Eros

(ĕr'ŏs', îr'-)

1. Greek Mythology. The god of love, son of Aphrodite.
2. often eros Creative, often sexual yearning, love, or desire: "The new playful eros means that impulses and modes from other spheres enter the relations between men and women" (Herbert Gold).
3. 1. Psychiatry. Sexual drive; libido.
   2. The sum of all instincts for self-preservation.

[Latin Erōs, from Greek, from erōs, sexual love.]

View more Miscellaneous videos

For more information on Eros, visit Britannica.com.

Eros, in Greek myth, the god of love, the Roman Cupid. He does not appear in Homer, but Hesiod includes him as one of the first created gods (see EREBUS), signifying the power of love over gods and men. Eros in this cosmogonic sense sometimes figures in the thought of the early Greek philosophers. In the lyric poets however he is the personification of physical desire, cruel and unpredictable, but embodying those qualities that inspire love, and hence young and beautiful. This Eros is the companion, often the son, of Aphrodite. His bow and arrows, first mentioned by Euripides, and later his torch, figure prominently in his role of mischievous boy assigned to him by the Hellenistic poets and artists. Quite often he is expanded into a plurality of Erōtes. Eros was not, however, simply a literary conceit; he was also an object of worship in several ancient cults. See also IRIS.

In ancient Greece the word Eros referred to love and the god of love. In his final theory of the drives, Sigmund Freud made Eros a fundamental concept referring to the life instincts (narcissism and object libido), whose goals were the preservation, binding, and union of the organism into increasingly larger units.

Eros the unifier is opposed to, and yet was blended into, the death instinct, an antagonistic force leading to the destruction, disintegration, and dissolution of everything that exists. "In this way the libido of our sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together" (Freud, 1920g, p. 50).

The term Eros, understood as a life instinct antagonistic to the death instinct, appeared for the first time in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), where Freud used it to establish a dynamic polarity that would define a new instinctual dualism. Freud wrote, "Our speculations have suggested that Eros operates from the beginning of life and appears as a 'life instinct' in opposition to the 'death instinct' which was brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance. These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by supposing that these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very first" (p. 61). In this essay Freud refers to the doctrine of the Greek physician and philosopher Empedocles of Agrigento (c. 490-430 B.C.E.), for whom the production of all things results from the interplay of two forces, Love and Discord, conceived of as the impersonal forces of attraction and repulsion.

Yet Freud's theoretical innovation is more than the pure speculations of philosophy, biology, or physics. Revision of his concepts was called for by his experience in psychoanalytic practice. He posited within the organism a primal masochism derived from the action of the death instinct to account for certain clinical problems: ambivalence in affective life, nightmares associated with traumatic neurosis, masochism, and negative therapeutic reactions.

Freud's uses of the term Eros (86 of 88 occurrences, according to Guttman's Concordance) is contemporary with his final theory of the instincts developed after 1920. The word itself, with its multiple meanings, enabled Freud to combine many things that he had previously separated and contrasted: love between the sexes, self-love, love for one's parents or children, "friendship and love among mankind in general," "devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas," and partial sexual drives (component instincts). This expanded concept of love led Freud to evoke, on several occasions (1920g, 1921c, 1924c, 1925e [1924]), "the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato's Symposium" (1925e, p. 218).

Although the concept of Eros, properly speaking, emerged late in Freud's work, this did not prevent him from claiming that all his earlier discoveries about sexuality can be seen in terms of Eros. Psychoanalysis showed that sexuality did not conceal "impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals" (1925e, p. 218), and that sexuality was thus different from genitality.

Though the term Eros does not appear in the original texts, two notes, one from 1925 in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and the other from 1920 in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), reinforce the use of "Eros" as a synonym for "sexual" in the discovery of psychoanalysis: "The situation would be different if 'sexual' was being used by my critics in the sense in which it is now commonly employed in psychoanalysts—in the sense of 'Eros"' (1900a, note 1925, p. 161). Freud even justified his failure to use the word earlier: "Anyone who considers sex as something mortifying and humiliating to human nature is at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions 'Eros' and 'erotic.' I might have done so myself from the first and thus spared myself much opposition. But I did not want to, for I like to avoid concessions to faintheartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, then little by little in substance too" (1921c, p. 91). Occurrences of the terms "Eros" (after 1920) and "eroticism" (after 1894) overlap in Freud's writings without ever leaving the field of sexuality.

Freud early on recognized the erotic character of repressed representations that lie at the heart of neurotic symptoms. He cites "the case of a girl, who blamed herself because, while she was nursing her sick father, she had thought about a young man who made a slight erotic impression on her" (1894a, p. 48), and who is then constrained to treat this unwanted representation of a sexual nature as if it had "never occurred." Freud conceived mental conflict as a moral conflict in which the troublemaker Eros stirs up trouble in the form of a symptom. He saw sexuality as a trauma that goes far beyond the well-known scenes of sexual seduction. Eros forces the ego to defend itself and thus participates in the division and fragmentation of the psyche. Repressed erotic representations later return in the form of symptoms or compromise formations that substitute for sexual activity or "precipitates of earlier experiences in the sphere of love" (1910a, p. 51). Such instances of deferred or aborted love are remote from sexual attraction and genital activity. Sexuality exists from infancy, is fundamentally perverse and polymorphous, and consists of a bundle of partial sexual drives that seek satisfaction independently of one another, in autoerotic fashion. The oral drive, for example, is seen as a mouth that kisses itself.

The 1920 footnote in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality retroactively referring to Eros (1905d, p. 266n) serves Freud's theoretical interests: to recognize infantile sexuality as something distinct from genitality, to emphasize the diphasic nature of sexual life, and to provide the concept of the drives with a mythical status, infantile in appearance and dominated by an ongoing and insatiable quest. Here Eros appears to conflict with the ego's instinct for self-preservation. The Oedipus complex determines the outcome of this conflict through the possibilities it offers for orienting the libido toward a sexual object (one that is no longer only sexual) by means of the phallus. The Oedipus complex is responsible for ensuring that the subject becomes satisfied in love after the reorganization at puberty, when the partial drives (component instincts) are enlisted in the service of an organized genital apparatus. Failing this, the subject will fall ill unless an alternative object is found through sublimation.

Eros is not only a cause of symptoms but can also become the means for their relief. The theoretical model of Eros as healer is beautifully illustrated in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva" (1907a [1906]).

Love was also at the center of the psychoanalytic experiment from the time of its initial discovery via transference. In the middle period of the development of psychoanalysis (1912-1915), the homage to love in Delusions and Dreams would butt up against its limitations in a theory of transference, which shows love to support resistance to remembering, and hence to analysis. Moreover, Freud discovered in cases of sexual impotence of psychological origin that a conflict exists between the "affectionate current" and the "sexual current": "Where they love they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love" (1912d, p. 183). This text anticipates Freud's comments in "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c). In this text, Freud saw the narcissistic libido as conflicting with erotic love of the object: Narcissus versus Eros. The ego claims a place among the sexual objects, and the self-preservation instincts have a libidinal nature. What distinguishes Eros is its link with objects: "A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill, if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love" (1914c, p. 85).

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920g) overturned these earlier constructions. The theory of a death instinct, which worked in silence, forced Freud to combine the ego instincts and sexual instincts directed at objects, grouping them under the umbrella of a single force whose goal was union: Eros. Such an Eros is no longer a troublemaker, a divisive agent that disturbs the mental apparatus. It is the power of creation, of reproduction; it makes existence possible and postpones the return to an inorganic state. When discussing the life-preserving sexual instincts (object libido and ego), Freud explicitly refers to the myth of Eros recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. But the life and death instincts rarely come into play in isolation: They form various amalgams in which each attempts to make use of the other's strength to its own advantage. Freud shows that moral masochism, for example, "becomes a classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of instinct. Its danger lies in the fact that it originates from the death instinct and corresponds to the part of that instinct which has escaped being turned outwards as an instinct of destruction. But since, on the other hand, it has the significance of an erotic component, even the subject's destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction" (1924a).

In Freud's last work, it is as if the scandal of the discovery of sexuality was displaced in favor of the theoretical innovation of the death instinct. Eros as the embodiment of Aristophanes' myth or Empedocles' theories appears to get the better of Eros as the embodiment of desire, an Eros whose birth is given in the myth recounted by Diotima in The Symposium.

Jacques Lacan distances, without completely separating, love and desire (Eros). Love is the mirage in which desire is caught. The phallus is the fulcrum between the object that gives rise to desire and the part of the subject, minus language, that is forever lost. "Therefore, to love is to give what one does not have, and we can only love by acting as if we don't have, even if we do" (Lacan, 1991).

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1894a). The neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 41-61.

——. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4: 1-338; 5: 339-625.

——. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

——. (1907a [1906]). Delusions and dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva." SE, 9: 1-95.

——. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. SE, 14: 67-102.

——. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.

——. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.

——. (1924a). Letter to Le Disque Vert. SE, 19: 290-290.

——. (1924b [1923]). Neurosis and psychosis. SE, 19: 147-153.

——. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE, 19: 155-170.

——. (1925e [1924]). The resistances to psycho-analysis. SE, 19: 211-222.

Guttman, Samuel A. (1984). The concordance to "The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud" (2nd ed.). New York: International Universities Press.

Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le séminaire. Book 8: Le transfert. Paris: Seuil.

—ROLAND GORI

[Roman name Cupid]

A Greek and Roman god of love, often called the son of Aphrodite. He is better known by his Roman name.

• Love and Romance - Eros: ancient Greek god of love
• Gods and Divinities - Eros: god of love (Greece)

This article is about the Greek god Eros. For other topics, including the philosophical and psychological use of the word "eros", see Eros (disambiguation).

Eros
The Eros Farnese, a Pompeiian marble thought to be a copy of the colossal Eros of Thespiae by Praxiteles[1]
God of love and attraction
Abode	Mount Olympus
Symbol	Bow, Arrows, Candles, Hearts, Cupids, Wings and Kisses
Consort	Psyche
Parents	Chaos or Aphrodite and Ares or Aphrodite and Hermes, or Iris and Zephyrus
Siblings	Gaia, Tartarus, Harmonia, Anteros, Himeros, Phobos, Adrestia and Deimos
Children	Hedone
Roman equivalent	Cupid

Eros (/ˈɪərɒs/, US: /ˈɛrɒs/; Ancient Greek: Ἔρως, "Desire"), in Greek mythology, was the Greek god of love. His Roman counterpart was Cupid ("desire"). Some myths make him a primordial god, while in other myths, he is the son of Aphrodite.

The Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, is popularly mistaken for Eros.^[2] In fact it represents Anteros.

Contents 1 Evolution of the cult and depiction of Eros 2 Primordial god 3 Son of Aphrodite 3.1 Eros and Psyche 4 Child god 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Evolution of the cult and depiction of Eros

Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several different guises. In the earliest sources (the cosmogonies, the earliest philosophers, and the mysteries), he is one of the primordial gods involved in the coming into being of the cosmos. But in later sources, Eros is represented as the son of Aphrodite whose mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals cause bonds of love to form, often illicitly. Ultimately, in the later satirical poets, he is represented as a blindfolded child, the precursor to the chubby Renaissance cupid - whereas in early Greek poetry and art, Eros was depicted as an adult male who embodies sexual power.^[3][4]

A cult of Eros existed in pre-classical Greece but it was much less important than that of Aphrodite. However, in late antiquity, Eros was worshiped by a fertility cult in Thespiae. In Athens, he shared a very popular cult with Aphrodite, and the fourth day of every month was sacred to him.^{[citation needed]}

Primordial god

According to Hesiod (c. 700 BC), one of the most ancient of all Greek sources, Eros was a primordial god, i.e. he had no parents. He was the fourth god to come into existence, after Chaos, Gaia (the Earth), and Tartarus (the Abyss or the Underworld).^[5]

Homer, curiously, does not mention Eros. However, Parmenides (c.400BC), one of the pre-socratic philosophers, makes Eros the first of all the gods to come into existence.^[6]

The Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries featured Eros as a very original god, but not quite primordial, since he was the child of Night (Nyx).^[3] Aristophanes (c. 400BC), influenced by Orphism, relates the birth of Eros and then of the entire human race:

At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.^[7]

Son of Aphrodite

This section requires expansion.

Eros depicted as an adult male, Attic red-figure bobbin (ca. 470–450 BC)

[Hera addresses Athene :] “We must have a word with Aphrodite. Let us go together and ask her to persuade her boy [Eros], if that is possible, to loose an arrow at Aeetes’ daughter, Medea of the many spells, and make her fall in love with Iason . . .” (Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3. 25 ff – a Greek epic of the 3rd century B.C.)

"He [Eros] smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms." (Seneca, Phaedra 290 ff)

"Once, when Venus’son [Cupid, aka Eros] was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. [And she became] enraptured by the beauty of a man [Adonis]." (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10. 525 ff)

"Eros drove Dionysos mad for the girl [Aura] with the delicious wound of his arrow, then curving his wings flew lightly to Olympos. And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire.” (Nonnus, Dionysiaca 48. 470 ff – a Greek epic of the 5th century AD)

Eros and Psyche

Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss in the Louvre, Paris

Main article: Cupid and Psyche

The story of Eros and Psyche has a longstanding tradition as a folktale of the ancient Greco-Roman world long before it was committed to literature in Apuleius' Latin novel, The Golden Ass. The novel itself is written in a picaresque Roman style, yet Psyche retains her Greek name. Eros and Aphrodite are called by their Latin names (Cupid and Venus), and Cupid is depicted as a young adult, rather than a child.^[8]

The story tells of the struggle for love and trust between Eros and Psyche. Aphrodite was jealous of the beauty of mortal princess Psyche, as men were leaving her altars barren to worship a mere human woman instead, and so she commanded her son Eros, the god of love, to cause Psyche to fall in love with the ugliest creature on earth. But instead, Eros falls in love with Psyche himself and spirits her away to his home. Their fragile peace is ruined by a visit from Psyche's jealous sisters, who cause Psyche to betray the trust of her husband. Wounded, Eros leaves his wife, and Psyche wanders the Earth, looking for her lost love. Eventually she approaches Aphrodite and asks for her help. Aphrodite imposes a series of difficult tasks on Psyche, which she is able to achieve by means of supernatural assistance.

A Roman copy of Eros Stringing the Bow from the Capitoline Museum

After successfully completing these tasks, Aphrodite relents and Psyche becomes immortal to live alongside her husband Eros. Together they had a daughter, Voluptas or Hedone (meaning physical pleasure, bliss).

In Greek mythology, Psyche was the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings (because psyche was also the Ancient Greek word for 'butterfly'). The Greek word psyche literally means "soul, spirit, breath, life or animating force".

Child god

This section requires expansion.

In late antiquity the satyrical poets depicted Eros as a blindfolded child who shoots his arrows at unlikely targets, engendering farcical love affairs.

See also

Greek deities series Primordial deities Titans and Olympians Aquatic deities Chthonic deities Other deities Personified concepts Apate Atë Bia Charites Eris Eros Harmonia Horae Hypnos Kratos Metis Mnemosyne Moirai Morpheus Nemesis Nike Thanatos Themis Zelos

• Aphrodite
• Ares
• Cupid
• Eros (concept)
• Erotes
• Greek words for love
• Hermaphroditus
• Kamadeva
• Love at first sight
• Symposium (Plato)

References

1. ^ A. Corso, Concerning the catalogue of Praxiteles’ exhibition held in the Louvre. Conference paper presented at ИНДОЕВРОПЕЙСКОЕ ЯЗЫКОЗНАНИЕ И КЛАССИЧЕСКАЯ ФИЛОЛОГИЯ – XI June 2007; p. 159
2. ^ Lloyd & Mitchinson (2006) The book of general ignorance "Because of the bow and the nudity... everybody assumed it was Eros, the Greek god of love"
3. ^ ^{a b} See the article Eros at the Theoi Project.
4. ^ "Eros", in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
5. ^ Hesiod, Theogony, 116-120.
6. ^ "First of all the gods she devised Erōs." (Parmenides, fragment 13.) (The identity of the "she" is unclear, as Parmenides' work has survived only in fragments.
7. ^ Aristophanes, Birds, lines 690-699. (Translation by Eugene O'Neill, Jr., Perseus Digital Library; translation modified.)
8. ^ Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Penguin Classics).

Further reading

• Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Eros"

External links

• Media related to Eros at Wikimedia Commons
• Eros: Greek Protogenos god of Procreation
• Eros: Greek god of Love
• Eros at Hellenistai Wiki

v d e Greek religion and mythology Religions and cults Dionysian Mysteries Eleusinian Mysteries Platonism Neoplatonism Orphism Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism Groups Amazons Anemoi Centaurs Chthonics Cyclopes Dragons Erinyes Gigantes Harpies Hekatonkheires Moirai Mortals Muses Nymphs Protogenoi Satyrs Sea gods Titans Twelve Olympians Ares Aphrodite Apollo Artemis Athena Demeter Dionysus Hephaestus Zeus Hera Poseidon Hermes Other major deities Asclepius Eros Helios Selene Eos Gaia Heracles Hades Hebe Hecate Hestia Pan Persephone Heroes Heracles and his Labours Achilles and the Trojan War Odysseus and the Odyssey Jason and the Argonauts Perseus and Medusa Oedipus and Thebes Theseus and the Minotaur Triptolemus Rites and practices Amphidromia Hymns Iatromantis Libations Pharmakos Prayers Sacrifices Temples Votive offerings Sacred places Delphi Dodona Delos Olympia Olympus

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)