A study appearing in The Journal of Neurophysiology shows that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal. See here. [I am grateful to Miryam Librán for the link].
So love is not a sublimation of sexual urge (as Freud used to think), and is not only a literary convention. It is a physiological affection, provoking a set of symptoms in the "patient". One of these is that love make the lover feel literally like a god. I have written an essay on this (in Spanish): "Cuando el amor nos hace dioses" (When love make us gods).
Interesting point. I also saw these results, and I wish that I had reached your insight.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it's good that we have literary scholars to see some of the broader cultural implications of work done in the empirical sciences.
So . . . Freud was wrong to see love as the sublimation of sexual desire, but what triggers love?
I fear that the spector of biological reductionism still haunts love's hallowed grounds.
Jeffery Hodges
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