Three famous unions, three passionate connections, three views on friendship.
Achilles and Patroclus
Loyalty, devotion, care, selflessness: in the friendship of the two heroes of the Iliad, all its wonderful qualities are fully manifested. The ardor of their feelings for each other knows no bounds … and comes to sexual intimacy: very often this friendly couple is considered a symbol of homosexual relations in ancient Greece. So is it or not? Historians are divided. But this assumption supports the psychoanalytic approach, according to which great friendship always contains an element of attraction – heterosexual or homosexual, repressed and sublimated.
Homer’s Iliad (Alphabet, Alphabet-Atticus, 2013).
Montaigne and Etienne de La Boesie
They met by chance, at one of the social events, and their friendship lasted only four years, but it remains one of the greatest stories of devotion. Perhaps because 10 years after the death of La Boesie, Montaigne will write in his “Experiments” about one of the properties of this friendship: secret. It is “this inexplicable power”, this miracle, this famous phrase: “Because it was him, and because it was me”, which simultaneously describes everything, but does not explain anything, with its continuation: “We have searched for each other before, than met,” allows us to assume that this meeting was an echo of the very first meeting – with the mother.
M. Monte “Experiences” (AST, Astrel, 2012).
Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess
At first, professional respect arose in the relationship between the neurologist and the otolaryngologist, which then grew into tender feelings, as evidenced by their correspondence. In it, they gradually moved from the address “dear colleague” to “my friend” and even “your Willy.” This correspondence lasted during the most productive period of Freud’s activity, which confirms the hypothesis of the fruitfulness of true friendship, in which the other embodies our “ideal self” and leads us forward. At the same time, a friend serves as a mirror for us, allowing us to look deeper into ourselves.. However, 20 years after they met, the friends quarreled: Fliss reproached that he appropriated his discovery of unconscious bisexuality, Freud considered these reproaches “a classic case of paranoia.” Friendship, which arose from passionate attachment and mutual idealization, and then died due to a painful quarrel, left a deep mark on Freud’s life. A similar scenario would recur later in his relationship with the psychoanalysts Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi.