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

THE ART OF LOVEthe women who fall in love. In Greece sexual love, downto a comparatively late period, was looked down on, andheld to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.It was in Magna Graecia, rather than in Greece itself,that men took interest in women, and it was not untilthe Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, asBenecke maintained, that the love of women was regardedas a matter of life and death. Thereafter the conceptionof sexual love in its romantic aspects appears in Europeanlife. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Parisremarks, it finally appears in the Christian Europeanworld of poetry as a main point in human life, a greatmotive force of conduct. But such romantic conceptionsstill failed to penetrate the European masses who continuedto regard "love" as a crude act of sexual intercourse.When, however, love isfully developedit becomes anenormously extended, highly complex emotion, and lust,even in the best sense of that word, becomes merely a coordinatedelement among manyother elements. HerbertSpencer, in an interesting passage of his Principles ofPsychology, has analyzed love into as manyas nine distinctand important elements: (i) the physical impulseof sex; (2) the feeling for beauty; (3) affection; (4)admiration and respect; (5) love of approbation; (6)self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8) extended libertyof action from the absence of personal barriers; (9) exaltationof the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementaryexcitations of which we are capable." Even this comprehensiveanalysis omits the element of love, already mentioned,based on the parental impulse, yet that is a highlyimportant element; when the specifically sexual elementin the conjugal relationship has fallen into the back-