need and desperation overtake cognitive capacity.

Love addiction is about power — to be more precise, about the inequality of power and the cravings for completion and merging. The gorgeousness of passion is such that merging with another human being is a gift to our species but a gift that can remain wonderful only if there is oxygen to breathe, when one of the partners, or both, need the space to run free and separate. This is not to intellectualize and reject the beauty of new love and renewed love and hopefully the many moments of exuberant togetherness, but to glance at the fact that passion nourishes the spirit only when it is intermittent.

Running with Scissors shows us sickness and we may ourselves run from it in order to experience ourselves as far away from the grotesque cast of players. It is perhaps too easy for them to evoke our judgment and justify our need for distance. However, if we watch these characters at a slower pace, we may begin to see a connection between the seduction of power in the film and the seduction used massively by our own culture, for example even in terms of our own political landscape, where we are hypnotized by our media; we might consider how many political choices are based on the renunciation of actual thought and deliberation.

How many of us are yearning for the magical fearless leader — and can notice only if we must our own habitual lack of true thought processes, so used to the “spin” are we. We actually have a president (guess who that is) who said today (December 8) that he doesn’t know why some people seem to think that in terms of Iraq he is or has been insistent on “staying the course.” Wow, then there comes on the radio at least ten instances where he is uttering those very words. How does that happen to those of us not sick enough for the terrible doctor in the film, but lost enough in space so we are not sickened enough to reject any leader who is such an obvious liar?

Back to love for a moment, back to love addiction. Each of us has probably had a lustful experience of loss of self in a relationship or fantasy relationship, one where we lost sight of practical reality and consequence. The doctor, the preacher, the housewife who wander into a cloud of haze and bewilderment, who follow “love” without care for children or danger — we know these people or we are these people.

It may be easy to reject this idea, to keep ourselves away from our memories or our secret “sinful” thoughts or experiences: they may be lurking anyway, and part of our running from the movie theater for food or drink or distraction may include the panic of recognition.

My guess is that after the distancing and judgment and the commenting about the horrible and even comedic weirdness of the human landscape of Running with Scissors, we might find ourselves somewhere in the crevices of one or several of the stunningly portrayed characters. They all touch nerves of our vulnerability — the ultimately human vulnerability to the hazardous promise of magical completion.

Carol Smaldino, CSW is a psychotherapist and author. Her website is www.growingreal.com. She is not Dr. Phil.