In a recent article “From Sexuality to Eroticism: The Making of the Human Mind” http://www.scirp.org/journal/AA/ I describe a new scenario for human evolution. Besides the well known topics of upright gait and explorative curiosity I dwell on the realm of erotic life. I do this in accordance with Owen Lovejoy’s pair-bonding hypothesis of human origins. In consequence of their upright gait early humans practiced frontal eye-to-eye copulation. In the beginning this was merely random and took place in the horde. But some females may have felt better with a specific male and thus looked for intimate relations with him. Here begins a sort of “emotional selection”, different from mere sexual selection for good genes. Through long-term bonds erotic feelings are intensified and extended onto higher-order emotions such as hope and jealousy. This scenario is confirmed by the fact that the development of the large brain of humans seems to be more in relation to emotional development than to technical faculties. Thus, eroticism in humans does not emerge causelessly but in consequence of intimacy, becoming in the long run more and more personal.

In a complementary article “Eroticism: Why it Still Matters” (http://www.scirp.org/journal/PSYCH/) I offer a more precise definition: Eroticism is the way humans transform the high energy of sexual desire into mental activity resulting in self-consciousness and mind reading. Different from Freud’s pansexualism I consider the connection between eroticism and consciousness as a formal one: both combine will and representation, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. It is thus that eroticism has transformed animal procreational sexuality into eroticism, and can be considered a central factor in the evolution of personal identity.