Saturday, May 16, 2009

Only one cure

From Care of the Soul (Ch. 4):

"A general principle we can take from Freud is that love sparks imagination to extraordinary activity. Being 'in love' is like being 'in imagination.' The literal concerns of everyday life, yesterday such a preoccupation, now practically disappear in the rush of love's daydreams. Concrete reality recedes as the imaginal world settles in. Thus, the 'divine madness' of love is akin to the mania of paranoia and other dissociations.

Does this mean that we need to be cured of this madness? Robert Burton in his massive self-help book of the seventeenth century, The Anatomy of Melancholy, says there is only one cure for the melancholic sickness of love: enter into it with abandon."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You make me sigh...the quote are so beautiful! I loved this line

"there is only one cure for the melancholic sickness of love: enter into it with abandon."

Suzanne Marie DeWitt said...

Yes; it's a theme I'm going to be teaching about soon... the willingness to remain in, to dwell in, the melancholic longing rather than either rushing to fulfillment or running away from it.