Ancient Love and Desire: Dr. Freund

I thought it was interesting that childbearing was so important to the continuation of the society that men and women were nearly forced to procreate and felt it was so important that they carried around relicts for good luck that they kept in the back of their minds all day. It would be naïve to ask if love existed in the early history of man. Of course it did. But I think love was less of a concern than survival and that’s very unfortunate. In fact, I think people centuries ago, people couldn’t differentiate between rape and love. Rape seemed to mean love to them and what we would call love is what they would call procreation. People didn’t make children out of love for their partner. It was out of necessity. Rape was sometimes out of love and other times out of necessity. But the way it was talked about during this presentation made me think rape was common and overlooked as normal. 

He talked a lot about symbols and I think that’s important because I don’t think any society has ever existed that didn’t have a meaningful symbol. Symbols must exist as a unifying image specific to a small population or the world and the reason I personally think they must be a part of culture is that it represents something unique about those people that they can stand behind and feel something for and identify with. It must be a symbol and not a person because a symbol never dies, never deceives you and never changes its mind about its meaning. It’s really hard to look back into history and try to uncover the meaning of a symbol when there are no written records and I thought Dr. Freund did an excellent job of deciphering the meanings behind the symbols of ancient Greece and presenting them in a lively, picturesque and thorough way. 

As a side note, Dr. Freund began his presentation with a stone box. I think it’s interesting how the femur has some relation to love and desire through this box. Coincidentally, the Eiffel Tower was also inspired by the femur bone structure. What do our thigh bones have to do with love?