In the last chapter, we observed that the contemporary paradoxes in sex and love have one thing in common, namely the banalization of sex and love. By anesthetizing feeling in order to perform better, by employing sex as a tool to prove prowess and identity, by using sensuality to hide sensitivity, we have emasculated sex and left it vapid and empty. The banalization of sex is well-aided and abetted by our mass communication. For the plethora of books on sex and love which flood the market have one thing in common—they oversimplify love and sex, treating the topic like a combination of learning to play tennis and buying life insurance. In this process, we have robbed sex of its power by sidestepping eros; and we have ended by dehumanizing both.

My thesis in this chapter is that what underlies our emasculation of sex is the separation of sex from eros. Indeed, we have set sex over against eros, used sex precisely to avoid the anxiety-creating involvements of eros. In ostensibly enlightened discussions of sex, particularly those about freedom from censorship, it is often argued that all our society needs is full freedom for the expression of eros. But what is revealed beneath the surface in our society, as shown not only in patients in therapy but in our literature and drama and even in the nature of our scientific research, is just the opposite. We are in a flight from eros—and we use sex as the vehicle for the flight.

Sex is the handiest drug to blot out our awareness of the anxiety-creating aspects of eros. To accomplish this, we have had to define sex ever more narrowly: the more we became preoccupied with sex, the more truncated and shrunken became the human experience to which it referred. We fly to the sensation of sex in order to avoid the passion of eros.

THE RETURN OF REPRESSED EROS

My thesis was formulated out of several strange phenomena I observed in my patients as well as in our society—psychic eruptions which have a curiously explosive quality. These phenomena occurred in areas in which, from any common-sense point of view, they would be least expected in our day. Most people live in the confidence that our technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd.

But I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic and extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. But that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real.

We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and a half times the incidence of ten years ago.¹ The increase is mainly among girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantaged groups. Indeed, the radical increase is not among Puerto Rican or Negro girls but among white girls—the jump of percentage of illegitimate births to all live births being from 1.7 ten years ago to 5.3 last year. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary is to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should, raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening questions. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality?

Kenneth Clark points out, for example, with respect to the lower-class Negro girl, “The marginal Negro female uses her sex to gain personal affirmation. She is desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own.”² This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with lower-class girls, but it is just as present in middle-class girls who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior.

Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who had always assumed a “Christian” attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in the therapy, to be unusually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into the other. She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to the blind. She became pregnant by the young blind man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion.

Now it is absurd to think we can understand this behavior on the basis of “sexual needs.” Indeed, the fact that she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her world if we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies.

She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lastingly even when she took LSD—the kind of person who cries out to the world to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she had a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a “dried up” quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in the therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her.

She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché “alienation.”

It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was blind. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of “blindness” surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many persons in our world of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a world of the blind, where nobody can see another and where our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so.

We could conclude that she became pregnant (1) to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; (2) to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (“hystera”) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions; (3) to express her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of which goes without saying.

But what of the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradictions in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she doesn’t know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical woman of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman.

I am proposing, in short, that girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over-availability of sex as a technique for the repression. A corollary is that our “dogmatic enlightenment” contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a “return of the repressed,” a return of an eros which will not be denied no matter how much it is bribed on all sides by sex; a return of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings.

The same is found in our work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they began having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the woman was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. But when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her period, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid he seemed to be. I then caught myself up with the realization that, in my naïveté, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement.

All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos;. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience.³

We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feeling, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of depersonalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so “civilized” that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for once if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T. S. Eliot has his rich comtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because the heart is never fully converted to passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the “cool millennium.” At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real.

Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, We yearn to talk but “our dried voices” are “rats’ feet over broken glass.”⁴ We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.⁵

It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk, wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the earth spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black madonna will be present if there is no white.

The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence.

WHAT IS EROS?

Eros in our day is taken as a synonym for “eroticism” or sexual titillation. Eros was the name given to a journal of sexy arcana, containing “Aphrodisiac Recipes” and posing such weighty question-and-answer articles as, “Q: How Do the Porcupines Do It? A: Carefully.” One wonders whether everyone has forgotten the fact that eros, according to no less an authority than St. Augustine, is the power which drives men toward God. Such gross misunderstandings would tend to make the demise of eros unavoidable: for in our overstimulated age we have no need for titillation which no longer titillates. It is essential, therefore, that we clarify the meaning of this crucial term.

Eros created life on the earth, the early Greek mythology tells us. When the world was barren and lifeless, it was Eros who “seized his life-giving arrows and pierced the cold bosom of the Earth,” and “immediately the brown surface was covered with luxuriant verdure.” This is an appealing symbolic picture of how Eros incorporates sex—those phallic arrows which pierce—as the instrument by which he creates life. Eros then breathed into the nostrils of the clay forms of man and woman and gave them the “spirit of life.” Ever since, eros has been distinguished by the function of giving the spirit of life, in contrast to the function of sex as the release of tension. Eros was then one of the four original gods, the others being Chaos, Gaea (mother earth), and Tartarus (the dark pit of Hades below the earth). Eros, says Joseph Campbell, is always, regardless of guise, the progenitor, the original creator from which life comes.⁶

Sex can be defined fairly adequately in physiological terms as consisting of the building up of bodily tensions and their release. Eros, in contrast, is the experiencing of the personal intentions and meaning of the act. Whereas sex is a rhythm of stimulus and response, eros is a state of being. The pleasure in sex is described by Freud and others as the reduction of tension; in eros, on the contrary, we wish not to be released from the excitement but rather to hang on to it, to bask in it, and even to increase it. The end toward which sex points is gratification and relaxation, whereas eros is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand.

All this is in accord with the dictionary definitions. Webster’s defines sex (coming from the Lation sexus, meaning “split”) as referring to “physiological distinctions…the character of being male or female, or…the distinctive functions of male or female.”⁷ Eros, in contrast, is defined with such terms as “ardent desire,” “yearning,” “aspiring self-fulfilling love often having a sensuous quality.”⁸ The Latins and Greeks had two different words for sex and love, as we do; but the curious thing to our ears is how rarely the Latins speak of sexus. Sex, to them, was no issue; it was amor they were concerned about. Similarly, everyone knows the Greek word eros, but practically no one has ever heard of their term for “sex.” It is Øûλov, the word from which we derive the zoological term “phylon,” tribe or race. This is an entirely different stem from the Greek word philia, which means love in the sense of friendship.

Sex is thus a zoological term and is rightly applied to all animals as well as human beings. Kinsey was a zoologist, and appropriately to his profession, he studied human sexual behavior from a zoological point of view. Masters is a gynecologist and studies sex from the viewpoint of sexual organs and how you manage and manipulate them: sex, then, is a pattern of neurophysiological functions and the sexual problem consists of what you do with organs.

Eros, on the other hand, takes wings from human imagination and is forever transcending all techniques, giving the laugh to all the “how to” books by gaily swinging into orbit above our mechanical rules, making love rather than manipulating organs.

For eros is the power which attracts us. The essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead, whereas sex pushes us from behind. This is revealed in our day-to-day language when I say a person “allures” me or “entices” me, or the possibilities of a new job “invite” me. Something in me responds to the other person, or the job, and pulls me toward him or it. I participate in forms, possibilities, higher levels of meaning, on neurophysiological dimensions but also on aesthetic and ethical dimensions as well. As the Greeks believed, knowledge and even ethical goodness exercise such a pull. Eros is the drive toward union with what we belong to—union with our own possibilities, union with significant other persons in our world in relation to whom we discover our own self-fulfillment. Eros is the yearning in man which leads him to dedicate himself to seeking arête, the noble and good life.

Sex, in short, is the mode of relating characterized by tumescence of the organs (for which we seek the pleasurable relief) and filled gonads (for which we seek satisfying release). But eros is the mode of relating in which we do not seek release but rather to cultivate, procreate, and form the world. In eros, we seek increase of stimulation. Sex is a need, but eros is a desire; and it is this admixture of desire which complicates love. In regard to our preoccupation with the orgasm in American discussions of sex, it can be agreed that the aim of the sex act in its zoological and physiological sense is indeed the orgasm. But the aim of eros is not: eros seeks union with the other person in delight and passion, and the procreating of new dimensions of experience which broaden and deepen the being of both persons. It is common experience, backed up by folklore as well as the testimony of Freud and others, that after sexual release we tend to go to sleep—or, as the joke puts it, to get dressed, go home, and then go to sleep. But in eros, we want just the opposite: to stay awake thinking of the beloved, remembering, savoring, discovering ever-new facets of the prism of what the Chinese call the “many-splendored” experience.

It is this urge for union with the partner that is the occasion for human tenderness. For eros—not sex as such—is the source of tenderness. Eros is the longing to establish union, full relationship. This may be, first, a union with abstract forms. The philosopher Charles S. Peirce sat alone in his house in Milford, Connecticut working out his mathematical logic, but this did not prevent his experiencing eros; the thinker must be “animated by a true eros,” he wrote, “for the task of scientific investigation.” Or it may be a union with aesthetic or philosophical forms, or a union with new ethical forms. But it is most obvious as the pull toward the union of two individuals sexually. The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but a genuine union. A sharing takes place which is a new Gestalt, a new being, a new field of magnetic force.

We have been led astray by our economic and biological models to think that the aim of the love act is the orgasm. The French have a saying which, referring to eros, carries more truth: “The aim of desire is not its satisfaction but its prolongation.” André Maurois, speaking of his preference for love-making to which the orgasm is not the goal but an incidental conclusion, quotes another French saying, “Every beginning is lovely.”

The moment of greatest significance in love-making, as judged by what people remember in the experience and what patients dream about, is not the moment of orgasm. It is rather the moment of entrance, the moment of penetration of the erection of the man into the vagina of the woman. This is the moment that shakes us, that has within it the great wonder, tremendous and tremulous as it may be—or disappointing and despairing, which says the same thing from the opposite point of view. This is the moment when the persons’ reactions to the love-making experience are most original, most individual, most truly their own. This, and not the orgasm, is the moment of union and the realization that we have won the other.

The ancients made Eros a “god,” or more specifically, a daimon. This is a symbolic way of communicating a basic truth of human experience, that eros always drives us to transcend ourselves. When Goethe wrote, “Woman draws us upward,” his line may be more accurately read, “Eros, in relation with a woman, draws us upward.” Such a truth is both inner, personal, and subjective on one hand, and external, social, and objective on the other—that is, it is a truth which obtains in our relationships in the objective world. The ancients, taking sex for granted simply as a natural bodily function, saw no need to make it into a god. Anthony presumably had all his sexual needs taken care of by the concubines accompanying the Roman army; it was only when he met Cleopatra that eros entered the picture and he became transported into a whole new world, ecstatic and destructive at the same time.

The artists have always instinctively known the difference between sex and eros. In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo’s friend Mercutio teases him about his previous sweetheart, describing her in good modern anatomical style:

It reads like a contemporary realistic novel, the bodily description of the heroine ending with the expected “quivering thigh” and allusion to the adjacent parts. For Mercutio is not in love; from his external view the phenomenon appears to be sex and to be used as any vital young Veronese man would use feminine pulchritude.

But does Romeo use that language? Absurd question! He is in the state of eros with Juliet:

It is interesting to recall that Romeo and Juliet were members of feuding families. Eros leaps the barriers between enemies. Indeed, I often wonder whether the eros in us is not excited and challenged especially by the “enemy.” Eros is strangely fascinated by the “outlander,” the person of the forbidden class, the foreign color or race. Shakespeare is true to the meaning of eros when he has the love of Romeo and Juliet, tragic as it was, bind together the previously warring Montagues and Capulets, and unite the whole city of Verona.

EROS IN PLATO

There is good basis in man’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted.

To find the roots of our understanding of eros, we turn to The Symposium, which still surprises and delights readers with the contemporaneousness of its insights into love.⁹ Plato’s dialogue describing this banquet—aptly called the most famous drinking party in history—is given over entirely to the discussion of eros. The setting is Agathon’s home, where Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others have been invited to celebrate Agathon’s winning of the prize the previous day for tragic drama. The evening is passed by each one in turn giving his thoughts and experience of eros.

“What is love?” asks Socrates in a crucial summary passage. He quotes the answer from Diotima, the celebrated teacher of love: “He is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…. He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal…. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides men and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together…”¹⁰

Eros is not a god in the sense of being above man, but the power that binds all things and all men together, the power informing all things. I do not use “in-form” loosely—it means to give inward form, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros is the god or demiurge, Plato continues, who constitutes man’s creative spirit. Eros is the drive which impels man not only toward union with another person in sexual or other forms of love, but incites in man the yearning for knowledge and drives him passionately to seek union with the truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is “a kind of eternity and immortality”—which is to say that such creativity is as close as men ever get to becoming immortal.

Eros is the drive for union and reproduction in the biological realm. Even in the birds and animals, says Diotima, we see the “desire of procreation,” and they are “in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union…”¹¹ Human beings are changing all the time—

Now in all this change, what binds the diversity together? It is eros, the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, form to our otherwise impoverishing formlessness, integration to counter our disintegrative trends. Here we must have a dimension of experience which is psychological and emotional as well as biological. This is eros.

It is eros which impels people toward health in psychotherapy. In contrast to our contemporary doctrines of adjustment or homeostasis or release of tension, there is in eros an eternal reaching out, a stretching of the self, a continuously replenished urge which impels the individual to dedicate himself to seek forever higher forms of truth, beauty, and goodness. The Greeks believed that this continuous regeneration of the self is inherent in eros.

The Greeks also knew that there always is a tendency for eros to be reduced simply to sexual desire—epithymia or lust in their terms. But they insisted that the biological is not denied but incorporated and transcended in eros:

We are in eros not only when we experience our biological, lustful energies but also when we are able to open ourselves and participate, via imagination and emotional and spiritual sensitivity, in forms and meanings beyond ourselves in the interpersonal world and the world of nature around us.

Eros is the binding element par excellence. It is the bridge between being and becoming, and it binds fact and value together. Eros, in short, is the original creative force of Hesiod now transmuted into power which is both “inside” and “outside” the person. We see that eros has much in common with the concept of intentionality proposed in this book: both presuppose that man pushes toward uniting himself with the object not only of his love but his knowledge. And this very process implies that a man already participates to some extent in the knowledge he seeks and the person he loves.

Later, in St. Augustine, eros was seen as the power which drives men toward God. Eros is the yearning for mystic union which comes out in the religious experience of union with God, or in Freud’s “oceanic” experience.¹⁴ There is also an element of eros in the love of one’s fate—“amor fati” as Nietzsche called it. By fate I do not mean the specific or accidental misfortunes which befall us, but rather fate as the acceptance and affirmation of the finite state of man, limited as we are in intelligence and strength, faced everlastingly with weakness and death. The myth of Sisyphus presents man’s fate in as stark a form as could be imagined; yet Camus finds in that fate, for the man who has courage to accept the consciousness of it, something which calls forth his eros, something to love:

Eros pushes toward self-fulfillment, but it is not at all the egocentric assertion of one’s subjective whims and wishes on a passive world. The idea of “mastering” nature or reality would have horrified the Greeks and would promptly have been labelled hubris, or inordinate pride which is an affront to the gods and a sure invitation for a man’s doom. The Greeks always showed a respect which amounted to a reverence for the objective, given world. They delighted in their world—its beauty, its form, its endless challenges to their curiosity, its mysteries to be explored; and they were everlastingly attracted by this world. Not that they would have had any truck with the modern sentimental belief that life by itself is good or bad; it all depends on what a man dedicates himself to. Their tragic view itself enabled them to delight in life. You can’t outwit death anyway by “progress” or accumulating wealth; so why not accept your fate, choose values which are authentic, and let yourself delight and believe in the being you are and the Being you are part of?

“Shall not loveliness be loved forever?” sings Euripides. The question is rhetorical, but the answer is not. Loveliness shall be loved not because of infantile needs, or because it stands for the breast, or because it is aim-inhibited sex, or because it aids adjustment or because it will make us happy—but simply because it is lovely. Loveliness exercises a pull upon us; we are drawn to life by love.

What does all this have to do with psychotherapy? I believe a great deal. When Socrates remarks, with a deceptive simplicity, “Human nature will not easily find a helper better than eros,” we can take his words as applying to the process of psychotherapy as well as the drive within a person toward psychic health. Socrates himself, as we see and listen to him in the Dialogues, is perhaps history’s greatest model of the psychotherapist. His prayer at the end of Phaedo could well be inscribed on the wall of every therapist’s office:

FREUD AND EROS

But the ancient Greeks knew, as every society and almost every individual learns, that responding as a total person in one’s encounters with life requires an intensity and disciplined openness of consciousness which is not easy to sustain. A tendency to dessicate eros, to reduce it to sheer sexual gratification or lust then occurs. In our day, we see several groups which seek to deny eros. There are the idealists, who, like Denis de Rougement, identify eros with sexual passion as part of their dubious and rejecting attitude toward eros. For eros is always an inescapable embarrassment to any purely mental or religious category.

There are also the naturalists, like the early Freud. He struggled valiantly to reduce love to libido, a quantitative concept which fitted the nineteenth-century Helmholtzian model in physics to which he was devoted. So great was his need to deny eros, that the term is not in the index to his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. In the first two volumes of Ernest Jones’s Life and Work of Freud, the term is also not mentioned in the index, whereas there are roughly thirty discussions of libido in the second volume alone. In the third volume Jones writes, “There are only a few earlier [before Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920] allusions to Eros in Freud’s writings.” Jones gives only two references, and they are very minor, using “erotic” as a simple synonym for “sexual.” It is only in this last volume that Freud discovers eros in its own right. He finds it as an aspect of human experience that must not only be distinguished from libido but is in important ways opposed to libido. And here a remarkable event occurs: Freud recognizes that fully gratified libido leads, via the death instinct, to self-destruction. Then eros—the spirit of life—is brought in to rescue libido from demise in its own self-contradictions.

But we are ahead of our story.

We have to distinguish three levels when discussing Freud on this topic. First, there is his popular influence, which has obviously been great indeed. When his concepts of “drive” and “libido” in the popular sense are taken literally, Freudianism in the popular sense plays directly into the banalization of sex and love, however contrary the real intentions of its author were.¹⁶

Freud sought to enrich and extend the concept of sex to include everything from fondling and nursing to creativity and religion. “We use the word ‘sexuality’ in the same comprehensive sense as that in which the German language uses the word ‘lieben.’”¹⁷ This wide extension of the term sex refers specifically to Viennese Victorian culture, for when any important human function is repressed as sex then was, it seeps out to color every other human activity.

There is, second of all, Freud’s own use of the terms sexual instinct, drive, and libido. As in any thinker with such richness of mind, we find Freud boldly ambiguous in employing these terms, cheerfully changing their meaning from stage to stage in the development of his thought. His concepts of libido and sexual drive have within them elements of the daimonic which transcend the physiological definition of sex, as we shall indicate below. Early in his career, his friends urged him to use the term “eros” because it was more urbane and would avoid some of the opprobrium aroused by the term sex; but he steadfastly—and rightly, if seen in his light—refused to accommodate himself by doing this. He seemed to be assuming in this period that eros means the same thing as sex. He held here to a model of sexual love (libido) which consists of a fixed economic quantity in every person and makes any kind of love other than sexual union merely the expression of sexuality which is “aim-inhibited.”

Freud’s belief that we have only a given quantity of love leads him to argue that when a person loves someone else there is a depletion of the love he has for himself.

There is an analogy here to what I have called the fear of the loss of one’s own being in falling in love. But on the basis of my own clinical experience, I believe expressing this on the hydraulic model of sex destroys the critical values at stake. The threat of the loss of one’s own being in falling in love comes from the dizziness and shock of being hurled into a new continent of experience. The world is suddenly vastly widened and confronts us with new regions we never dreamed existed. Are we capable of giving ourselves to our beloved and still preserving what center of autonomy we have? Understandably, this experience scares us; but anxiety about the vastness and dangers of the new continent—accompanied by delight and anxiety simultaneously—should not be confused with loss of self-esteem.

Actually, anyone’s normal day-to-day observation demonstrates just the opposite to Freud’s view. When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” And we cannot subsume this under the rubric of “returned libido cathexis” from the loved one; for this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not. The now generally accepted formulation of this problem was made best by Harry Stack Sullivan, who gave abundant evidence that we love others to the extent that we are able to love ourselves, and if we cannot esteem ourselves, we cannot esteem or love others.

Now the fact that Freud does not mention eros during the first two-thirds of his life and work does not mean that he would have agreed with our contemporary gospel of “free expression.” He would have looked askance at all the talk in our society about simply “doing what comes naturally,” the setting up of Rousseau’s happy primitive in a South Sea isle as the ideal. In 1912 he wrote:

Freud wrote the above paragraph two years before World War I. It was directly after the war that he realized the implications of this problem for the individual person. Certain radical reflections were forced on him by his seeing that patients afflicted with war neuroses did not behave according to the pleasure principle. That is, they did not seek to get rid of the painful trauma—indeed, they behaved in just the opposite way; they relived the painful trauma again and again, in their dreams and in real life. They seemed to be struggling to do something with the remembered trauma, to re-experience the anxiety so that something could be assuaged, or to re-form themselves in relation to their world in such a way that the trauma could have meaning. However one describes it, something was occurring that was infinitely more complex than the mere reduction of tension and increase of pleasure. This specifically led Freud to the clinical problems of masochism and the repetition compulsion. He saw that love, more complex than his previous theories implied, always exists in polarity with hate. It was not a far step from there to his formulation of the theory that life exists always in polarity with death.

We now come to the third level in Freud’s view of sex and eros, appearing in his middle and later writings, which is, for our purposes, the most interesting and important of all. He began to see that the gratifying of the sexual drive itself—the full satisfaction of libido with its reduction of tension—has an ultimately self-defeating character and tends toward death.

In this period directly after the war, when he was sixty-four, Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a book about which there has been, and still is, endless controversy even within the psychoanalytic movement itself. He begins by summarizing his previous beliefs that “the course of mental events automatically regulated by the pleasure principle…is inwardly set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of tension.”²⁰ The sexual instincts (which, he whimsically remarks, are so hard to “educate”) were the prime example of the goal of pleasure by means of reduction of tension. An instinct, Freud emphasizes, has as its goal the restoring of an earlier state. He borrows here from the second law of thermodynamics, that the energy of the universe is constantly running down. Since “…an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things…” and “inanimate things existed before living ones,”²¹ so our instincts push us back to the inanimate. The instincts move toward nirvana, which is complete absence of excitation. The “aim of all life is death.”²² And here we find ourselves at Freud’s most controversial theory termed the death instinct, or Thanatos. Our instincts, which seem to propel us onward, are now only moving us in a great circle which is doomed to come back to death. Man, this creature so “noble in faculty,” moves step by step in a pilgrimage that is destined to bring him only back again to the inanimate state of the stone. From dust we are, and to dust we ultimately return.²³

Then a remarkable event occurred, the importance of which I do not believe is recognized by students of Freud. For the first time in Freud’s work, eros comes into its own as a central and necessary concept. It is perhaps not surprising that this man, who as a boy in a gymnasium in Vienna had kept his diary in Greek, should now, at the point of his greatest dilemma, find in the wisdom of the ancients a way to meet his perplexity. Eros comes in to rescue sex and libido from extinction.

Eros enters as the opposite to Thanatos, the death instinct. Eros fights for life against the death tendencies. Eros is the “uniting and binding, the building and blending, the increase of tension within us.”²⁴ Eros introduces “fresh tensions,” writes Freud.²⁵ Eros is given a character not only greater than, but in significant ways different from, libido. Eros, “builder of cities,” as Auden calls it, standing against the pleasure principle with its reduction of tension, enables man to create cultures. “Eros operates from the beginning of life, and appears as a ‘life instinct’ in opposition to the ‘death instinct.’” Human existence now consists of a new form of the battle of the giants, Eros against Thanatos.

How Freud himself must have experienced the contradiction going on in his thinking as this birth-process went on is shown in the way he himself writes about it: “…the death instincts are by their nature mute and…the clamor of life proceeds for the most part from Eros. And from the struggle against Eros!”²⁶ This is the bold inconsistency of genius! And one of the most serious inconsistencies is the endeavor in Freud still to identify this Eros with the sexual instincts. He speaks of the “libido of Eros,” the “libido of the Id,” and the “libido of the Ego,” and about “desexualized libido” and “non-desexualized libido”—until the reader feels that Freud is laboring under the necessity of forcing all his insights, even a great one like this rediscovery of eros, onto the procrustean bed of his old energy system.

We can cut through this confusion if we keep clearly in mind the dynamic point that Freud did not bring eros into his work at all until he had to face the fact that the sexual instincts operating on the pleasure principle were self-defeating. Eros, thus, does represent something genuinely new. Freud ends one essay by affectionately calling “Eros, the mischief maker,” and we are left with the impression that this Eros is not easily going to let the death instinct establish peace in the id “prompted by the pleasure principle” and bought at the price of apathy. When “satisfaction triumphs,” writes Freud, “then Eros is eliminated, and the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purposes.”²⁷

The dilemma we face in our society is similar to the one Freud faced—the assumption that the ultimate goal of existence is the satisfaction of impulses has led sex into the cul-de-sac of tedium and banality. Eros, drawing us ahead, refers to the realms of possibilities; it is the reach of human imagination and intentionality. Several authorities,²⁸ in refutation of the literal form of the death instinct, point out that reasoning from the second law of thermodynamics is false, since plants and animals draw renewed power from their environments. Thus, eros is our capacity to participate in a constant dialogue with our environment, the world of nature as well as persons.

Freud himself took pride in relating his concept of eros to that of the ancient Greeks. He writes, “…anyone who looks down with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato.”²⁹ When Freud’s followers wrote papers arguing the close relation of his eros to Plato’s, the master affirmed their views with enthusiasm: “In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the Eros of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido, of psychoanalysis, as has been shown in detail by Nachmansohn (1915) and Pfister (1921).”³⁰ Not only is Freud’s concept of eros radically different from Plato’s, but, as Professor Douglas Morgan states, after appreciative and lengthy studies of both Platonic and Freudian love,

Phillip Rieff agrees with this, “…the psychoanalytic Eros is basically unlike the Platonic.”³²

What Freud does have in common with Plato is that both believed love is fundamental in human experience, love pervades all actions, and is a deep, broad, motivating force. “Within the meaning of ‘Eros’ in both, are encompassed genital-sexual love, fraternal and civic love, the loves of science and art and perfection.”³³ But when we ask what that love is, we find entirely different answers. Even after introducing eros, Freud defined it as a push from behind, a force coming out of “chaotic, undifferentiated, instinctive energy-sources along predictable and prescribable paths toward mature life and only partially, painfully civilized love.”³⁴ Whereas for Plato, eros is entirely bound up with the possibilities ahead which “pull” one; it is the yearning for union, the capacity to relate to new forms of human experience. It is “wholly telic, goal-directed, and moves toward the more-than-nature.”³⁵ The culture in which Freud studied, thought, and worked was an alienated one, and that alienation is already revealed in his definitions of love and sex—as it reveals itself even more in ours a half century later. This may partly account for his confusion of his eros with Plato’s.³⁶

But on my part, I value Freud’s intuition, or “hope” if I may say so, that his eros would have something of Plato’s in it. This is another example of what we find so often in Freud—which underlies his frequent and important use of myths—that the ethos and meaning of his concepts went way beyond his methodology and beyond the logic of the strict application of the concept. My disagreement with Professor Morgan is his statement above—that the Freudian and Platonic concepts of love are incompatible. On the basis of my clinical work with patients, I believe that not only are the two compatible, but that they represent two halves both of which, in a human being’s psychological development, are required.

THE UNION OF EROS: A CASE STUDY

I shall give as an example a psychoanalytic session that took place while I was writing this chapter, which I believe demonstrates not only the contrast between the Freudian and Platonic views of eros in therapy but also their interrelationship.

A woman in her late twenties had come for treatment because of severe lack of feeling, blockage in spontaneity—both of which made sexual relations a difficult problem for her husband and herself—and a self-consciousness which at times paralyzed her. She was the daughter of one of the old aristocratic American families of considerable stature, a family in which her masochistic mother and prestigious father and three older brothers constituted a rigid structure in which she had to grow up. In therapy, she learned—with her rational temperament—to inquire of herself the “reason why” she was emotionally paralyzed in this or that situation, what was occurring when she felt nothing sexually, and she became able to experience and express her anger, sexual passion, and other feelings with considerable freedom. This was aided by a good deal of useful inquiry into her childhood and the difficult traumas she had sustained in this overly-structured family, and it was accompanied by a positive effect on her practical living.

But at a certain stage, we hit a stalemate. She kept asking the “reason why,” but it no longer made any change in her; her emotions seemed to be their own reason for being. The session to which I shall now refer came during a period when she was working on the possibilities of a genuine love with her husband.

She reported that the previous night she had felt flirtatious with her husband and in that mood had asked him to reach down the back of her dress and take out a bug or whatever was there. Later in the evening when she was writing checks at her desk, he unexpectedly threw his arms around her. She, furious at being interrupted, scratched a line across his face with her pen. In telling me about this, she tossed off some ready-at-hand explanations of her anger as due to her brothers’ having taken advantage of her as a child no matter what she was doing. When I questioned this by asking what she was using her feelings for in the incident, she flared up in anger: I was taking away her “free spontaneity.” Didn’t I see she must “trust her instincts”? Hadn’t we spent a good deal of time helping her learn to feel, and so what did I mean by asking her what she was doing with her feelings? And what is more, the question sounded just like her family’s telling her to be responsible. She finished the attack with the expostulation, “Feelings are feelings!”

We can readily see the contradiction she is caught in. She had effectively ruined the evening with her husband. Ostensibly seeking the possibilities of a genuine love between them, she had accomplished exactly the opposite. She pulls her husband toward her with one hand and as quickly drives him away with the other. She justifies this contradictory behavior by an assumption which is very common in our day, namely, that feeling is a subjective push from inside you, emotions (the term coming from e-movere, to move out) are forces which put you into motion, and so are to be “emoted” in whatever way you happen to feel at the moment. This is probably the most prevalent unanalyzed assumption about emotions in our society. It takes its model from a kind of glandular hydraulics—we have an inner secretion of adrenalin and need to let off our anger, or gonadal excitement and must find a sexual object. (Whatever Freud actually meant, his name is brought in to halo this assumption.) It fits the popularly accepted mechanical model of the body as well as the more sophisticated deterministic models that many of us were exposed to in our first courses in psychology and physiology.

What we were not told—because practically nobody saw it—is that this is a radically solipsistic, schizoid system. It leaves us separated like monads, alienated, with no bridge to any persons around us. We can “emote” and have sexual relations from now till doomsday and never experience any real relationship with another person, only literally a doomsday. It does not decrease the horror of the situation to realize that a great many people, if not most in our society, experience their emotions in just this lonely way. To feel, then, makes their loneliness more painful rather than decreasing it, so they stop feeling.

What is omitted in my patient’s (and our society’s) view is that emotions are not just a push from the rear but a pointing toward something, an impetus for forming something, a call to mold the situation. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing toward the future, a way I want something to be. Except in the most severe pathology, feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of one’s self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally present. Feelings are rightfully a way of communicating with the significant people in our world, a reaching out to mold the relationship with them; they are a language by which we interpersonally construct and build. That is to say, feelings are intentional.

The first aspect of emotions, as forces which “push,” has to do with the past and is correlated with causality and the determinism of one’s past experience, including the infantile and archaic. This is the regressive side of emotions about which Freud has taught us so much of lasting importance. In this respect, the investigation of the childhood of the patient, and the re-experiencing of it, has a sound and essential role in enduring psychotherapy.

The second view, in contrast, starts in the present and points toward the future. It is the progressive aspect of emotions. Our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world. Our feelings not only take into consideration the other person but are in a real sense partially formed by the feelings of the other persons present. We feel in a magnetic field. A sensitive person learns, often without being conscious of doing so, to pick up the feelings of the persons around him, as a violin string resonates to the vibration of every other musical string in the room, although in such infinitessimally small degrees that it may not be detectable to the ear. Every successful lover knows this by “instinct.” It is an essential—if not the essential—quality of the good therapist.

In dealing with the first aspect of emotions it is entirely sound and accurate to ask the “reason why.” But the second aspect requires asking the “purpose for.” Freud’s approach is roughly correlated with the former, and he would, no doubt, have denied my use of “purpose” here. Plato’s and the Greek concept of eros is correlated with the second: emotion is attraction, a pulling toward; my feelings are aroused by virtue of goals, ideals, possibilities in the future which grasp me. This distinction is also made in modern logic; the reason is the consideration in the past which explains why you are doing this or that, and purpose, in contrast, is what you want to get out of doing it. The first concept is correlated with determinism. The second refers to your opening up to new possibilities of experience. It is thus correlated with freedom. We participate in the forming of the future by virtue of our capacity to conceive of and respond to new possibilities, and to bring them out of imagination and try them in actuality. This is the process of active loving. It is the eros in us responding to the eros in others and in the world of nature.

To return to my patient: she experienced a hopelessness in the above session, arising out of her dim awareness of the trap she was caught in. Two sessions later she was to say, “I’ve always looked for reasons I feel such and such toward George. I believed that was what was important—that process would lead to a nirvana. Now I’ve run out of reasons. Maybe there aren’t any.” It is interesting that her last phrase is more brilliant than she realized. For it is true, both in therapy and in life, when we get to the stage where our essential needs are mostly met and we are not need-driven, that “there aren’t any reasons” in the sense that reasons lose their relevancy.³⁷ The conflict becomes stalemate and boredom on one hand, or on the other, the opening of one’s self to new possibilities, the deepening of consciousness, the choosing and committing of one’s self to new ways of life.

The distinction between “reason why” and “purpose” clicked strongly with my patient and released in her several important insights. To her considerable surprise, one of these was a radical shift in the meaning she gave to responsibility. Now she saw it not as merely the external and passively-received expectations from her family, but as an active responsibility to herself in being aware of the power she was exerting that evening with her husband. Responsibility now consisted of her choosing what she wanted of her life with him and elsewhere.

It is no doubt safe to say—again excepting severely pathological individuals—that all emotions, no matter how contradictory they appear on the surface, have some kind of unity in the Gestalt which constitutes the self. The clinical problem—as in the case of the anxious child who is forced to act lovingly toward parents who are actually hostile and destructive toward him—is that the person cannot or will not let himself be aware of what he feels or is doing with his feelings. When my patient was able to analyze her two contradictory acts that evening toward her husband, it turned out that both were motivated by anger toward him and men in general, she setting up the situation to prove the man is the villain. Both actions presupposed the man as the authority figure (which she was doing with me in the “nirvana process” of therapy). And, in the meantime, she remains the whim-directed, willful child. She could cope with men on the basis of the childhood pattern, but—as came out in pronounced anxiety in subsequent sessions—could she cope with them as an adult?

We have arrived on the wings of eros, if I may put it so, at a new concept of causality. No longer are we forced to understand the human being in terms of a billiard-ball cause-and-effect, based solely on the explanations of “reason why” and susceptible to rigid prediction. Indeed, Aristotle believed that the motivation of eros was so different from the determinism of the past that he would not even call it causality. “In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros” writes Tillich, “which drives everything towards the highest form, the pure actuality which moves the world not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia…”³⁸

I am proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the new possibilities, the goals and ideals, which attract and pull them toward the future. This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with its other half. Eros gives us a causality in which “reason why” and “purpose” are united. The former is part of all human experience since we all participate in the finite, natural world; in this respect, each of us, in making any important decision, needs to find out as much as he can about the objective facts of the situation. This realm is particularly relevant in problems of neurosis in which past events do exercise a compulsive, repetitive, chainlike, predictable effect upon the person’s actions. Freud was right in the respect that rigid, deterministic causality does work in neurosis and sickness.

But he was wrong in trying to carry this over to apply to all human experience The aspect of purpose, which comes into the process when the individual can become conscious of what he is doing, opens him to new and different possibilities in the future, and introduces the elements of personal responsibility and freedom.

EROS SICKENING

The Eros we have been discussing is that of the classical age, when he was still the creative power and the bridge between men and gods. But this “healthy” Eros deteriorated. Plato’s understanding of Eros is a middle form of the concept, standing between Hesiod’s view of Eros as the powerful and original creator and the later deteriorated form in which Eros becomes a sickly child. These three aspects of Eros are also accurate reflections of psychological archetypes of human experience: each of us at different times has the experience of Eros as creator, as mediator, and as banal playboy. Our age is by no means the first to experience the banalization of love, and to find that without passion, love sickens.

In the charming story quoted at the beginning of this chapter, we saw that the ancient Greeks had put into the quintessential language of myth the insights which spring from the archetypes of the human psyche. Eros, the child of Ares and Aphrodite, “did not grow as other children, but remained a small, rosy, chubby child, with gauzy wings and rougish, dimpled face.” After telling us that the alarmed mother was informed, “Love cannot grow without Passion,” the myth goes on:

Within these disarmingly naïve sentences, with which the Greeks were wont to clothe their most profound wisdom, lie several points which are crucial for our problems now. One is that Eros is the child of Ares as well as Aphrodite. This is to say that love is inseparably connected with aggression.

Another is that the Eros which had been the powerful creator in Hesiod’s time, causing the barren earth to spring up with green trees and breathing the spirit of life into man, has now deteriorated into a child, a rosy, chubby, playful creature, sometimes a mere fat infant playing with his bow and arrows. We see him represented as an effete Cupid in so many of the paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as in ancient times. “In archaic art Eros is represented as a beautiful winged youth and tends to be made younger and younger until by the Hellenistic period he is an infant.” In Alexandrine poetry, he degenerates into a mischievous child.⁴⁰ There must be something within Eros’ own nature to cause this deterioration, for it is present already in the myth which, while later than the Hesiod version, still dates from long before Greek civilization disintegrated.

This brings us to the very heart of what has also gone wrong in our day: eros has lost passion, and has become insipid, childish, banal.

As is so often the case, the myth reveals a critical conflict in the roots of human experience, true for the Greeks and true for us: we engage in a flight from eros, the once powerful, original source of being, to sex, the mischievous plaything. Eros is demoted to the function of a pretty bartender, serving grapes and wine, a stimulator for dalliance whose task is to keep life endlessly sensuous on a bank of soft clouds. He stands not for the creative use of power—sexual, procreative, and other—but for the immediacy of gratification. And, mirabile dictu, we discover that the myth proclaims exactly what we have seen happening in our own day: eros, then, even loses interest in sex. In one version of the myth, Aphrodite tries to find him to get him up and about his business of spreading love with his bow and arrows. And, teen-age loafer that he has become, he is off gambling with Ganymede and cheating at the cards.

Gone is the spirit of the life-giving arrows, gone the creature who could breathe spirit into man and woman, gone the powerful Dionysian festivals, gone the frenzied dancing and the mysteries that moved the initiates more than the vaunted drugs of our mechanical age, gone even the bucolic intoxication. Eros now playboy indeed! Bacchanal with Pepsi-Cola.

Is this what civilization always does—tames Eros to make him fit the needs of the society to perpetuate itself? Changes him from the power that brings to birth new being and ideas and passion, weakens him till he is no longer the creative force that breaks old forms asunder to make new ones? Tames him until he stands for the goal of perpetual ease, dalliance, affluence, and, ultimately, apathy?⁴¹

In this respect we confront a new and specific problem in our Western world—the war between eros and technology. There is no war between sex and technology: our technical inventions help sex to be safe, available, and efficient as demonstrated from birth-control pills all the way to the how-to-do-it books. Sex and technology join together to achieve “adjustment” with the full release of tension over the weekend, you can work better in the button-down world on Monday. Sensual needs and their gratification are not at war with technology, at least in any immediate sense (whether they are in the long run is another question).

But it is not at all clear that technology and eros are compatible, or can even live without perpetual warfare. The lover, like the poet, is a menace on the assembly line. Eros breaks existing forms and creates new ones and that, naturally, is a threat to technology. Technology requires regularity, predictability, and runs by the clock. The untamed eros fights against all concepts and confines of time.

Eros is the impetus in building civilizations. But the civilization then turns on its progenitor and disciplines the erotic impulses. This can still work toward the increase and expansion of consciousness. The erotic impulses can and should have some discipline: the gospel of the free expression of every impulse disperses experience like a river with no banks, its water spilled and wasted as it flows in every direction. The discipline of eros provides forms in which we can develop and which protect us from unbearable anxiety. Freud believed that the disciplining of eros was necessary for a culture, and that it was from the repression and sublimation of erotic impulses that the power came out of which civilizations were built. De Rougement, for one of the few times, here agrees with Freud; he does not forget

But there comes a point (and this is the challenge facing modern technological Western man) when the cult of technique destroys feeling, undermines passion, and blots out individual identity. The technologically efficient lover, defeated in the contradiction which is copulation without eros, is ultimately the impotent one. He has lost the power to be carried away; he knows only too well what he is doing. At this point, technology diminishes consciousness and demolishes eros. Tools are no longer an enlargement of consciousness but a substitute for it and, indeed, tend to repress and truncate it.

Must civilization always tame eros to keep the society from breaking up again? Hesiod lived in the strongly fomenting, archaic sixth century, closer to the sources of culture and the moments of gestation and birth, when the procreative powers were at work, and man had to live with chaos and form it into something new. But then, with the growing need for stabilization, the daimonic and tragic elements tended to be buried. Insight into the downfall of civilizations is revealed here. We see effete Athens set up for the more primitive Macedonians, they in turn for the Romans, and the Romans in turn for the Huns. And we for the yellow and black races?

Eros is the center of the vitality of a culture—its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.