The Love Grotto
Life Lessons about Sex, Love, Religion, and Society in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tale of Tristan
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The central dilemma of this tale is the tension between our duty to follow the engrained patriarchal values of our society on the one hand and an in-depth realization of our holistic human nature on the other. Gottfried stresses following an authentic life over a prescribed one. In short, it is the dilemma between obligation and love: behaving correctly under surveillance (the watchful dictates of law or custom) or living by the spontaneous inclinations of the illumined heart.
Gottfried tells his listeners that he intends to busy himself with bringing pleasure and satisfaction to a select circle of “noble hearts,” as opposed to upper-class society in general. In his day, the well-to-do youth of the nobility were bent upon simply having a good time. But in Gottfried’s view, certain individuals were in fact capable of welcoming love in the totality of its profound antitheses—the bittersweet opposites—joyful sorrow, life and death, Heaven and Earth, all united in one single experience of love.
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About the Book
This book introduces the reader to a feminist psychological understanding of the age-old tale of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde. John Perkins offers us a series of life lessons designed to heighten our appreciation of our own sensibilities as he retells and examines Gottfried von Strassburg’s twelfth century work Tristan.
The central dilemma is the tension between our duty to follow the ingrained patriarchal values of our society on the one hand and an in-depth realization of our holistic human nature on the other—following an authentic life over a prescribed one; the struggle between obligation and love—behaving correctly under surveillance (the watchful dictates of law or custom) or living by the spontaneous inclinations of the illumined heart.
About the Author
John N. H. Perkins is a psychoanalyst in the tradition of C. G. Jung. Educated at the University of Notre Dame, in the U. Chicago Great Books curriculum at Shimer College, and The Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, Perkins studied with the late Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence College, and was the analysand and proteacute; of the late analyst and writer Dr. Robert A. Johnson.