Figure of Eros

Eros was the Greek god of love. He is often represented in flight, carrying a lyre or a bow and arrow. Freud’s collection includes at least six statues of this kind, and in his work he identified the basic life instinct as Eros. In defining Eros as the life instinct or the libido, Freud referred to the classical concept of love: “We are of the opinion, then, that language has carried out an entirely justified piece of unification in creating the word ‘love’ with its numerous uses, and we cannot do better than take it as the basis of our scientific discussions as well. By coming to this decision, psychoanalysis has let loose a storm of indignation, as though it had been guilty of an outrageous act of innovation. Yet it has done nothing original in taking love in this wider sense. In its origin, function, and relations to sexual love, the ‘Eros’ of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love force, the libido of psychoanalysis. (SE, 18, p91) In Civilization and its Discontents (1931) Freud also described the history of civilization as “the struggle between Eros and death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species”. (SE 21, p122)