One of my favorite books is Sam Keen's The Passionate Life. Sam Keen regards eros as an impulse or energy that links us to the whole web of life rather than a strictly sexual-romantic thing. His goal in this book is to help us recover 'a healthy passion' for life. He does so by contructing a life-map that traces transformations of love through the course of a lifetime and describes the psychological orientation characteristic of each stage.
Reading his work, it strikes me that being Jehovah's Witnesses kept us in a childlike state as far as eros is concerned. The Society was our parent, our mother, and Jehovah was described as a stern father. When we leave the Jehovah's Witnesses' belief system, it is as though we are thrown into an adolescent stage of love development, one that Keen describes as "The Rebel." Here are a few excerpts from the book regarding the Rebel stage:
To gain our freedom, we must use the knife of de/cision. We come to a fork in the road, either/or. We must choose. . . . To say a single "yes" we must say "no" a hundred times. Thus Nietzsche could say: "I love the great Nay sayers for they are the great 'yea' sayers."The first, and hardest, "no" is the de/cision to sever our ties with home, to endure the alienation that inevitably comes from leaving all that is familiar. Our temptation is to remain in safety, beyond tragedy. But if we do, all the delightful virtues of childhood will become twisted into dependent vices. Instead of becoming responsible, we will be reactionary; instead of creative, conservative.
A passionate life is a continuing dialogue between self and other. And all real dialogue, according to philosopher Karl Jaspers, is a "loving combat." To become who we are we must learn to wrestle. Push-pull. Yes-no. Love must be muscular, to enter the contest, to endure the agony, of the clash between points of view.But, sadly, parents, guardians, and authorities often squelch the first trace of rebellion. "Don't you dare contradict me." They demand unquestioning obedience. They react to the young rebel's "no" as if it were an insurrection that must be controlled at any cost. When the authorities are too rigid and insecure to embrace the rebellious ones, either the spark of individuality will be extinguished or the repression will act like gasoline thrown on the embers and inflame the situation.
In the adversarial personality, the bad boy or bad girl continues to play out the drama of adolescent rebellion. Defiance becomes a way of life. The adversary will always be linked in an antagonistic relationship to some authority. If you live out of a negative identity, the only time you will feel alive is when you are in conflict or combat. Others will always be cast in the mold of the enemy against whom you must struggle. Eros will be reduced to a mode of warfare, life to a battle. You will be aroused by the prospect of violence. If you are "normal" you will limit your love for violence to lawful competition, fighting with your spouse, and voyeurism--a regular ritual bloodbath on TV or in the movies. Your daydreams will be filled with schemes for conquest, plans for achieving what psychoanalyst Karen Horney calls a "vindictive triumph" over others. Even if you don't win, you can achieve a victory by being drunk, drugged, or in disgrace. You will show "them" you can't be bossed around.
If the adversarial personality is a reactionary prolongation of the style of "bad boys and girls," the pleaser's mask wears the perpetual smile of the good boy or girl. Pleasers are the "yes" men and "yes" women. . . .Beneath the smiling mask, we can see the injury that results from a deficiency of rebellion. The nice ones are never quite real. They lack self-definition, self-confidence, because they have never created boundaries and limits for themselves by making decisions. Having never dared to break the taboos they suffer from shame. Their sins are ones of omission rather than commission. They "have left undone those things they ought to have done," most especially deciding for themselves what is good and evil. Being impotent because they have never dared to assert themselves, they continually play the blame-game. They are innocent and powerless and, therefore, others are always to blame when things go wrong. In their world, the only authorities are God, the church, the Bible, the government, the boss, and what the neighbors think. They have yet to bite the apple of consciousness. The price they pay is high, although not often visible. Their repressed negativity erupts as ulcers, gut reactions, boredom, depression, suicide, and, occasionally, murder. Notice how frequently the newspapers, when interviewing the neighbors of the latest mass murderer, report: "We don't know how he could have done it. He was such a nice boy. Something of a loner, but everybody liked him." Repressed rebellion seethes beneath the pleasant facade, but eventually breaks forth in violence.
After talking about the various faces of adolescent love, Sam Keen describes adult love, when one has grown beyond both dependence and independence to the realization that we are interdependent--individuals in need of a community:
. . . The social contract is not based on a cynical compromise that we make because without the laws of civility we would be enemies to each other; rather, it is based on the visceral knowledge that we would die without communion with our own kind. The singular life, as we are discovering now that western individualism has destroyed the basis of community, leads to alienation, anomie, and apathy. The motive power for the individual life, paradoxically, is inseparable from community.Within the ambience of the group, it is not intense passion that is valued so much as orderly care, not wild encounters with strange loves, but quiet kindness. Society tames us, teaches us to keep our Dionysian impulses in control (except during Mardi Gras, Fasching, orgies on the Sagittarian moon, and occasional affairs). It is not prudery that leads the tribe to domesticate eros, but the observation that it is patience, day-to-day kindness, basic trust, and competence that makes for a full life. For cooking, one wants embers, not flames. For a bountiful harvest, seed must not only be sown but cultivated. Stability is the precondition for the development of intelligence and love.
Ginny