Plato vs. Freud on eros and sexuality Plato's concept of love mandates two rectifications. Both of these rectifications are necessary in order for us to appreciate the relevance of Plato's theory of love to contemporary problems. The first depiction comports with the non-sexual aspect of the loving relationship, because Plato's theory of love indeed includes sex.

The second depiction, or rectification, is related inextricably to the heterosexual aspect of the loving relationship. Without a doubt, Plato considers love between people solely as a homosexual phenomenon, but his explication of sex comprises both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

The sociological setting of Platonism is all one needs to understand it: In Fifth Century Athens, apart from some outstanding exceptions, like Pericles' legendary love for Aspasia, men only married for reproductive needs and ends, yet reserved the term 'love' and the passionate activity of sexual love only for homosexual relationships. However, nothing in Plato's philosophy gets in the way of adapting it in its entirety to modern times, when due to their education and to political changes, women gained the right to love and to be loved as absolute equals to men, who have always enjoyed this very right.

After dispelling these misunderstandings related to the pop-culture notion of Platonic love, we discover a great richness and depth in Plato's comprehension and rationalization of love. In explaining why love is so incredibly critical to us and yet why it falls in our lives so often, Plato's comprehension of love is increasingly applicable to our time.

From the sexual passion we call love, we demand and indeed coerce a lot, but usually end up bitterly upset when the romance erodes. Nevertheless, we keep insisting on getting married, believing in our heart of hearts and against all logic and rationality, that we are simply going to be the ones who will succeed in beating the system. If we fail, we just switch our partner and try again. We often finish our love life as we began it: completely flabbergasted and often bitterly upset, but still hopeful.
Freud, on the other hand, views love only from the perspective of the sexual drive. From Freud's perspective, love as well as sexuality is rooted in our infancies. A person's first love object, oedipally, is the mother. The mother's breast, for Freud, provides the infant not only with nourishment but also a source of sexual pleasure which he will years afterwords demand from his adult lover. This is the opposite for girls.

The primary difference between Plato's concept of lover and Freud's concept is the understanding, for Freud, that sex is as much a part of love as anything else is. Plato refused to believe that, believing procreation to be different from sexual or passionate love, which, of course, was saved only for homosexual encounters.

The difference here lies in their different methods of inquiry. Plato based his philosophy on unscientific observations and readings of the past masters. Freud, on the other hand, performed actually psychiatric examinations on the way to determining his mode of thinking.

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