If conscious beings are sometimes motivated to intensify their consciousness through expressive activity, rather than merely to reduce homeostatic drives, then the prevalent assumption that erotic love is ultimately derivative from a reductive sexual drive is far from self-evident. For this reason, our inquiry here will begin not with sexuality per se, but with a question that has proven much more difficult to even formulate, let alone answer, in terms of traditional psychological theories: Why do people experience the intense, turbulent, and all-consuming passion which I designated above as a feeling of "erotic love,' or "eros in the full sense,' rather than merely feeling sexually attracted to each other?