A Babys Hug

We were the only family with children in the restaurant. I sat Erik in a high chair and noticed everyone was quietly sitting and talking. Suddenly, Erik squealed with glee and said, 'Hi.' He pounded his fat baby hands on the high chair tray. His eyes were crinkled in laughter and his mouth was bared in a toothless grin, as he wriggled and giggled with merriment.

I looked around and saw the source of his merriment. It was a man whose pants were baggy with a zipper at half-mast and his toes poked out of would-be shoes. His shirt was dirty and his hair was uncombed and unwashed. His whiskers were too short to be called a beard and his nose was so varicose it looked like a road map.

We were too far from him to smell, but I was sure he smelled.. His hands waved and flapped on loose wrists. 'Hi there, baby; hi there, big boy. I see ya, buster,' the man said to Erik.

Everyone in the restaurant noticed and looked at us and then at the man. The old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. Our meal came and the man began shouting from across the room, 'Do ya patty cake? Do you know peek-a-boo? Hey, look, he knows peek- a-boo.'

My husband and I were embarrassed. We ate in silence; all except for Erik, who was running through his repertoire for the admiring skid-row bum, who in turn, reciprocated with his cute comments.

We finally got through the meal and headed for the door. My husband went to pay the check and told me to meet him in the parking lot. The old man sat poised between me and the door. 'Lord, just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Erik,' I prayed. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back trying to sidestep him and avoid any air he might be breathing. As I did, Erik leaned over my arm, reaching with both arms in a baby's 'pick-me-up' position. Before I could stop him, Erik had propelled himself from my arms to the man.

Suddenly a very old smelly man and a very young baby consummated their love and kinship. Erik in an act of total trust, love, and submission laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed, and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime, pain, and hard labor, cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. No two beings have ever loved so deeply for so short a time.

I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Erik in his arms and his eyes opened and set squarely on mine. He said in a firm commanding voice, 'You take care of this baby.'

He pried Erik from his chest, lovingly and longingly, as though he were in pain. I received my baby, and the man said, 'God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift.'

I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Erik in my arms, I ran for the car. My husband was wondering why I was crying and holding Erik so tightly, and why I was saying, 'My God, my God, forgive me.'

I had just witnessed Christ's love shown through the innocence of a tiny child who saw no sin, who made no judgment; a child who saw a soul, and a mother who saw a suit of clothes. I was a Christian who was blind, holding a child who was not. I felt it was God asking, 'Are you willing to share your son for a moment?' when He shared His for all eternity. How did God feel when he put his baby in our arms 2000 years ago.

The ragged old man, unwittingly, had reminded me, 'To enter the Kingdom of God , we must become as little children.'

Well, I'm mistaken if the Plato through C.S. Lewis account and distinctions of the kinds of love is adequate. I happen not to think that it is.

The "Plato-through-C.S. Lewis account" can be said to be virtually equivalent with the general consensus. Thus, you're pitting yourself against the whole of Western Civilization.

I think Freud, rightly understood [...] that there is some drive or tendency (which he calls "Eros" but I don't think he means to confine himself to the Greek understanding of Eros) which is at work or part of one's relationship to a child, a pet, a rose, a friend, a lover, a spouse, or God himself.

No, sorry, you are quite wrong; where did you get that idea?! Freud - and yes, I have read him in the original German - used the term "eros" in the sense of "libido." If he posited that there was any "erotic" component to one's relationship to a child, a pet, a rose, etc., then only when it had a libidinous aspect.

This is why I tried to distinguish (in my use of language) between "sexual" and "genital".

Freud would have recognized no substantial difference between "sexual" and "genital" - except that "genital" was a subset of "sexual;" see following paragraph.

Freud asserted that there were three stages of sexual development: the oral, the anal, and the genital. (I am, of course, terribly simplifying things here.) They all were essential libidinous in nature.

Thus, Freud believed that infants experienced a primitive kind of sexual pleasure when suckling... which was later gratified in defecation (the next stage) or retaining feces (hence: anal-retentive.)

(Understandably, this generated considerable furor and moral outrage in 19th Century Vienna.)

In the mature individual, the libidinous drive expressed itself and/or sought gratification in the genital stage.

But that is beside the point.

The point being that, properly speaking, the generally accepted sense of the word "erotic" refers to "pertaining to sexual feelings, their stimulation or gratification."

I am frankly unable to respond to your musings regarding "Phaedrus ... as a kind of instigator of the Philia in philosophy" or "Catherine of Siena's" writings - but I venture to guess that we have already shown ourselves to be "nerds" in the eyes of 99% of FreeRepublic's readership, so we'd best leave it at that.

Regards,

I have no problem being against the consensus of Western Civ., if indeed I am. What kind of argument is that? Western Civ. was put together who went against the consensus.

Whatever Western Civ happens to consense about, I don't think agape was in technical usage before St. Paul. As I said, there seems to be little evidence that it was.

I would suggest that in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", which I think is a most wonderfully provocative book, both Eros and Thanatos are elevated beyond libido.

except that "genital" was a subset of "sexual;" see following paragraph.

This at least close to what I was saying. Subset is a pretty substantial difference.

Thus, Freud believed that infants experienced a primitive kind of sexual pleasure when suckling... which was later gratified in defecation (the next stage) or retaining feces (hence: anal-retentive.)

I really think this is the popular misunderstanding. Sorry, original German or not. Sucking is perfectly age-appropriate erotic pleasure to the infant. It is immature in only in an adult human. This is an important difference.

There is something amiss when a toddler or an adult is big into breast-feeding and less capable of potty-training or intercourse. But infants are primitive only by comparison. There's a lot going on there, both in the dazed newborn lamb bleating to its dam (who bleats back, as she "teaches" him the sound of her voice) and searching for the teat and in the human infant whose eyes and ears are drinking in the face and the cooing of the attentive parent.

Also, while retaining and expelling feces both have an erotic aspect, the anus and rectum both being "cathected" areas, I'm concerned that you mention only anal-retention. That is, there are two major "anal" (in the psych, not the physical, sense) disorders, retention a and compulsion.

The point being that, properly speaking, the generally accepted sense of the word "erotic" refers to "pertaining to sexual feelings, their stimulation or gratification."

Yes, I suppose. Similarly in the blind and popular sense of consummation of love, the phrase means sexual intercourse, whether perverted or normal. But neither the writer nor I are dictated to by the limited vocabulary, usage, and imagination of people who read consummation and think only of wedding beds.

I remember my mother complaining about popular Freudian "analytical" discussions of things like car-bumpers. (Remember the breast shaped protuberances on the Cadillacs or yore?) She complained that there are only so many shapes possible in our space and that liking this or that shape could always be attributed to some sexual disorder. The problem in her thought was with the concept "disorder".

We are animals. Animals, from platyhelminthes to sheep to men, are erotic. They have a drive to life.

I do not lay my eros aside when I buy a car or feed my cats or look in my Gazillion Volume New Testament Lexicon (while I acknowledge some vague feelings of phallic power in owning and knowing how to use such a thing -- my dictionary is bigger than so-and-so's). Eros is always a part of me, whether or not I am thinking of this or that hot babe or of going potty or of having a drink, or engaged something far less basic, like playing solitaire or having an discussion of agape.

I have a kind of inchoate yearning for all the students in my RCIA class, though only one or two qualify as hotties. You might say I want to nourish them with the milk of wisdom, and, who knows, that might be a part of it. But I do not think this is a frustrated erotic desire, either (phallically) to "make" the chicks or "orally" to nourish them with my non-existent breasts. It is ALL a motion (or function or something) of Eros, the joking, the puns, the diagrams on the board, the carefully picking one's way through the Chalcedonian Definition, and all pretty much benign. The "pathology" of "the Psychopathology of Everyday Life" is pathological only in a mythical sense, by comparison to some Rousseau-ian notion of the unfettered primitive human. In terms of what the self-conscious animal really is though, it is a benign "pathology" and it has led to wonderful things.

But I am more or less happily married and have a grown child and the organs of ingestion and secretion still function more or less well. And I don't think they would or I would function better in those activities if I stopped yearning for my students.

If having read and thought about a book makes me a nerd, I am okay with that. But it is important in a discussion of this kind, I think, to rise above Western Civ 101 or even (and I AM impressed, I have very little German) the earlier Freud in German.

But what I get from this exchange is more, heh heh libido to acquire (how very oral of me!) a copy of Deus Caritas Est, or whatever the encyclical is called, and to nail down what Ben XVI thinks about Eros.

Anyway, that's my story .... Thanks for the thoughts.

Dear Mad Dawg,

That does not contradict anything I have said thus far. You are essentially agreeing with me. Good! (But, unfortunately, I suspect that you thought that you were disagreeing with me.) According to Freud, infants were little Lustlinge (sybarites? epicures? I haven't a German-English dictionary handy.)

I have no problem being against the consensus of Western Civ. [...]

You are, of course, free to espouse a position entirely antithetical to that of Western Civilization and/or the general consensus (I realize that general consensus is a pleonasm - but I want to be understood by the general public, heh-heh.) But when you (surreptitiously) attach your own personal meaning to a word deviating from the standard (dictionary) meaning, then you can expect an argument from me. And that's what you're doing when you assert that eros does not imply a libidinous, sensuous, or sexual component. And you compound your "crime" when you attempt to invoke or otherwise enlist Freud in your defense.

But actually, I freely confess that I'm not an expert on these matters. I admit that I'm a dabbler, and I suspect that, in fact, neither of us is qualified to conduct a truly rigorous discussion on this topic, and are plainly bickering because it amuses us to show off to the unwashed masses our learnedness.

Regards,

St John's College, then (seminary and) pastoral psych, then years of thinking about it and further study of kiddie psych is where I'm coming from.)

The problem with "infantile" and "primitive" is that the words themselves are seen as being pejorative, and adulthood, as distinct, say, from old age, is considered a standard in such a way that everything that is different from it is somehow deficient.

Compared to the placidities of later life, the sexual stresses of mid-life are "primitive", but a 45 year old whose sexual desire was like that of a 5 year old or an 85 year old would rightly be notable. But to make the 45 year old a standard to which other ages ought to measure up is an error in thought.

In related news, I think Hugh Hefner is pathological in the bad sense. The man needs help.

But when you (surreptitiously) attach your own personal meaning to a word deviating from the standard (dictionary) meaning, then you can expect an argument from me. And that's what you're doing when you assert that eros does not imply a libidinous, sensuous, or sexual component. And you compound your "crime" when you attempt to invoke or otherwise enlist Freud in your defense.

I resent "surreptitiously". I kept had nothing up my sleeve. I think this: If a word like "eros" gets kept alive and developed from before Plato up to now, and if "the base vulgar" use it almost exclusively to refer to peep-shows and related matters, while I find in its use outside of the imprecise lingo of newspaper writers a less genital and more general meaning, I will tend to go with what I take to be the use by the edumicated.

Particularly because I find even in what you write a vague use of "Sexual" as almost equivalent to "genital". (But then I resist the politically correct and essentially leftist attempt to resurrect and change the meaning of "gender".) It matters to me that "sex" is allegedly related to section, sector, dissect, and all those cutting and dividing words. So, as I said earlier, I would question the attempt to use "sexual" in a literal way to discuss homosexuality, while I would not balk at "genital". (Lustlinge? I'm going with "pleasure monkeys.") Characterizing my position as entirely antithetical to that of Western Civilization (while skipping over your solecism on agape as being used by ancient Greeks) seems just wrong to me. What PERIOD of Western Civilization are we talking about here, the one that viewed man's friendship with a woman as, at least, a prodigy if not an impossibility? The one that makes Parzival remarkable because in it the hero desires his wife (of all things!) rather than some inaccessible lady? The one in which Dante has the theme of his erotic love for Beatrice as the lure, hook, and line which draws him to heaven?

To which thinkers are we referring to, those who view, or seem to view, women as a necessary inconvenience required for momentary relaxation and the propagation of the species or Augustine and the great courtesy he shows to Proba while also seeming relieved that she is now a widow and won't be distracted by, ah, domestic concerns?

I think the Western Civ behind which you retreat for cover is non-existent except in the minds of academics who think that if a thinker died long ago he is more a kind of specimen than a brother tho be taken seriously.

I got my notion of Eros in the strictly psychological sense from "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and elaborated and confirmed it by reading Erickson and some other guy whose name I forget but who owed a great debt to Erikson and Freud, and then Stone and Church.

But it was influenced by The Symposium, The Phaedrus, light reading in the Western Fathers, a lot of time spent in the epic poems of the high Gothic Era and in their, ahem, consummation, if you'll excuse the expression, in Dante.

It would be that I do not see, for example "sublimation" of explicitly genital (or other cathected organ-related) drives as non-erotic or less erotic. Eros, which in Beyond the Pleasure Principle seems to have been generalized into something like "openness to the other," "processes" not only the erotic stimulus, whether internal or external or both, but also processes its mutation into a desire to write sonnets. The whole deal is erotic and erotic satisfaction is derived from reading the sonnet and having it praised by others.

And the toddler in our story, and the old derelict, certainly have a sensuous aspect to their exchange, but the little guys testes are hardly pouring out testosterone yet (and the old guy's have probably let up some on that) and I think it a metonymous use of language to call the interchange sexual, while I'll enthusiastically call it erotic.

Looks like we're oging to have to agree to disagree, but one of the things on which we are going to agree to disagree is your account of five loves as general to Western Civ from the time of the ancients. The record of the word "agape" surely doesn't support that contention.

Dear Mad Dawg,

Rather than addressing each individual rejoinder you've made (the hour is late, and our disagreement is - I think - rather too subtle for my present state of mind,) let me say the following:

I'm getting the sense from you that you are reading meanings in my arguments that aren't there. I don't believe that I used the words "infantile" or "primitive" (though I did refer to "babies" and may have described their level of oral gratification as less-advanced than the anal or genital stages,) but even if I may have used such expressions, they were only short-hand terms and are not meant to be taken literally (just as it would be improper, strictly speaking, to describe a chimpanzee as "more primitive" than a human being.)

The same applies to the phrase "Western Civilization." That's an extremely broad term, and if we were conducting a rigorous debate, you would be right to attack me for employing it.

For the purposes of this discussion, the terms "infantile" and "primitive" are not pejorative to me, and I agree that it would be wrong to view your hypothetical 45-year-old as the "gold standard" against which everything else should be measured.

As for my use of the words "surreptitiously" or "crime:" Please take no offense; those were rhetorical statements, intended to lend a little "flavor" to our discussion.

As for associating "peep-shows" etc. with "eros;" that is your association, not mine. I believe that - also - certain very subtle, artistic, aesthetically refined, and even sublime feelings could have an underlying erotic component. I hope that you weren't assuming that my insistence that "eros" always has a sexual aspect means that I always equate "eros" with the vulgar, the prurient, or the grossly organic.

Regards,

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