Abstract

This article proposes a study on love as an ambivalent experience that incorporates, along with the pleasant, essentially pain, and whose experience requires preparation and self-knowledge. To do this, I have taken as a starting point fragment 130 of sappho and the Platonic notion of soul of Phaedrus, to culminating in a reconsideration of pain as a necessary experience that allows the understanding of what sappho’s calls “bittersweet” love. The erotic suffering is considered in two ways: from the deep pain that leads to the abyss, to the pain that is in balance with “the sweetness” of love.