Poisoned Embrace : A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism - Softcover

Lawrence Osborne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747513813 ISBN 13: 9780747513810

Publisher: Pantheon, 1993

Synopsis

The Poisoned Embrace is a provocative investigation into the history of sexual pessimism as it has evolved in Western theology throughout the ages.
 
Since the days of the Early Fathers, sex and death have formed a theological equation known as sexual pessimism. This aversion to the carnal, and its consequent elevation of the virginal and the chaste, springs not from Christianity, but from Gnosticism.
 
Osborne examines the art, mythologies, and traditions of Christendom, and distinguishes thematic archetypes: the Virgin, the Witch, the Leper, the Noble Savage, the Jew, the Oriental, the Androgyne, and Don Juan. He traces our now-glorified ideal of sexual passion back to the Troubadours and Northern Mystics, and explores how the Passion of the Cross relates the ideas of sublime passion and therapeutic energy.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Osborne is the author of The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, and six books of nonfiction. His short story "Volcano" was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2012, and he has written for the New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Forbes, Harper's, and several other publications. He lives in Bangkok.

From Kirkus Reviews

A vivid but quirky survey of what Osborne (Paris Dreambook, 1991; Ania Malina, 1987) calls ``sexual pessimism''--the association between sexual pleasure and death--which he traces to the Gnostics, the pre-Christian sect that gave creative power to evil and held carnal pleasure in contempt. Osborne offers a series of archetypes that represent sexual pessimism, beginning with the ``Virgin.'' In discussing the Virgin, he offers a learned survey of medieval and ancient theories of female anatomy, and shows his command of medical history--a mastery that comes into play when he considers other archetypes such as the Leper, the Syphilitic, and Don Juan, whose sexual excess was usually attributed to his physical inadequacy. Osborne's chapter on the Witches considers their erotic associations and traces them to the Talmudic tradition, speculating on what need they answered in the society that called them into being and that then destroyed them. The Jew is also an archetype, Osborne says, with a special sexual burden as a predator, as the originator of onanism and homosexuality: an overcivilized neurasthenic who invented psychoanalysis to explain himself. The Noble Savage, here referring to the American Indian, is the very opposite--a representative of an ``apocalyptic counter-culture'' whose sexual practices were considered degenerate even as they represented lost Eden. The Oriental archetype refers to stereotypes relating to harems, the degradation of women, and a taste for violence. Osborne's final archetype is the Androgyne, including hermaphrodites. He concludes with a discussion of sexual optimism, the belief in the therapeutic value of sex--an attitude promoted by psychoanalysis and advocated in secular radical political that deromanticized sexuality and encouraged free love. An assertive, odd, reductive reading of a familiar and complex cultural phenomenon that the Greeks identified as eros and thanatos. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0747513813
• ISBN 13: 9780747513810
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1