Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXfor when a bird pined to death for the loss of its mate thiscannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, butmust involve the interweaving of that instinct with theother elements of life to a degree which is rare evenamong the most civilized men. Some savage races seem tohave no fundamental notion of love, and (like the AmericanNahuas) no primary word for it, while, on the otherhand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient Peruvians,there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verbmunay> to love.Brinton long since remarked that the words for lovein some American Indian languages reveal four mainways of expressing the conception: (i) inarticulate criesof emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or similarity; (3)assertions of conjunction or union; (4) assertions of aBrinton adds that "these same no-wish, desire, longing.tions are those which underlie the majority of the wordsof love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkablefact emerges, however, that the peoples ofAryan tongue were slow in developing their conception ofsexual love, while the American Mayas, going beyond thepeoples of early Aryan culture, possessed a radical wordfor the joy of love which was in significance purelypsychic.Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal ofsexual love. True love for the Greeks was nearly alwayshomosexual. The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regardedwoman as only an instrument of pleasure and thefounder of the family. Theognis compares marriage tocattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentaryto the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "femaleboy-friends." -^Eschylus makes even a father assume thathis daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. Thereisno sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it isonly[326]