I GO! Valentine’s Special: Why Eros vs. Thanatos is the subtext of the Epstein files & neo-Romanticism’s come-back.

“To love is good, too: love being difficult.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

It has been a rough week for the romantics, the humanists, the tender-hearted, those who love to love. Those who believe in justice. The Epstein files, Iran’s repression, the continued efforts to break women and girls in Afghanistan... So, this week, I GO! is back to help elevate us above the newsflow - and the relentless assault against morality - with an ode to the greatest feeling, and highest value, in this world:

L.O.V.E.

The ultimate human experience. The most powerful – and the most devastating, potentially. The most potent drug.

So yes, this is a Valentine’s edition. But not a sentimental one – a Freudian recognition that one the two forces locked in permanent tension in our psyche may be winning a battle today, but not the war.

Eros vs. Thanatos: the subtext of the Epstein files

On the surface, the files are about s*x, power, elites, and secrecy. Underneath, really, they’re about death.

In Freudian psychology, Eros is the life drive (Lebenstrieb). It describes the set of instincts oriented toward survival and self-preservation; sexuality and libido; attachment, love, bonding; creation, growth, and continuity (including civilisation itself). Eros is creation, intimacy, joy. It is desire. Attachment. Beauty. Continuity. The need to connect, to build, to bring something into being, a force that binds us to others and to the future.

In contrast, Thanatos is the death drive (Todestrieb), which pulls us in the opposite direction: aggression, repetition, destruction, a return to an inorganic, tension-free state. It is domination. Numbness. Void.

In the Epsteinian universe, Eros is extracted and becomes degeneration. The goal is no longer pleasure - it’s control, annihilation of the other’s subjectivity. S*x without eros (connection), life force mutating as compulsion. It becomes dangerous and monstrously ugly. Scarily hollow.

The Epstein system reeks of Thanatos. It is about dominance, humiliation, destruction of innocence, repetition without satisfaction. It is pathological.

Power is Thanatos, because true Eros dissolves hierarchy - it’s mutual, alive, curious. Power is predatory.

Killing the divine feminine

And so are the Iranian and Taliban regimes – those death cults. They are not organised around God, tradition, or even order. They are organised around control of the feminine. Their obsession is not faith: it is Eros containment.

Women’s hair, women’s bodies, women’s voices, women’s laughter, women’s movement, women’s pleasure, women’s enjoyment - all must be regulated, covered, erased, disciplined. Because they represent aliveness.

That is why these regimes embody Thanatos in its purest political form: rigid, punitive, vertical, obsessed with purity and punishment. Repression as virtue. Eros - embodied, reciprocal, creative - is their mortal enemy.

Their regimes and reigns of death does not just destroy lives and bodies. They kill possibility. They kill desire. They kill the future.

“Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold!” The return of Romanticism

This weekend marks the release of the much-anticipated 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Romanticism has always been a revolt against death – and certainly against emotional aridity. A return of Eros: the hunger for intensity, poetry, sincerity, and full presence. A refusal of irony. Of detachment. Of living at arm’s length from one’s own feelings.

Perhaps this helps explain the strange paradox of Valentine’s Day today.

At first sight, it has never been more commercial. Consumer spending in the US only is expected to reach a record $29.1 billion this year, surpassing last year’s record (NRF).

But beneath the numbers lies something more complex and very encouraging: gifts increasingly extend beyond romantic partners to friends, colleagues - even pets. Can we interpret this as a growing need to celebrate kindness and connection in a world where hatred has become commoditised, to ritualise affection and tenderness when desire is often just seen as extraction?

Desire is connection - to others, to ourselves, but first and foremost, to life itself, to Eros. It is that “elan vital”.

So today, especially if you are an Echo, seek your own Narcissus. Treat yourself as you would your ideal lover. Book the massage. Run the bath. Pop the Champagne. Open the dusty bottle of Château Lafite. Light the candle. Reconnect with the love inside you. That force - the flush, the expansion, the aliveness, the dopamine rush we associate with love, it already lives inside you. You chose when to activate it. You do when you choose life (and surround yourself well, undoubtedly, of course…).

I am wishing you all a day full of love and kindness.

Tenderly, Charlotte x