Freud locates the roots of love in Eros, in libidinal energy and to perhaps subtly narcissism. Can love be ever the platonic ideal?The phenomenon of love is interesting not just in its occurrence but also in the fact that the human ego rises above all to see another worthy of its attention, curiosity, space and time. Kings, Poets, madmen and perhaps every soul does manage to at least brush against the enormity of this instinctual emotion. Now is love divested of the physical. Is it possible to speak of its mystical other and its erotic self. Amidst Freud's pseudo scientific focus on sexuality at the roots of human development, perhaps Paulo Coelho's "Eleven Minutes" offers a psychoanalytic couch. An interesting probe into a young girls physical and spiritual journey through love and sexuality. The journey ends with the reader confronting his/her own "inner light" the sacred nature of sexuality and love. Now perhaps that also brings us closer not just to Freud's Narcissism. The eastern religious philosophy has never ignored the possibility of love in the context of sexuality. Though Buddhism's Kama sees sensual sexuality as an obstacle to enlightenment, Hinduism's Kama does not see the sensuous as separate from love that could be even personified in the Godhead of 'Kamadeva'. And perhaps it is also in this duality of two aspects of the same concept, Coelho's Maria finds her self wedged between sacred sexuality and love.
