Western Notions of Love - Love In Western History, Romantic Love, "scientific" Analysis Of Love, Bibliography
feelings mother child
In the West, probably more has been written about love than any other topic except the nature of God. There is, however, no consensus on what the word love or amor, agape, Liebe, eros, or hundreds of other terms signifies. It is clear, however, that it is more than a simple animal urge to procreate. Harry Harlow, for example, demonstrated that mother love was essential to the normal development of infant monkeys, and that infants deprived of love and nurturance became disturbed, unhappy adults, unfit for monkey society. But love is much more than the feelings of a mother for a child, although mother love has usually been regarded as much more intense than that of a father. Among other things the term love has been used to describe the feelings of a child toward a parent, one's feelings for friends and comrades, a religious yearning for transcendence, an entirely materialistic desire for physical sexual gratification, and the list could go on.
Additional Topics
One kind of love that might best be called romantic love has been the gift or curse to the world of Western culture. This is a phenomenon that at its simplest might be described as the practice of choosing one's mate based on personal preference, rather than societal obligations. Such a concept emerged in the Middle Ages, and the true lover as described by Andreas Capellanus in his twelfth …
Scholars have spent a good deal of time and energy in trying to trace the source of romantic love to Islamic lyric poetry, to Greek Platonism, to Ovid, to heretical Christian Cathars—apparently all contributing factors—but extremely influential in the period was the rise of the female patron of literature and arts. Literature is molded by the type of audience it has. In much of the p…
In a sense Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had begun this investigation. He had challenged the Christian-philosophical ideal of transcendental, universal love. For him, the urge to love came from the self, born out of base instinct. Freud's id was, in many ways, a revival of the Greek idea of love as an unreasoning furor. While his ideas were soon challenged, Freud was important for placin…
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. The Subordinate Sex. Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ——. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments
10 months ago
i am so interesting romatic love history !