We need to rediscover the sacred purpose of sexuality, which is the sweet and terrifying primal emotion of connection.
The desacralization of sex is a sign of affective-sexual dissociation. Our ability to caress lovingly represents a neurological evolution. Sex is not a puerile act. It is the celebration of, and participation in, a mysterious fusion whose nature transcends the world of knowledge. Sexual magnetism, full of significations, is linked to mystical states, ecstasy and poetry.
Prejudice, gossip, ideas about decency, respectability and dignity, the neurotic idealization of impossible loves and the worst of all monsters, Catholic repression and religious puritanism, end up annihilating, particularly in women, the natural options for pleasure and tenderness that were given to them by life. The odd thing is that all this oppression was institutionalized by the family, the educational system, church and state, with their police-like control systems on morality, with censorship.
The repression of Eros gives way to a tortuous development of the vital energies and to an inversion
of the bonding impulses/attachment drives, appearing the typical destructiveness of our civilization, war,
torture, exploitation, and ecological destruction. Freud suggested in Civilization and its Discontents that if we attained the outer and inner freedom to express Eros in all its portentous possibilities all institutions that sustain civilization would be endangered.
A discipline capable of gradually liberating the forces of Eros and making social relationships progressively more sincere and spontaneous, can open the door to vitality, so needed in this sick civilization. The awakening of Eros, keeping nevertheless the control of the identity, is undoubtedly the preparation for the health we seek.