The changing face of love

Children as the supreme object of love

Each era is defined by what it takes to be the supreme object of love. For a long time in the Western world the romantic lover has been that object. But parental love towards the child is now becoming the archetypal love, argues Simon May.  

 

What we in the Western world, or at least in much of Europe and North America, take to be the supreme object of love has been undergoing a historic change since about the middle of the nineteenth century. For Plato, in one of his voices, it was absolute and eternal beauty— or creation of, and in, beauty; for Aristotle it was the perfect friend; for the Christian world­view that dominated for many centuries it was God; for the troubadours of medieval Europe it was the (usually unattainable) Lady, seen as a repository of virtue; for the seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza it was nature considered as a whole; from the late eight­eenth century it became the romantic-erotic partner — or, more rarely, nature or art; for psychoanalytic thinking, it is the parent, or rather some internal rep­resentation of the parent; but now, the supreme object of love is coming to be the child.

In other words, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the archetypal love: the love without which one’s life cannot be deemed to be complete or truly flourishing; the love that traces, or points to, the domain of the sacred. As a result, to violate the child— or the parent-child bond— is now ultimate sacrilege, the contemporary equivalent of desecrating the divine.

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So why, in our era, might the child be elevated to the supreme object of love?

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