The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is

An extraordinary history of love, from the ancient Sumerians to Freud. Of all human emotions, love is perhaps the most mysterious and decisive in shaping our destiny. Without it, we are unfulfilled. But is it one emotion, or a compound of many? The Anatomy of Loving captures the color and vitality of human experience and thought on the subject of love, beginning with the seduction poetry of ancient Sumer, and moving to the findings of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. In this exploration, psychoanalyst and scholar Martin Bergmann examines the thinking of figures throughout history who have influenced our notions of love to the present—Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, Stendhal, Madame Bovary, and Eliza Doolittle. Medieval courtly love and nineteenth-century romantic love, homosexual and bisexual love—all are examined by Dr. Bergmann as they have been manifested in art and literature. Although proponents of psychoanalysis have yet to agree on a single definition of love, Bergmann traces the distinctions made in that discipline between sexuality, narcissism, love, infatuation, sublimated love, and religious love. Above all, Bergmann eloquently delineates how the idea of love serves as a unique crystallization of the longings that suffuse the human heart.