An extraordinary history of love, from the ancient Sumerians to Freud Of all human emotions, love is perhaps the most mysterious, and the most 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 brilliant, humanistic exploration, psychoanalyst and scholar Martin Bergmann examines the thinking of figures throughout history who have influenced our notions of love to the present day: Plato and Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, Chekhov and 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. And, though proponents of psychoanalysis have yet to agree on a single definition of love, Bergmann traces the fine differences made in that discipline between sexuality, narcissism, love and 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. “A learned appreciation . . . The perspectives afforded the reader are at once specialized and rich.”— Partisan Review

Love’s memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous’s writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers’ returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love’s unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous’s narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l’amour même, l’amour m’aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

An anthology of poems, from many different countries and periods of time, reflecting various aspects of love.