Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton Classics)

by Anne Carson

“I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody.” The piece of himself that goes out to Bernard makes Bernard immediately familiar “even before I see who it is.” As Sokrates would say, it makes Bernard oikeios. Even so, Neville goes on to appraise the experience as an ambivalent one, both “useful” and “painful.” As in the Greek poets, its pain arises at that edge where the self is adulterated and bitter verges alarmingly on sweet. Eros’ ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to ‘mix up’ the self. The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. “How curiously”: he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before. Some such glimpse may be the mechanism that originally shapes a notion of ‘self’ in each of us, according to some analyses. Freudian theory traces this notion to a fundamental decision of love and hate, somewhat like the ambivalent condition of the lover, that splits our souls and forms our personality. There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and the world begin...