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Plato Freud
Two Theories of Love
Santas Gerasimos (Author)
9780631159148, Wiley
Hardback, published 29 June 1988
208 pages
24 x 16.4 x 2.2 cm, 0.454 kg
What is love? Why do we idealize those whom we love? How do we choose whom to love? Are some kinds of love better than others? Each age returns to these questions with renewed perplexity. Gerasimos Santas examinees the two greatest theoretical architectures of love, side by side. It provides a thorough critical description and comparison of these theories, allowing a sophisticated dialogue to emerge between the two thinkers. In the first half of the book Professor Santas reconstructs and explains Plato's theories of eros and philia: erotic love, familial love and friendship. He attempt to show that Plato's was a unified theory in which erotic love has a special connecion with creativity and beauty. He then discusses Freud's notion of love as distinct from, though based on, his general theory of sexuality. He discusses in detail Freud's explanations, before and after narcissism, of idealization and choice of beloved. Freud too, it emerges, had a unified theory of love: all love has its origins in the libidinal instincts of infancy and childhood. The book concludes by showing that, despite Freud's claim that his theory of love is 'Platonic', the two theories are instructively different.
Preface ix Abbreviations xii 1 The Study of Love 1 Introduction 1 Questions about Love 3 Terms of Love: Eros, Philia, Agape 7 Limits of This Study 9 2 Plato's Theory of Eros in the Symposium 14 Introduction 14 Some Preliminary Speeches: Eros all Good, Eros Good and Bad, Eros a Cosmic Force 15 The Speech of Aristophanes: Eros as Desire to Unite with One's Other Half 18 The Speech of Agathon: Good and Beautiful Eros is Eros of Beauty and Goodness 22 The Speech of Socrates: Introductory 25 The Deficiency and Egoistic Models of Desire Applied to Eros 26 Generic Eros: Desire for the Good to be One's Own Forever 32 Specific Eros: Desire to Create Offspring in Beauty for the Sake of Immortality 34 The Ladder of Love: From Eros of a Beautiful Body to Eros of Beauty Itself 40 Beauty, Immortality and the Good 43 3 Passionate Platonic Eros in the Phaedrus 58 Introduction 58 Pleasure, Rationality and Eros as Human Madness 59 Eros as Divine Madness 62 The Phaedrus and the Symposium 69 Philosophic Eros in the Phaedo and the Republic 72 4 Plato on Friendship and Familial Love 81 Introduction 81 Friendship in the Lysis: Like to Like and Opposite to Opposite 81 What is Neither Good nor Bad is Friend to the Good 84 Friendship and Familial Love in the Republic 89 Friendship as Sharing Knowledge and Desire for the Good 91 5 Freud's New Theory of Sexuality 97 Introduction 97 The Old and the New Concepts of Sexuality 100 What is Sexual? 102 Psychosexual Development and the First Appearance of Love 107 Normal Sexuality 110 6 Freud's Theory of Love 116 Introduction 116 The Central Thesis: All Love is Sexual in Origin 117 The Main Characteristics of Love: Exclusive Attachment and Overvaluation 119 Explanations of the Choice of Love-Object 122 Narcissistic Models of Object-Choice 127 Freud's Explanations of Overestimation 133 Narcissistic and Egoistic Love 137 Familial Love, Friendship, and Sublimation 139 Love, Happiness, and Civilization 144 7 The Two Theories of Love Compared 153 Introduction 153 Freud's Own Comparisons to Plato 154 The Function of Love in Plato and Freud 157 The Origin of Love in Plato and Freud 162 Sublimation and the Ladder of Love 169 Choice and Overestimation 172 Plato and Freud 177 Epilogue: More Questions About Love 185 Bibliography 189 Index 194
Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]
