Psychology as the Science of Human Being by Jaan Valsiner Giuseppina Marsico Nandita Chaudhary Tatsuya Sato & Virginia Dazzani

Author:Jaan Valsiner, Giuseppina Marsico, Nandita Chaudhary, Tatsuya Sato & Virginia Dazzani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Embodied Passionate Love

The human body and mind form an interconnected unit. The body shapes human cognition in the same way that the body is shaped by the mind. In passionate love, the body is a main player beyond the boundaries of sexuality.

Consider, for example, human skin. As skin has a common embryonic origin with the central nervous system, it contains numerous receptors (of temperature, pressure, pain, touch) that allow interaction with the environment. At the same time, skin is a “wrapping” necessary for the regulation of salt and water metabolism and temperature. In the meeting of lovers, skin is a border. It acts as a barrier and delimitation of bodily identity while also serving as the site of intermingling with the other, in pain and pleasure. The skin is an organ capable of conducting a wide range of sensory experiences in a fuzzy zone between pleasure and tenderness that allows the coevolution of lovers’ relational process. It is a territory of residence of stories, memories, and experiences that are evoked in the romantic encounter. The lovers’ skin-to-skin contact permits the emergence of passion only if the lovers have affection for their own bodies. The passionate love is impossible if the lovers deny, devalue, reject, or refuse their bodies. The appearance of body shame collapses the border and the fear appears interfering the emergency of plenitude and unicity.

Lovers’ prose, poems, and slang have attributed a sort of visceral residence to the experience of love, such as descriptions and representations of the heart and stomach butterflies. The bodily representation of love has an inside and outside, as in “feeling the other” and “feeling him/her inside me.” The transition between outside and inside is another embodied border that is represented by bodily zones of access, such as the mouth, nose, ears, vagina, and anus. These apertures are places of connection between internal mucous, membranes, and superficial skin. Like any border, they are ambiguous biological zones of transition.

These transitional zones are transformed into the residences of the border between individuality and fusion. Being inside and outside of the other has a rhythmic edge of transgression. This embodied consummation of the desire for uniqueness in union arises from the complexities and subtle refinements of lovemaking pleasure. Increased pleasure and sexual tension lead to the resolving orgasm. This climax can lead to full union with another, the blurring of boundaries through being as one soul and one body; at the same time, it is the realization of separation and disengagement. It is the joy of communion and the melancholy of a petit mort. Paz (1997, p. 103, translated by the authors, December 2014) stated:Love is ceremony and representation and something else, a purification that transforms the subject and object of erotic encounter in unique people. Love is the ultimate metaphor for sexuality. Its foundation stone is freedom and the mystery of the person.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.