Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love
In this book, Christine Downing clears away the modern myth of homosexuality in order to retrieve a deeper understanding of women's love of women and men's love of men. This deeper understanding of same sex love is an understanding of the longings that such a love expresses, assuages, frustrates, and engenders.
The first half of the book looks anew at what depth psychologists have written about homosexuality, and discovers in them, particularly in Freud, a view very different from that usually associated with the psychoanalytical perspective, and much more illuminating, much more supportive. The second half of the book turns to the myths about homosexual desire that were told and retold in Ancient Greece, a culture where same sex love was validated as part of everyone's "normal" eroticism--as well as to what two of Greece's most gifted writers, Sappho and Plato, had to say about the homoerotic. The last chapter probes the "deepest mystery" of all to show how an understanding of the intimate interrelationship between death and desire might help us at a time when lovemaking and death making have become so painfully interfused.
Condition: Some wear on dust cover (fraying and slight tear). Some dust on pages due to storage. Previous owner's signature inside cover. Otherwise like new.