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Psychoanalytic writers (including Jung) have tended to stress the regressive elements of falling in love: its recapitulation of infantile oneness and the longings of the Oedipus complex. While this is part of the story I believe it is also an experience of initiation, a developmental event in its own right that marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Such initiation requires the capacity to bear the pain of love as well as its pleasures, an element which the modern romanticized view of erotic love has tended to eclipse.
Falling in love has, in our culture, become equated with romantic love and is supposed to be a universal prerequisite to what has also come to be known as romantic marriage. While we now expect more than ever before that those who are married will love each other, there is more to love than erotic love and there is certainly more to erotic love than can ever be wholly contained in marriage. Of course erotic love does not mean just sex either - rather it refers to the experience of being ‘in love’. This experience is a very ancient and almost universal one, although it may assume greater importance in the erotic life of some individuals and cultures than others and certainly assumes different forms depending on the cultural context (Endleman 1988).
Modern sociologically based critiques of romantic love often assert that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, certainly no older than the medieval cult of courtly love. Drawing on Greek and Indian myth I shall suggest that romantic love is simply a modern variant of an experience well known to antiquity. This will also provide the basis for a brief historical review of erotic love in Western culture, with particular reference to Plato's Symposium.
Throughout the paper I shall be concerned to explore the sexual