Eros and Chaos [Paperback]

Veronica Goodchild (Author), Dianne Skafte (Foreword), Veronica Goodchild (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

Eros and Chaos is a provocative book that reminds us that our soul's primary longing is for love and then explores that longing. Veronica Goodchild explains that our most important task is the growth of our consciousness and that this cannot be accomplished apart from an awareness of the complexities of love and its shadows. It takes the reader into that domain where eros' arrows thrust us into those shadowy depths where our keenest vulnerabilities and woundings and our deepest imaginings and longings are hidden. Bibliography. Index.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Weiser Books (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892540540
• ISBN-13: 978-0892540549
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gospel of Chaos and Love, October 25, 2001

By 

Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLO... (Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Eros and Chaos (Paperback)

About a year ago I was present to hear Dr. Goodchild's response to a classmate's question about whether love is "only projection," an erotic glow we put into the person we fall for. We had just had a class in psychoanalysis, a useful but highly reductive set of theories and therapies.

Although I can't repeat the response here, much as I'd like to, it was splendidly animated, asking in essence: if love is all projection, what does that say about the beloved--HER feelings, HER reality?

Although you can't know the St. Elmo's Fire that cavorts from the very windows wherever Dr. Goodchild speaks unless you're there to have your hair raised by it, the passion behind it lights this fine book of hers, in which Sekmet and Shakti, angels and aliens rise like currents of celestial fire to charge the dance of Chaos and Eros, the mythic pair so often pushed off the dance floor by Chaos and Order or just Order, finally a solo in the positivist pageants of our time, so addicted are we to programs, lists, and control, we heirs to Apollo and Rome.

And so the Chaos we try to arrange out of our lives and relationships (thereby depotentiating both) breaks in again in unexpected places, angered at going unrecognized, eager to initiate us into a richer and more genuine--and more tumultuous--kind of Eros than we're used to. For there's no such thing as a safe love, or a truly orderly vocation. Would we want them if there could be?

Some of my classmates question whether depth-related learnings are still relevant, what with falling bombs, terrorist attacks, a literal anthrax to match the psychic poisoning of our era. In and below such surface-level cataclysms and the pain they involve Dr. Goodchild reads the re-emergence of a long-repressed cosmological love intimately bound up with everything else we've managed to marginalize: the fleshly, the feminine, the esoteric, the earthly, the imaginal. To quote from the book:

"Could it be that the chaos of our world, losing its way in breakdowns on all levels from the personal to the political, from the cultural to the geophysical, signals that moment of deadly peril where collective consciousness seeks its own destruction and dissolution, in order to birth a relation to this complex Mystery, a connection that we can only approach, that we can only forge, with an attitude born of a willingness to suffer, and of a love that can only emerge from our grief?"

Obviously, this kind of love has nothing to do with a manically optimistic "everything is love, man"; its wellsprings are deeper and its cost far higher than anything rainbow stickers and positive affirmations could tap.

"Love is a paradox and evokes all our shadows. The claim in this book is that it is just this great undoing, this peculiar darkened illumination, that is part of love's great gift to us."

It is a poetic, multidisciplinary work in which the author bravely brings in some of her own collisions and learnings with the lively pair mentioned in its title; reading it reminded me that the best books are not so much put together as given birth.

"Whatever is done with love," Nietzsche wrote in a fine passage, "always occurs beyond good and evil."

p.s. It bears mentioning that as I wrote this review, a statue of Ishtar was being unearthed in Iraq.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacking Balance, July 31, 2009

By 

Adam - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eros and Chaos (Paperback)

"Eros and Chaos" makes a necessary case for the inclusion of the feminine consciousness. However, in the process of doing it, it makes for painful reading, on two counts. First of all, its writing style is chaotic and convoluted. Perhaps it is intentional, in order to match the title as well as the content that are aimed at restoring honor to chaos. However, it does take the eros out of reading. Secondly, the very thesis seems to be a bit skewed. Whereas the attempt to restore the much-maligned feminine consciousness is honorable and necessary, to do so at the rejection of the masculine consciousness is repetition of the cycle of violence. Mutual exorcisms do not heal, what we need is an inclusive, mutually affirming, collaborative existence of both consciousnesses or paradigms. While "clitoral consciousness" has its merits, if one is fixated at the groins and never graduates beyond, we have another skewed existence. And the author seems to miss the point that the whole meaning of eros cannot be equated to merely the erotic and the orgasmic. Also, there seems to be a pervasive hostility to other perspectives, instead of a compassionate coexistence. That is sad scholarship, indeed.