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,
It is possible for love to be physical and passionate AND be non-sexual - the love between mother and baby, between owner and pet, between caregiver and patient, between soldiers.
Granted, the modern understanding of "eros" is sexual, but the other Greek words for love lack the element of physical passion.
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.