The Urgency of Changing Our Thinking about Eros In Atlanta recently, a man broke into the apartment of his former girlfriend and brutally murdered both her and her new lover with an axe. When asked later whether he had considered the consequences of being apprehended and prosecuted, he responded that without his relationship to this particular woman his life had no meaning, and for this reason it made no difference what happened to him. All-too-facile explanations of such events can be devised in terms of neurological imbalances or improper child-rearing practices. But why are suicide, the murder of spouses and lovers, and other crimes of passion so much more prevalent in advanced, urban-industrial cultures, and especially in those where people's value is assessed in terms of socio-economic success and failure? And why do the associated psychic disturbances express themselves so prominently in terms of disruption of attitudes toward love relationships? It cannot be a mere coincidence that the most heinous crimes are crimes of love. I shall suggest here that the most direct way to understand the most prevalent dysfunctions of the modern psyche is to understand the dysfunctions of eros. The reason for this is twofold. First, eros is central tQl the project of defining meaning for conscious beings - for reasons more fundamentally philosophical than anything envisioned by Freud or other drive-reduction theorists.

Klappentext

While many books have been written about human sexuality, few have seriously explored the philosophical and psychological meaning of erotic love. This reflects a bias and a problem in contemporary culture: the misunderstanding of eros out of a theory of physiological drive-reduction (ignoring the countervailing motivation toward intensification rather than reduction of conscious feeling) has led to an egocentric view of human nature, which in turn motivates a simplistic hedonism in value thinking and an atomistic-individualist conception of society. The ultra-competitive nature of this kind of culture leads to overconcern with masks of invulnerability - i.e., narcissism - which prevents the dropping of superficial defenses necessary for deep and authentic love relationships to mature. But the intense, direct experience of the intrinsic value of another being embodied in authentic love experiences is needed to combat the existential threats to the meaningfulness of life (alienation, powerlessness, relative insignificance in the ultimate scheme, and death). This experience is motivated by the need to be pulled out of oneself into a non-egocentric way of experiencing which cares as much about expressing value feelings, in order to deepen and intensify them, as it does about reducing egocentric drives. The misunderstanding, neglect, and dysfunction of this basic human need thus reflects a serious problem in the psychology of the self and the structure of the community, whose study requires a phenomenological rather than a merely empirical-scientific approach, since the latter approach alone leads almost inevitably to the very reductionism at issue.

Inhalt
The Urgency of Changing Our Thinking about Eros.- 1. The Centrality of Eros in the Project of Defining Meaning for Human Beings.- 2. Reassessing Assumptions and Methods in the Study of Eros.- I A Phenomenology of the Experience of Eros.- One Eros as Transformation.- Two After the Awakening.- Three Sexuality and Infatuation.- Four Fear of Eros and the Fragmentation of Consciousness.- II Eros in Its Broader Existential and Cultural Context.- Five The Destruction of Eros.- Six The Obsession with Eros as Pointing beyond Itself.- Seven Eros and the Value of Being.- Conclusion.- References.