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The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man's Quest to Know What Love Is
A psychoanalyst looks at the portrayal of love in poems from Homer to Shakespeare, discusses Freud's writings on love, and examines the relationship between narcissism and love
- GenresPsychology
302 pages, Hardcover
First published January 23, 1987
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March 1, 2024
1. Eye-opening in part one (looking at the history from a psychoanalytic perspective gives new meanings to many things!), and nice survey of the history of psychoanalysis dealing with love in part two. I wonder what readers with a stronger background in psychoanalysis might think; it was quite helpful for me.
2. I caught two mistakes, one minor. p.167 speaks of Poussin's "Dido and Aeneas" painting in the Toledo Museum. Should be Venus and Mars. p.98 discusses Virgil's Discourse on Love in the Divine Comedy, but in the English translations I consulted, the sense almost seems opposite to the meaning Bergmann gives it. Virgil speaks of the lover extracting or discovering the form of the beloved and keeping it in his mind; Bergmann speaks of creating that form. The difference is huge. Just something to keep in mind when reading a well-researched book that nevertheless is geared towards the general audience.
P.S. Bergmann doesn't strike me as someone with a Western bias or with a preference for everything Greece and Rome (like I am), so the fact that he judges the Greeks to have discovered the language to talk deeply and concretely about love seems to me significant. I have never thought of the Greeks in this way (the fact that they have a richer vocabulary of love didn't seem to me to indicate an advantage or superiority in thinking about it over other languages or cultures). Just a random thought that doesn't have much to do with the book's main message...
2. I caught two mistakes, one minor. p.167 speaks of Poussin's "Dido and Aeneas" painting in the Toledo Museum. Should be Venus and Mars. p.98 discusses Virgil's Discourse on Love in the Divine Comedy, but in the English translations I consulted, the sense almost seems opposite to the meaning Bergmann gives it. Virgil speaks of the lover extracting or discovering the form of the beloved and keeping it in his mind; Bergmann speaks of creating that form. The difference is huge. Just something to keep in mind when reading a well-researched book that nevertheless is geared towards the general audience.
P.S. Bergmann doesn't strike me as someone with a Western bias or with a preference for everything Greece and Rome (like I am), so the fact that he judges the Greeks to have discovered the language to talk deeply and concretely about love seems to me significant. I have never thought of the Greeks in this way (the fact that they have a richer vocabulary of love didn't seem to me to indicate an advantage or superiority in thinking about it over other languages or cultures). Just a random thought that doesn't have much to do with the book's main message...
Displaying 1 of 1 review