Sexuality and infatuation

pp. 97-123

in: Ralph Ellis, Eros in a narcissistic culture, Berlin, Springer, 1996

Abstract

We have postponed up to this point any detailed discussion of sexuality per se because, in order to lay the groundwork for understanding sexuality as expressive and not merely consummatory, it was first necessary to develop the larger context in terms of which physical sexuality plays its role for erotic love in the sense we are considering. But it has also been apparent at each step in the analysis that eros is distinguished from close, empathie friendships primarily because sexuality is involved. The intensity of physicality is central to the entrapment in the involuntary, "fateful' and predetermined qualities — the mental obsession, the inability to substitute one object for another, the inability to forget the other or give up hope in chagrin d'amour, and the compulsion to pursue a particular object even if at the expense of one's own happiness. The way in which sexuality develops also, in many instances, leads somewhat naturally to the establishment of a space of empathy and thus, if the space is well-established, to erotic love. I shall also suggest later that, even if the space of empathy is utterly destroyed by the eros-destructive factors alluded to in the previous chapter, sexual attraction in some "physical' sense may well remain.