The Ancient Dance Between Eros and Thanatos
Life is full of polarities that give our existence meaning. We know pleasure because we have felt pain. We revel in beauty because we have witnessed destruction. We experience happiness only because we have known despair. The emotional energies that fuel our lives spring out of this grand dichotomy that separate the light from the dark, the constructive from the destructive.
Sigmund Freud plucked this phenomenon up and out of the great undercurrent of the human experience and awarded these opposing forces mythological labels: Eros was established as the “life instinct” (alluding to the Greek god of love) and, later, Thanatos for the “death instinct” (alluding to the Greek force of death). Freud articulated these two instincts as being hopelessly locked in a state of eternal battle.
Eros encapsulates the will to survival and the desire to create. What blooms out of this instinct are the potent forces of love and ambition that both draw civilization and color it, so to speak. Allegorically, Eros can be expressed as Renaissance art — creations that prioritized elegance, the exquisiteness of the human form, and classical notions of man’s nobility. Eros is both the impulse to sustain (to attain basic necessities of life) as well as the impulse to thrive (to carve higher ideals). Eros is nurturing and stimulating, infused with the precepts of…
