A for Love (excerpt) There are only two main types of love: physical love and sexual love. Yet a single name was originally sufficient to designate both: Eros. But Eros became exclusively sexual the day when it was discovered that, under the name of love, the courtesy of desire (“Permit me, Madam, to kiss you”) actually hid the savagery of the drives (“Oh Madam, you are too good”). What a somewhat rogue Viennese doctor, who had the funny habit of laying his patients down to better undress their souls, roughly summed up in these words at the end of the 19th century: "Desire is the phony alibi that we invent to hide our impulses". And the phony alibi became, by a strange slip, the libido. “Oh the thug! “, tried to retort the shocked puritans, but in a way too timid, so that their complaint became “I love you”.