Eros

Eros (Photo credit: virgi.pla)

In Greek mythology Eros is the son of Aphrodite and Ares. He is portrayed on ancient vases as a highly attractive athlete, as a boy with wings and arrows, and later, as a pudgy babe.

As the god of romantic love he is praised in Hesiod‘s hymns as the most beautiful of all the gods. In popular myth and classical art he’s depicted as shooting arrows of love into the hearts of soon-to-be lovers. The Orphic mystery cults deemed his creative powers great enough to regard him as the creator of the world. Hesiod wrote that Eros sprung from Chaos, representing instinctual, sexual and creative energy.

Sigmund Freud hypothesized a general life instinct which he called eros, in contrast to an opposing death insinct, thanatos (Greek = death). C. S. Lewis and many others use the term eros to describe emotional romantic love as opposed to Agape, or selfless love.

Plato used the term eros to signify a desire to seek the transcendental beauty of the eternal Forms, which is partially recognized in particular instances within this changing world of becoming.

Eros is paralleled by the Roman god Cupid and in Latin is Amor.

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Id

Freud's diagrams from 'The Ego and the Id' (1923) via Wikipedia

Id [das Es (German) translated to the id (Latin); the "it" (English)]

In Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalysis, the id is a supposedly instinctual reservoir of disordered unconscious drives – a “cauldron full of seething excitations” – that’s present at birth.

Freud says that the id operates on the pleasure principle. As such, it places continual demands on the ego for the fulfillment of its instinctual needs.

Towards the end of his career, Freud suggested two main aspects of the id—a drive toward life (Eros) and one toward death (often called Thanatos).

Freud believed that people are driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido or Eros) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive. The death drive was also termed “Thanatos”, although Freud did not use that term; “Thanatos” was introduced in this context by Paul Federn.¹

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

References:

• Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977, p. 66.

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