ABSTRACT
Diotima tells that love and desire of a beautiful body is desire for eternal possession of the good, and depicts love as love of immortality that alone can make up for the loss of beauty we witness with old age and decay. For the seer and priestess Diotima of Mantinea, who makes a significant appearance in Socrates’ account of love in the Symposium, philosophy is a more elevated form of sexual desire. The vision of the therapist as an instrument of love is all the rage in sections of humanistic psychology. Quantitative, data-ridden research measuring love and depth of relating is thus, at least according to the definition, sentimental. A good depiction of sentimentality comes from Tolstoy, who writes of those Russian ladies who wept at the theatre and were utterly oblivious of their coachman sitting outside in the freezing cold.
