Love, desire and infatuation: encountering the erotic spirit.

Erotic love is a universal experience with all the features of numinous archetypal experience. Indeed, for many people it may be their closest brush with the divine. Prior to Plato the spiritual and sexual aspects of the erotic spirit seem to have been fused but Plato introduced a distinction between physical and sexual love that opened up a conflict between them that has not yet been healed. It is proposed that love is an experience of the imagination; links are drawn between this idea and Plato's ladder of love in which the love of beauty and truth supercedes physical love. At the same time, the indissoluble linkage between the sexual and the spiritual is asserted, especially as found in the poetry of Donne. In addition to the regressive elements emphasized in psychoanalytic views of love, encountering the erotic spirit involves an initiation process culminating in the transformation brought about through the painful loss of love's illusions.