Eros and Thanatos: Bezos in Venice
The spectacle of Jeff Bezos marrying Lauren Sánchez in Venice , produced many disparaging headlines. My headline, Eros and Thanatos draws on Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytic theory:
Eros: The life drive. It encompasses love, creativity, sexuality, connection, and the instinct to preserve and reproduce life. It seeks pleasure, harmony, and growth.
Thanatos: The death drive. It represents aggression, destruction, compulsion toward repetition, and a return to an inorganic state. It’s the impulse behind risky behavior, war, and even self-destruction.
This blog aims to be both playful (Eros) and deadly serious (Thanatos). It was inspired by a colleagues comment on social media. Aodhan Moran asked a question to a psychologist who had posted on linked in, that the wedding would end up killing two people due to its contribution to climate change. Aodhan asked about how the relationship between love and death…. this made me think.
EROS
Marriage and love go hand in hand, and I have no reason to doubt that Eros was alive and well when Jeff married Lauren. Cynics will talk about marrying for money etc, but my guess is that love was in the air. However, as the psychoanalysts amongst us know, there is never a pure love, only a love that is filled with complexity, and is often tainted by other desires.
There is the love of the couple who wanted to get married, but also something else, perhaps what Lacan calls Plus-de-jouir (surplus enjoyment). This refers to an extra, excessive enjoyment derived not from fulfilling desire, but a more painful excessive enjoyment gained from engaging in a repetition, or some unconcious struggle. My hypothesis is that the excess enjoyment was gained from the pain of being part of the spectacle, from the obscene display of wealth, and perhaps the love (or the desperate need) of being the centre of attention.
If love between the couple was the dominant, their love of the spectacle would not have been necessary, in fact it would have got in the way of something much more intimate.
Thanatos
It’s difficult to argue against the claim that over 60 private jets, plus all of the mass consumption at this wedding was excessive, and yes we can link it to the death drive. How one couple can utilise love as a vehicle for such an onslaught on an already over-crowded Venice, to a place where you aren’t wanted, and with scant regard for the environmental impact. This is to dance with Thanatos at your own wedding. This week we read of Spain and Italy having temperatures of over 45 degrees, which brings the issue into sharp focus.
The destruction of the planet is one aspect of Thanatos. Another aspect could be a kind of self-loathing, an unconscious desire to be despised whilst seemingly looking for love and admiration off others. Perhaps, Jeff Bezo’s adolescent desire to turn his body into a muscular fortress, reveals his need for defence mechanisms to act as a cover for a deep insecurity and vulnerability. Perhaps there is an unconscious need to bolster a fragile ego, a bit like Trump who called in Bezos and the tech-bro’s to his Presidential inauguration. Was it Thanatos calling in the world’s wealthiest, to the worlds best known beauty spot, in order to create an overbearing, excessive and bling, spectacle?
Thanatos perhaps overshadowed love in this wedding by aggressively bringing hell to Venice, a city so overcrowded that clearly didn’t want this wedding.
I was struck by Bezos bald head glistening in the Venetian sun, and the image made me think that in spite of all the wealth, and all the body building, there was this little rich boy, filled with a desperate need for recognition. Thanatos in a titan struggle with Eros, ended up by claiming his soul because of his unbearable need to be seen by the other.