Obsession, Eroticism, and the Absolute: A Dialogue Between Balzac, Poe, and the Human Psyche
You’ve met this man before.
He’s brilliant, charming, visionary. He’s got a laboratory in the attic, or a journal hidden under his mattress. He says he’s chasing something pure, something true—some final insight that will make everything else make sense. He tells you he’s doing it for humanity. Maybe even for you.
But you’re not fooled, not anymore.
You’ve seen what happens to people like this. You’ve dated one. Maybe you are one.
Balzac’s The Quest of the Absolute is not just about chemistry. It’s about compulsion dressed up as genius. It’s about a man, Balthazar Claës, so addicted to the fantasy of perfection that he sacrifices everything real: his wife, his children, his dignity. He does it with the same righteous detachment we see in Poe’s narrators—men who say they’re haunted by beauty or truth or madness, but what they’re really haunted by is the fear of being seen as small, ordinary, vulnerable.
The Erotic Pull of the Ideal
In therapy—and in the bedroom—we see the same pattern: the idealization of the Other (or the Self) as a way to avoid the messy, painful, erotic aliveness of relationship. What Balzac calls the “Absolute,” Poe calls the “Nevermore.” Both are ways to say, I can’t bear what is, so I will chase what might be.
Claës doesn’t make love to his wife. He makes love to his hypothesis. He pours his longing into glass tubes and gold dust, not into her skin or her grief. She dies waiting. Poe’s men are no different: they whisper to dead lovers, they murder the people they fear need them, they speak to birds and tombstones because that’s safer than speaking to women who still breathe.
When we idealize, we don’t have to touch. Or smell. Or tremble. Or age.
The Cost of Fantasy
Fantasy isn’t the enemy. But when fantasy is the only lover in the room, when it replaces rather than enhances contact, we move from erotic to psychotic. In my clinical work, I see this with clients who confuse arousal with control. They chase the idea of intimacy, but not the experience of it. They want “safety” in the arms of someone who doesn’t challenge them.
Claës wants the final element—the divine compound that will make life perfect. But perfection isn’t erotic. It’s sterile. Erotic energy comes from difference, tension, limit, surrender. And death. Poe knew this. That’s why his lovers are always dead.
But death is also an excuse. You can’t argue with a corpse. You can’t be rejected by an ideal.
Salome’s Dance
And this brings us, inevitably, to Salome.
Not the Hollywood femme fatale. Not the church’s cautionary tale. The real one. The one Oscar Wilde tried to pin down and Richard Strauss tried to compose. The girl who danced for her father’s desire and then demanded a man’s head on a plate.
Why?
Because Salome sees through the illusion. She dances for power, not love. She eroticizes death because she was never allowed to eroticize life. She lives in a world where men chase absolutes and call it virtue. So she does the same. She asks for what she cannot have—a prophet’s kiss—and when he refuses, she destroys him. She becomes the God her father worships.
But the truth is: Salome is lonely.
Like Claës. Like Poe’s narrators. Like so many of us who fall in love with the unattainable.
Salome teaches us the danger of eroticizing absence. Of worshipping what resists us instead of embracing what arouses us. Of confusing hunger with holiness.
Final Words
Balzac gives us the man who dies for his idea. Poe gives us the men who go mad in its shadow. Salome, dancing barefoot and bloodstained, reminds us of what is left behind: a body that still aches, a mouth that still wants, a world that refuses to be perfect—but might still be enough.
If we’re willing to stay in it.
If we’re willing to touch it.
If we’re willing, finally, to stop chasing the Absolute, and start kissing what’s right in front of us.
