BOOKS
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very different manners, been unafraid to write plainly; they cast,
with their bravery, their inventiveness and craft, a powerful light
into the future.
JAY PARINI
KNOWING AND LOVING
THE ANATOMY OF LOVING: THE STORY OF MAN'S
QUEST TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS.
By Martin
S.
Bergmann.
Columbia University Press. $35 .00.
This tome, modest in size considering its subject matter,
surveys the terrain of love. Since Freudian psychoanalysis is
both the lens through which the surveyor looks and also part of
the territory surveyed, the perspectives afforded the reader are at
once specialized and rich.
The refractions built into this unusual methodology are
themselves of interest. Curious goings-on present themselves in
the clash between title and subtitle where the quest to know what
love is is equated with loving and anatomy with story. Of the first
equation, a central paradox is unwittingly engaged: the relation
of loving to knowing. Knowing, of course, may mean carnal pos–
session, but it may also be its antithesis. Love is both an emotion
which seizes hold from inside, a source of bliss or suffering, and
an entity that exists outside to be seized, the vulnerable object of
an attempt to know what it is.
Man sees himself alternately in thrall to love or in the posi–
tion of nonparticipatory investigator. One version of this opposi–
tion is the suffering, idealizing troubadours and Freud 's
Leonardo; another the arrow-struck, helpless female and the
mastering male. Investigation of love loosens the sometimes
death-like grip of love on other endeavor. One cannot be con-
