Love and Sex

• Need for love

1. sexual desire is one manifestation
2. psycho-biological (polarity)

Existential dimension of interpersonal passions split into physiological and biological natures.

The Masculine is represented

• penetration
• guidance
• activity
• discipline
• adventurousness

The feminine is represented

• productivity
• receptivity
• protection
• realism
• endurance
• motherliness

Freud said that sexual instinct was the sole expression of love. It's aim for relief was to remove painful tension. Sexual desire was an itch, so physical satisfaction removed the itch.

Sexual attraction

• partially relieves physical pain
• masculine and feminine characters are divided into poles
• therefore the main need is unification of the poles

Development of the capability of love TO love

related to the object of love

• A. starts as a dependency on mother and existence. It is unconditional.
• B. as a child becomes independent, more aware of things and the outside world. Identifying, separating, categorizing. Relationship to mom loses relative significance and father becomes more and more important.
• C. Conditional love develops. Father projects- "i love you because you fulfill my expectations, because they are your duties, b/c you like me.

Father represents world of thought, man-made, law and order, discipline, travel and adventure. "the father teaches the child, shows him the road into the world. Related to private property, ownership and the relationship is inherited through this.

A. Unconditional Love

v.s. Deserved loved: loved because of one's merit. because one deserves it. Leaves doubt. maybe, maybe. fear that love could disappear. easily leaves a bitter feeling (that one is not loved for oneself; that one is loved only because one pleases. This is not love, it is being used)

How to meditate on knowing the difference between unconditional love- loving as is v.s. deserved or conditional love?

Mother represents home. We come from soil, nature, ocean. There are 2 diff aspects of the mother's unconditional love

1. biological preservation. the care and responsibility to provide and sustain life
2. the attitude that instills a "love for the living". The difference between who only received the "milk" to who got both the "milk and honey". Thus is an inherent nature of inequality of those who primarily gives.

H.S. Sullivan has a strict division between of love 1&2

1. love > in the normal form in Western Society is> "team work" or collaboration mentality; or a haven from aloneness. A socially patterned pathology.
2. sexuality > (what Freud primarily focused on)

Real Love:

is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence. Hence, if each one of them experiences himself from the center of himself from the center of his existence. This is called a "Central Existence".

Erotic love

is dependent upon circumstances and certain specifics (whereas brotherly love is love for all). It is exclusive; though does not necessarily mean possessive attachment.

We are all >> ONE >> yet each individual is a unique and unduplicable entity. Can you love in the other person all of mankind, all that is alive?

Receiving love of normal erotic love --> unsatisfactory development remains a component. It finds expression in religious forms, but more often finds it in neurotic forms.

1. Pattern of infantile relatedness: can lead to social ineffectiveness. Conflicts in intimate personal relationships can arise. Affectionate and charming to induce. Yet acts immature, immature and superficial down the line.
2. Sentimental Love: experienced only in the fantasy. Movies, music, daydreaming. When it comes to reality person freezes. Abstractification- of past and future happiness and love. Fond memories but no actual fond experience in the now.
3. Projective mechanisms
4. Necessity of Absence of Conflict: Real conflict between two people, those which do not serve to cover of project, but which are experienced on the deep level of internal reality, are not destructive. They lead to clarification. They produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength.

Physical desire can be caused by many other intentions other than "union through love". Stimulated by the wish to conquer or destroy; by vanity, anxiety or loneliness.