Carol Gilligan, whose classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now offers a brilliant, provocative book about love. Why is love so often associated with tragedy, she asks. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?
Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare's plays and Freud's case histories, to Anne Frank's diaries and contemporary novels. Groundbreaking and immensely readable, The Birth of Pleasure has powerful implications for the way we live and love.
Chapter 1
Let it be Like wild flowers, Suddenly, an imperative of the field ...
- Yehuda Amichai
For years, without knowing why, I have been drawn to maps of the desert, drawn by descriptions of the winds and the wadi - dry watercourses that suddenly fill with rain. I began following an ancient story about love told in North Africa in the second century, written in the coastal city of Carthage, carried into Europe as the winds carry the desert sand, falling like rain into a tradition whose origins lie in the birth of tragedy, coursing through the centuries like an underground stream. Set in the landscape of tragedy, the story leads to the birth of pleasure.
Psyche is the youngest and most beautiful of three daughters, the magical position in the folktale tradition, the young woman slated to marry the prince. She was so beautiful that everyone honored her and called her the new Venus, as if the goddess of love had returned to earth, now a young woman again. This fantasy of replacement, one woman seen as the replica of another, leads to envy among women and also to isolation. Venus, replaced, becomes old Venus. And Psyche, although worshiped by all, is loved by no one, because nobody sees her. Her beauty has become a blind, dazzling others who admire her as the ideal woman, an object of beauty, the goddess of love herself. Psyche is lonely, depressed, and confused by the fact that while everyone idolizes her, no one will marry her - nobody knows who she is. She hates in herself that beauty in which the world finds such pleasure.
Her father the king, distressed by his daughter's unhappiness and suspecting a god's intervention in her failure to marry, goes to consult the oracle of Apollo - a woman who speaks for the male god. She tells him that his daughter is destined for a funereal marriage to a wild and cruel and snaky monster. He is to take her to a lofty mountain crag and leave her to her fate.
Psyche's parents - active father, silent mother - are bereft by the news of their daughter's sad fate. With heavy hearts, they prepare to take her to the high hill. But Psyche, hearing them weep, tells them they are grieving at the wrong time: "When countries and people were giving me divine honours, when with a single voice they were all calling me a new Venus, that is when you should have grieved, that is when you should have wept, that is when you should have mourned me as if I were already dead." They had taken her honor as cause for celebration without seeing that, for Psyche, being renamed New Venus signified her erasure. That was her funeral, she says, showing the obduracy of adolescents but also revealing that like the Fool in the Renaissance play, she is the truth-teller in this story about love. Buoyed by the truth and clear in her determination that she would rather die than continue to live her death-in-life existence as New Venus, she leads the procession to the mountain with a firm step. "Take me," she says, "and put me on the cliff appointed by the oracle. I hasten to enter into this happy marriage. I hasten to see this high-born husband of mine." Yet, left alone on the high ledge, Psyche waits in terror for the serpent monster.
Meanwhile, Venus, shocked to discover that there is - that there could be - a new Venus, sends for her son, Cupid, the god of love, and kissing him long and intensely with parted lips, beseeches him in the name of the maternal bond to punish that "defiant beauty." He is to make Psyche fall in love with the most wretched of men. But when Cupid alights on the high mountain ledge and sees the beautiful young woman who looks like his mother, he falls in love with her.
The love story begins with the wind. Summoned by Cupid, it brings the sensations of love, the feeling of being lifted and carried, taking Psyche from the ledge of terror and bringing her into the pleasures of her own body. There came, the sensual story goes, a softly blowing zephyr, which lifted her garments up, causing them to billow. And with its tranquil breath it carried her, little by little, down the slopes of the high cliff and into a valley deep below, where she lay on a bed of moist and fragrant flowers. In the andante of this sensuous awakening, told as a story of nature ("Come slowly, Eden," Emily Dickinson will write), Psyche sleeps and then wakes feeling calm. She finds herself now in a grove of tall trees, next to a glistening stream. In the middle of the grove, she sees a magnificent palace, which she enters, and there her unknown husband visits her at night. And so, the sexual story continues, "that which was at first a novelty did by continual custom bring her great pleasure, and the sound of a mysterious voice gave comfort to her loneliness." But this is a love conducted in darkness and sealed by silence. Hidden from Venus, an illicit love.
Cupid tells Psyche that she must promise not to try to see him or speak about their love. If she breaks her promise, he will leave her. But while Psyche cannot see her lover, he is nonetheless sensible both to her hands and to her ears. She knows him through touch and by the sound of his voice, yet she cannot see or say what she knows.
Maybe love is like rain, sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth, collecting in hidden springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows. So that to say, as Moses coming down from Sinai said, that there are two roads, one leading to life and one to death and therefore choose life, is to say, in effect, choose love. But what is the way?
I read the myth of Psyche and Cupid at a time when relationships between men and women were changing. The waves of liberation that swept through American society in the second half of the twentieth century set in motion a process of transformation, freeing love from many constraints. The civil rights movement galvanized a moral consensus against prejudice and domination, and in a historic convergence, it was followed by both the antiwar movement and the women's movement. A conversation about freedom was joined by questions about long-standing ideals of manhood and womanhood. For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to sacrifice herself for others? Was this the meaning of becoming someone's wife or mother? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored and idealized by statues in the park and paintings in the museum. The gay/lesbian liberation movement drew people's attention to men's love for men and women's for women, and also to men's love for women who were not the objects of their sexual desire and women's love for men who were not their economic protectors. In the 1990s, for the first time since suffrage, women's votes elected the president. The tension between democracy and patriarchy was out in the open.
Democracy rests on an ideal of equality in which everyone has a voice. Patriarchy, although frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of women by men, literally means a hierarchy - a rule of priests - in which the priest, the hieros, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and men from women, and placing both children and women under a father's authority. With the renaissance of women's voices in the late twentieth century, with sons questioning the authority of fathers, especially with respect to war, with the revolution in technology reducing the need for a priesthood by providing direct access to knowledge, the foundations of patriarchy were eroding.
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