Nachmansohn and Pfister;[1] and when the apostle Paul, in his famous epistle to the Corinthians, prizes love above all else, he certainly understands it in the same 'wider' sense.[2] But this only shows that men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them.
Psycho-analysis, then, gives these love instincts the name of sexual instincts, a potiori and by reason of their origin. The majority of 'educated' people have regarded this nomenclature as an insult, and have taken their revenge by retorting upon psycho-analysis with the reproach of 'pan-sexualism'. Anyone who considers sex as something mortifying and humiliating to human nature is at liberty to make use of the more genteel expressions 'Eros' and 'erotic'. I might have done so myself from the first and thus have spared myself much opposition. But I did not want to, for I like to avoid concessions to faint-heartedness. One can never tell where that road may lead one; one gives way first in words, and then little by little in substance too. I cannot see any merit in being ashamed of sex; the Greek word 'Eros',
- ↑ Nachmansohn: 'Freuds Libidotheorie verglichen mit der Eroslehre Piatos'. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1915, Bd. Ill; Pfister: 'Plato als Vorläufer der Psychoanalyse', ibid., 192 1, Bd. VII. ['Plato: a Fore-Runner of Psycho-Analysis'. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1922, Vol. III.]
- ↑ 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'
