Myths of Strategy

Why do we love the way we do? Is desire a divine blessing, a curse, or some strange combination of pleasure and pain? In Myths of Love: Echoes of Ancient Mythology in the Modern Romantic Imagination, Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, in collaboration with scholar Jerome E. Singerman, argues that the ancient Greeks and Romans understood something essential about love—that it is at once transcendent and destructive, sacred and shameful, natural and transformative. Across twenty-five myths ranging from the tenderness of Baucis and Philemon to the lust of Leda and the Swan, the book traces the complex and sometimes contradictory ways we experience love and sexuality. Westheimer and Singerman invite readers to explore how these ancient stories reveal enduring truths about human relationships today.

A Dialogue Between Past and Present

The book opens with a vivid scene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the two authors stand before Lucas Cranach the Elder’s depiction of the "Judgment of Paris." The painting becomes a conversation starter about how ancient myths like Paris’s choice among goddesses remain embedded in modern ideas of beauty, lust, and competition. That observation launches their inquiry: how have these myths, reshaped over centuries, continued to define what we mean by love, shame, fidelity, and passion? Why do Aphrodite’s tricks, Hera’s jealousies, and Zeus’s transgressions still resonate in our romantic imaginations?

Dr. Ruth’s warm, conversational storytelling brings a therapist’s empathy to each myth, while Singerman provides historical and literary grounding. Together, they turn classical myths into case studies on erotic obsession, jealousy, sacrifice, and devotion. Their collaboration proves that mythology isn’t just ancient fantasy—it’s psychology with a poetic twist.

Love’s Many Faces: From Desire to Devotion

Across the centuries, the Greeks and Romans used their gods as mirrors for human feeling. Aphrodite represents the overwhelming power of sexual attraction; Artemis embodies chastity and independence; Hera personifies marriage’s burdens; Zeus reveals lust without conscience. Westheimer organizes her discussions by these emotional archetypes, showing how each myth turns a piece of love’s puzzle—physical pleasure, idealization, jealousy, possessiveness, loss—into a story we can feel in our bones.

In "Tiresias: The Riddle of Pleasure," the old seer’s transformation between male and female bodies triggers questions about sexual fulfillment and gender experience that still animate modern debates. In "Cupid and Psyche," the blind god of desire and the mortal girl of soul remind us that trust and vulnerability are the foundations of love. In "Dido and Aeneas," the queen’s heartbreak becomes an allegory for love sacrificed to duty—what happens when the heart’s destiny clashes with obligation. These stories bridge erotic love, marital love, and even love’s absence. They suggest that all forms—lust, devotion, obsession, or spiritual union—carry both healing and peril.

The Dark and the Tender

If the myths show love’s glory, they also reveal its darkness. Phaedra falls tragically into illicit passion for her stepson Hippolytus, consumed by shame and desire. Pasiphaë is cursed to lust for a bull—a myth that Westheimer reads as punishment for human arrogance and a metaphor for how sexual desire can humiliate or destroy. Yet in the tender story of Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who host gods disguised as travelers, we find love at its purest—humility, constancy, and mutual care enduring to the very end of life.

These contrasting tones make the book a kind of map to the extremes of love’s landscape—from the carnal to the sacred, from youthful infatuation to mature companionship. Each myth becomes a facet of Westheimer’s broader thesis: that love, however flawed, is what most deeply defines us. “Whether for good or ill,” she writes, echoing Ovid, “there are few things quite so transformative as love.”

Why These Stories Still Matter

Westheimer and Singerman insist that ancient myths persist because they confront timeless human conflicts. Are men and women capable of equal pleasure and power in love? Can fidelity survive desire? Is shame an inevitable companion to passion? Myths turn these questions into images—a blinded prophet, a woman turned to a tree, a god transformed into a swan. Each transformation literalizes psychological truths that modern therapy still wrestles with. When you read these myths, Westheimer suggests, you’re also reading about yourself: your longing to be seen, your mistakes in love, your fear of loss.

By restoring the erotic pulse at the heart of these myths, Myths of Love becomes something more than scholarship. It’s a conversation across millennia about what it means to love and be human. Westheimer invites readers not to revere the gods but to learn from them—to see in Tiresias’s wisdom, Psyche’s courage, or Baucis’s devotion the echoes of our own stories. If understanding love is the most enduring human quest, this book argues, then mythology remains its deepest, oldest guide.

One of the major threads running through Myths of Love is the idea that love changes everything—it reshapes identity, ambition, even fate itself. Westheimer calls this the alchemy of affection: just as Ovid’s Metamorphoses turns people into plants, stones, or stars, love transforms mortals and gods alike. Through stories like Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Ceyx and Alcyone, she shows us that love’s most honest expression is not conquest but transformation.

Love as Metamorphosis

The tale of Cupid and Psyche, for instance, begins with sensual pleasure hidden in darkness but ends with illumination—literally. Psyche’s curiosity to see her invisible lover mirrors anyone’s need to love with open eyes. Her trials, imposed by the jealous goddess Venus, represent the growth all lovers must undergo when desire deepens into true intimacy. Westheimer notes that Psyche’s eventual reunion with Cupid signifies that genuine love fuses body and soul, pleasure and knowledge; it’s not blind but fully aware.

Similarly, Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld in search of Eurydice dramatizes love’s power to challenge even death. His music softens the hearts of the gods below, but his failure to resist looking back teaches that love’s transformations can be undone by doubt. “If only he could have trusted,” Westheimer writes, “he might have rewritten mortality itself.”

When Love Defies the Gods

In many myths, to love is to trespass against divine law. Ceyx and Alcyone’s faithfulness across life and death earns them divine pity—they are turned into halcyon birds who calm the seas, a symbol of peace after storm. By contrast, when Alcyone’s father Aeolus unleashes the winds, or when Dido defies fate for passion, the tragedy is inevitable: mortals who love too deeply threaten the hierarchy of gods. In these crises, love’s metamorphic power becomes both punishment and redemption—it can destroy the body but preserve the soul in new form.

Love as Personal Evolution

Westheimer connects these myths to modern psychological insight: love forces evolution. Falling in love dismantles ego defenses; heartbreak ignites empathy. Psyche’s endurance, Orpheus’s devotion, and Alcyone’s serenity parallel therapeutic growth—recognizing that identity is fluid and relationships are catalysts for change. As she often tells her patients, desire may begin in the body, but its ultimate transformation is of the self.

By viewing these transformations through both mythic and modern lenses, Westheimer turns Greek tragedy into emotional education. Each metamorphosis becomes a metaphor for how you—like Psyche or Orpheus—might risk looking inward, survive loss, and come out changed yet more whole. Love’s danger, the book insists, is inseparable from its power to renew.

What does it mean to experience passion as a woman—or as a man? Through myths like Tiresias, Iphis and Ianthe, and Hermaphroditus, Westheimer explores love as a profoundly gendered experience. She argues that these myths prefigure modern conversations about sexuality, gender identity, and pleasure, showing that the ancients already wrestled with what we now call sex equality and sexual autonomy.

Tiresias: The First Gender Explorer

The prophet Tiresias, transformed from man to woman and back again, becomes Westheimer’s emblem of experiential knowledge. When Zeus and Hera ask who feels more pleasure in sex, Tiresias answers without hesitation: women. Hera’s rage and his ensuing blindness symbolize the ancient—and still lingering—shame attached to female sexuality. Westheimer reframes the myth as a parable about owning one’s experience: Tiresias’s insight is punished precisely because it reveals an uncomfortable truth about gendered pleasure and power.

Beyond Binary Myths

Hermaphroditus, born from Hermes and Aphrodite, refuses simple categorization. His unwilling merging with the nymph Salmacis—an act of assault disguised as love—exposes ancient fears of gender fluidity. Westheimer reads this as a myth of violation, not liberation; the forced union turns the beauty of dual identity into a curse. Modern understanding of intersex and transgender experience, she insists, must reclaim what mythology distorted: that duality can be strength, not shame.

By contrast, Iphis’s miraculous change from girl to boy on the eve of marrying her beloved Ianthe illustrates the limits of ancient tolerance. The gods intervene to preserve heteronormative order. Westheimer connects this to the twentieth-century memoir Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, showing how even modern narratives often end with conformity: love between women only survives when recoded as heterosexual. Yet by revisiting Iphis, she highlights a continuity of desire that predates modern labels—a reminder that “love existed before psychology gave it names.”

Taken together, these myths dismantle rigid binaries. They reveal how sexual pleasure and identity have always been intertwined with cultural anxieties—and how each generation must relearn what Tiresias once knew: love’s truths can only be told by those who have lived both sides.

Westheimer approaches love not as a sentimental ideal but as a force that exposes our darkest impulses. Through tragic stories like Phaedra’s lust, Pasiphaë’s animal curse, and Narcissus’s fatal self-love, she argues that obsession and shame are not aberrations—they're part of the anatomy of desire. By facing them, we move from destruction to understanding.

When Desire Turns Dangerous

“What is this thing called love?” asks Phaedra before confessing her forbidden desire for her stepson Hippolytus. Her passion is consuming, irrational, and ultimately fatal—not because of love itself, Westheimer insists, but because society makes female desire taboo. Phaedra’s inability to express longing safely mirrors the psychological repression modern women still endure. Her story, echoed in modern plays like Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, warns that when desire is shamed, it corrodes selfhood.

Likewise, Pasiphaë’s compulsion to mate with a bull—engineered by vengeful gods—is a grotesque exaggeration of how passion can humiliate. Yet there’s a thread of empathy here: her punishment reflects sins not her own but her husband’s arrogance. Westheimer sees in this myth a grim truth about relational power—the innocent often bear the consequences of others’ desires.

The Mirror of Narcissus

No story captures self-destructive obsession better than Narcissus, the boy who falls in love with his reflection. Westheimer interprets his tragedy not as vanity but as arrested development: unable to love others, he fixates on his own unattainable image. Today’s culture of self-curation—Instagram filters and personal branding—echoes his fate. Like Echo, whose voice remains only as repetition, those who orbit narcissists lose their voices in the reflection of someone else’s self-love.

By revisiting myths of obsession, Westheimer turns moralistic tales into psychological parables. They teach that erotic intensity without empathy leads to isolation; shame without compassion kills the soul of love. Her therapeutic insight reclaims tragedy as a chance for understanding: passion isn’t the problem—disconnection is.

The book’s middle chapters remind us that love’s story is often written in blood. Myths like Helen and Paris, Laodamia and Protesilaus, and Alcestis and Admetus reveal how personal relationships are tested by war, duty, and mortality. Westheimer reads these tragedies not as ancient history but as timeless reflections on loyalty, grief, and the costs of devotion.

Helen and Paris: Desire That Burns Worlds

When Paris awards Aphrodite the golden apple and receives Helen as reward, he triggers the Trojan War. Westheimer suggests that their myth exposes the ruinous power of lust divorced from conscience. Paris’s entitlement and Helen’s beauty become symbols of how attraction, when idolized, ignites destruction. Yet Euripides’s alternate version—where Helen is only an illusion and the real queen waits innocently in Egypt—reminds us that love itself is not guilty; the world’s projections are.

Love in the Time of War

Laodamia and Protesilaus show love’s nobility and futility intertwined. The first hero to die at Troy leaves behind a wife so grief-stricken she builds his likeness from wax and joins him in death. Westheimer likens her to modern war widows who cannot stop loving what’s gone, illuminating both the beauty and danger of devotion. Her story invites a hard question: when does loyalty become self-erasure?

Alcestis, who dies to save her husband Admetus, expands the theme of sacrifice. While her selflessness fits ancient ideals of wifely virtue, Westheimer reads it with ambivalence. Alcestis’s silence upon returning from the dead—revived by Heracles—suggests trauma, not passive sainthood. Love here demands endurance, but also the courage to question unjust demands made in its name.

In these myths, love collides with social structures—war, patriarchy, destiny—and often loses. Yet their sorrow clarifies something crucial: deep connection is measured by what you’re willing to risk, not what you can control. As Westheimer observes, “Love may end, but its echo teaches us to live.”

Not all the myths end in death or despair. Westheimer balances tragedy with tenderness, emphasizing art, empathy, and imagination as ways love redeems itself. The stories of Pygmalion, Ceyx and Alcyone, and Baucis and Philemon illustrate how creativity, compassion, and constancy turn passion into enduring connection.

Love as Creation

In Pygmalion, the sculptor’s ideal woman comes miraculously to life—a fantasy of perfect love literally molded by male desire. Westheimer and Singerman don’t dismiss it as sexist idolatry; they reinterpret it as a cautionary tale about loving what you imagine rather than who truly is. Just as in Shaw’s modern retelling, the real transformation must occur in the creator—learning to love a partner with her own voice, not a statue of perfection.

Love as Compassion and Continuity

In Ceyx and Alcyone, fidelity transcends death. When storm kills the husband, the gods grant the grieving wife wings to join him as a bird. Their myth, origin of the “halcyon days,” symbolizes calm born from sorrow—a poetic image of healing after loss. Westheimer reads the story as therapy’s essence: mourning can transform into peace when love finds new form.

Finally, Baucis and Philemon closes the book with quiet grace. Two poor elders welcome gods disguised as travelers, embodying hospitality and mutual care. Their reward is eternity together, not as spirits but as entwined trees. For Westheimer, their story captures mature love stripped of vanity—partnership as daily kindness, where sex gives way to sacred companionship. It’s the love we all hope to grow into.

Through these gentler myths, Myths of Love completes its circle—from Eros’s chaos to serene devotion. Art, empathy, and endurance turn fleeting desire into something divine. In the end, Westheimer suggests, every love story—ours included—is a small act of creation against time.