Within the tapestry of love, an exquisite intertwining unfolds, revealing a profound enigma. What manner of love is this? Does it unfurl as the glorious advent where we rekindle our fragmented souls, seeking solace in the embrace of our “other half”? Do we quest for the elusive “soulmate,” who resonates with the very essence of our being? Or does it transpire as an ethereal moment of fusion, where we dissolve into the essence of the longed-for, becoming one in a sacred union? Perchance, it encompasses all of these facets in an intricate dance of interconnectedness, weaving a sublime tableau of ardor and longing.
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To begin this series on love, I propose to go back in time to Plato’s Symposium, in order to allow Aristophanes to put us on the trail of the origin of these seductive metaphors that have retained their eternal youth, carried by all languages, providing humans, throughout the centuries, with material for mythical fantasies. Our human nature, says the philosopher, was very different from what it is now. At the origin of creation,there were three human species: male, female, and androgyne composed of both. The latter species has disappeared. Each human being had a round shape with a rounded back and sides, four hands, four legs, two identical faces on a single head, four ears, two reproductive organs, and everything else in proportion. They possessed extraordinary strength and vigor. Led astray by their sense of extraordinary power, they decided to challenge the gods. The gods found themselves in a quandary because, on one hand, they did not want to eliminate the human race from which they benefited by the worship it offered them, on the other hand, they could not leave their hubris unpunished. Jupiter then decided to weaken them by cutting them in half, which would produce a double advantage: they would be weaker, but at the same time more numerous to pay homage to them. And so it was done. Apollo was in charge of the operation: each time he cut a human in half, he turned the face and neck, shaped the chest, belly, and navel, the latter so that they would forever remember the punishment inflicted. Desperate, each divided half rushed to the other wanting to embrace and merge with it in order to regain its lost unity, obtaining no other result than impotence, withering, emaciation, and, in the end, death. Faced with the danger of the extinction of the human race, Zeus, taking pity, undertook a new operation: he transposed the reproductive organs to the front of each body, which had been placed at the rear, allowing males and females to generate one another. “From that moment dates the innate love of men for one another: love recomposes the ancient nature, strives to melt two beings into one, and to heal human nature. Each of us is therefore like a hospitable land, since we have been cut like soles and have become two from one; so each one seeks his other half.” Aristophanes’ version is seductive, powerfully evocative, as myths tend to be, and undoubtedly poetic. However, let us risk a different interpretation from his, concerning the origin of the search for the lost half: that of the timeless nostalgia that the human being retains of the original maternal fusion where the infant and mother were one. Psychoanalyst J. McDougall states it as follows: “Psychic life begins with an experience of fusion that leads to the fantasy that there is only one body and psyche for two people who constitute an indivisible unity.” Perhaps Aristophanes had an intuition of this origin and created this myth to offer us an eloquent metaphor of the eternal quest for this lost paradise! But this unity, this fusion, cannot be prolonged without seriously hindering the development of an individual. The necessary rupture of this bond will leave, in the human psyche, a void, a gap, like a missing part. From then on, the human being, inhabited by the hope of reliving this fusion, of finding that missing part of oneself, would set out in search of the one who would fill this irreparable absence. Believing to (re)find them, he/she will only experience frustration and disappointment. For it is only with the acceptance of the definitive loss of this fusion, and the lack within each, that the foundations of the birth of desire will be laid.
