The story of Eros and Psyche, told as a short interlude in a longer novel The Golden Ass, by the ancient Roman writer Lucius Apuleius, has proven irresistible to Jungian theorists. Erich Neumann adapted the story (Neumann, 1956) and was the first to interpret it. He approached the story as a paradigm of female development. By contrast, both von Franz (1970) and Ulanov (1971) see it as a model for anima development in men. James Hillman (1972) sees it as an archetypal drama – a metaphorical portrayal of the longing of the Psyche for Eros and Eros for Psyche, and recently Lena Ross has interpreted the tale as the “struggle to separate from the collective while maintaining a relationship to the divine” (Ross, 1991: 65).
In relative contrast to the above analyses, we will be approaching this story as a portrayal of what we have described as the archetypal self-care system and its “rescue” (by Eros) of a traumatized innocent ego (Psyche). In this story, Psyche's rescuer turns out to be a daimon-lover and, like the tale of Rapunzel, the story describes the healing of trauma as a two-stage process in which the protective, loving aspects of Eros are encountered first and the daimonic aspects later. As the story progresses, both Eros and Psyche must suffer the loss of illusion as a relationship is finally worked out between the reality-bound ego and the ambivalent numinous powers represented by Eros in both his protective and persecutory form. Eros/Psyche, then, represent a dyad much like the witch/Rapunzel, and this archetypal structure defines the self-care system of the traumatized patient with its initial resistance to change and ultimate acceptance of change's inevitability (which is part of the human condition).
If we apply a gnostic metaphor to this development in our story, we might say that the two-stage process delineates a kind of two-stage descent of the spirit into matter – an incarnation of the personal spirit (daimon) in the body. In Chapter 4, we described this process in reference to Winnicott's notion of “indwelling.” In the present chapter we see that indwelling seems to occur in a two-stage process. In stage one, the alienated (traumatized) ego of the narrative (Psyche or Rapunzel) is “captured” by a protective daimon (witch or god) and swept away into a fantasy castle or tower. After sufficient time in this transformational chamber feeding nightly on the ambrosia of her caretaking daimon, the innocent, uninitiated ego of the narrative is strong enough (both Psyche and Rapunzel are pregnant) to risk alienation from the positive side of the Self with which it has become identified. At this juncture, a sacrifice takes place and stage two is initiated. This sacrificial moment which we saw in Rapunzel at the moment both she and the Prince confront old Dame Gothel and are thrown out of the tower, issues in a process of suffering and alienation as (in our current story) both Eros and Psyche suffer the “dark side” of their blissful love. But this suffering includes the positive, interior element (in utero) and is therefore of a completely different order from the unregenerate misery with which our stories begin. It represents the suffering of a sacralized ego – an ego now under the guidance of the Self and its individuating energies.
There once lived a King and Queen who had three daughters and one of them, Psyche, was so extraordinarily beautiful that men were speechless in her presence and began to worship her as though she were the goddess Aphrodite herself. Her less attractive sisters had long-since been married to kings. Yet potential suitors only admired Psyche from afar, leaving her miserable, broken in spirit, all the while loathing in her heart the very loveliness that made her so unapproachable. In this dilemma, Psyche's father consulted the oracle Apollo to find a husband for her, and received the proclamation that Psyche was to be prepared for marriage with a monstrous dragon, and so, with great weeping and mourning, she was led up a lonely mountain to await her marriage to the daimon.
Meanwhile, Aphrodite, who was deeply offended that a mere mortal should have displaced her as Goddess of Beauty, summoned her lusty little boy Eros, and implored him to avenge her by causing Psyche to fall in love with the vilest of men – “one so broken that through all the world his misery has no peer” (5). Sent on the avenging errand by his mother, Eros found Psyche trembling on her lonely mountain crag. Sweeping her away on the West Wind, he bore her gently down to a beautiful grove near a transparent fountain of glassy water. In the center of the grove stood a palace “built by no human hands but by the cunning of a god”(9).
Allured by the charm and beauty of the miraculous palace, Psyche beheld such vast wealth and provision as she had never seen. Overcome with joy, she was given instruction by disembodied voices that bade her refresh herself and served her delicious meals and wine like nectar, then sang to her as an invisible choir. That night, under the shroud of darkness, her unknown husband came, made love to Psyche and departed in haste before dawn. And so it was for many nights and days.
But meanwhile, Psyche's parents grew old and feeble with grief, and her elder sisters also. Climbing to the crag where Psyche had been left, they beat their breasts and wept for the lost Psyche until finally the young beauty, herself overcome with grief, prevailed upon her unknown husband to allow them to visit her. Granting her wish, Eros wafted the two sisters to his palace on the West Wind, but he made Psyche promise – on the threat she would lose him forever – that she would say nothing of her husband or what he was like.
Upon seeing the affluence of her heavenly wealth, Psyche's elder sisters burned with envy and, returning home swollen with rage, contrived a plan against her. Feigning grief, rending their hair and tearing their faces, they returned to the crag once again. Meanwhile, poor Psyche, missing her sisters more than ever, prevailed upon Eros to allow a second visit, then a third.
“Do you see,” he said, “what great peril you are in? … Those false she-wolves are weaving some deep plot of sin against you whose purpose is this: to persuade you to seek to know my face, which, as I have told you, if once you see, you will see no more. And so if hereafter those wicked ghouls come hither … give neither ear nor utterance to anything concerning your husband. For soon we shall have issue, and even now your womb, a child's as yet, bears a child like to you. If you keep my secret in silence, he shall be a god; if you divulge it, a mortal” (18).
Finally Psyche's sisters devised an equally cunning deceit and address their sister; “Ah you are happy, for you live in blessed ignorance of your evil plight and have no suspicion of your peril …. For we have learned the truth …. He that lies secretly by your side at night is a huge serpent with a thousand tangled coils; blood and deadly poison drip from his throat and from the cavernous horror of his gaping maw. Remember Apollo's oracle, how it proclaimed that you should be the bride of some fierce beast …. The hour has now come when you must choose whether to believe your sisters …. or find a grave in the entrails of a cruel monster” (22–3).
Poor Psyche was overcome with terror at this melancholy news. Swept beyond the bounds of reason and trembling with anguish, she resolved to look upon her unknown lover and if necessary kill him in his sleep as her sisters recommended. “Impatience, indecision, daring and terror, diffidence and anger, all strove within her, and, worst of all, in the same body she hated the beast and loved the husband” (25).
None the less, when the appointed hour came and Eros was fast asleep, she lit a lamp – and there beheld the beautiful Eros, fairest of Gods. Pricking herself on one of his arrows, Psyche fell in love with love. She threw herself upon him in an ecstasy of love, but at that very moment, the oil lamp sputtered and a drop fell upon Eros. Leaping from the couch, his secret now betrayed, Eros tore himself from Psyche's kisses and flew away with never a word.
Like most fairy tales, our story begins with something out of balance between the numinous world of the gods and the human realm. In other words, something has gone wrong in the mediation of archetypal energies and the imbalance will have to be corrected. In the story of Rapunzel, we saw how a wall separated these two worlds (as in the schizoid disorders) and how gradually, through different mediating figures and the suffering of Rapunzel and her Prince, the two worlds were interpenetrated and eventually integrated. In Eros and Psyche we do not have a wall between the numinous and the real, but rather a defensive use of the a wall between the numinous and the real, but rather a defensive use of the numinous by an inadequately established reality-ego. This is the problem of narcissism, i.e., the identification of the ego with beauty, wealth, or fame – all collective values that inflate the ego with numinous, archetypal energies that do not properly belong to it. Psyche is “inflated” by everyone else's desire (she carries their projections), but her own desire is unawakened. Her “spirit is broken” and she is full of self-loathing – precisely what we have seen as the legacy of early trauma. Only her outer beauty sustains her self-esteem. Inwardly she is empty and without an authentic self.
In this dreadful situation, abandoned by human love and destined only for bondage to a daimon-lover, Psyche is in the same plight as Jung's Moon-lady after her incestuous violation by her brother (Chapter 3). However, “man's extremity is God's opportunity,” and at this moment of unbearable suffering, a transcendent “being” comes to the beleaguered ego's rescue, sweeping it away into an inner mythic landscape, dissolving it in divine energies so that it can recover. In this case, Psyche's daimon-lover is none other than “Love” himself. However, this “Eros” is apparently in need of his own development, because we first meet him in our story as nothing but a mother's boy, possessed as it were, by his divine mother Aphrodite who kisses him “with parted lips.” So if our story is about the rescue and transformation of a traumatized ego, it is also simultaneously about the rescue and transformation of the daimonic partner of this ego, who is drawn down into human affairs out of love for this very wounded feminine part of the self.
Taking a tip from Grotstein (1984), we noted in the epigraph to Chapter 1 that “when innocence has been deprived of its entitlement, it becomes a diabolical spirit.” In keeping with this analysis, we might best think of this god, Eros, as that inviolable personal spirit or daimon that escaped Psyche's selfhood when her spirit was broken. In Chapter 2 we explored how in early trauma, there is a reversal of what Winnicott called indwelling and the somatic and spiritual poles of the archetype are dissociated. We speculated that one reason for this split was the necessity of preserving the personal spirit inviolate and that the Self, reacting to trauma, was the organizing agent for a dismemberment of experience necessary for survival. In our clinical examples, we also saw how, when this happens, the Self constellates negatively, actually preventing integration or individuation, and how, while protecting the personal spirit, it also persecutes or imprisons it.
If we think of the Self as that potential wholeness of the personality which continually seeks incarnation in the ego and its object-relations, then the dismemberment or severing of its relationship with the reality ego which trauma forces upon it, means that the Self has, so to speak, sacrificed itself – i.e., sacrificed its very essence which is relationship. As the daimon or the god (Eros) in our narrative, it has cut itself off from its potential reality-incarnation (Psyche) – dismembered itself, so to speak, by dismembering its relationship to the ego and the world. The resulting pair Eros/Psyche, then represent two halves of an original personal/transpersonal (inner/outer) unity that has been dismembered by trauma. Like Plato's original man who was cut in two, with each half forever seeking its mate, the Eros/Psyche or Self/ego pair are now radically separated and, if they are to be rejoined, it will require that the person housing this process find a new capacity for suffering the psyche's archetypal affects. This new capacity for suffering is always a rediscovery based on the remembering of earlier times in the patient's life when dependency was possible and love was welcomed. This remembering can occur only in a love relationship with another person and we have repeatedly seen the resistance to this love which the dismembered Self sets up. In psychoanalysis, this love relationship emerges in the transference and, with it, all the transpersonal uniting factors that such transferences set in motion.
In our story, and in mythology in general, the “transpersonal uniting factors” are intermediate beings or daimons who link up the purely spiritual realm of the gods and the earthbound human race. In Plato's symposium, Socrates cites Eros as just such a mighty daimon or spirit, halfway between God and man. One of his listeners asks him a more general question about what these mighty daimons or spirits do, and he replies:
They are the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods.
(von Franz, 1980a: 36)
So it is the daimonic that serves, then, as an intermediate area of experience, between the transpersonal, archetypal world, with its numinous dynamism – both positive and negative – and the human, mundane world of ego-functioning. Daimons represent the Self in its mediating dynamism. As both Protectors and Persecutors, they are necessary parts of the self-care system, precisely because there has been insufficient mediation of the raging archetypal energies that pour through the ego in traumatic circumstances. We know that the ego cannot unfold according to the promptings of a transpersonal control-point unless there is a facilitating environment – unless the archetypal world is allowed to personalize in such a way that its grandiose imagery is scaled down to human proportions. Without this, it is as though the Self turns its energies from living into a last-ditch effort at preserving what is left of the true personality for possible redemption in the future. It “supplies” a world (Eros' crystal palace) for the beleaguered child-ego in place of the lost world of life lived in relation to reality. In other words, the daimon-lover is what the Self looks like when it is ingrown – turned back on itself, unredeemed by human recognition.
In our story, Eros flies on his great wings to the mountain crag where Psyche is waiting in order to carry out his mother's bidding. No sooner does he see Psyche's suffering, however, than something comes over him which even he cannot control and he is drawn down into the human realm, betraying his own divine mother and thereby entering voluntarily into his own transformation process. This moment contains the paradox that love awakens in the God of Love only when he approaches human suffering and limitation. In our story, divine Eros is moved to betray his heavenly perfection only by a suffering mortal soul. This is an incarnational motif similar to the early Christian concept of “kenosis” (from the Greek meaning “to empty”) whereby Christ, identified with the all-pervading oneness of the Godhead, without definiteness, “emptied himself” of his all-embracing plenitude to become man – to become definite. Jung thought he saw in this voluntary sacrifice a glimpse of the psyche's telos or ultimate goal, which was not just the ego's goal but transformation of the whole personality. The Self does not seem to want unlimited expression (discharge). It seeks human limitation in order to transform itself.
The world into which Eros sweeps the traumatized Psyche is well known to us now from Rapunzel's tower. It was to Jung's great credit that he realized the true nature of this inner sanctum following outer trauma. Unlike Freud, who saw it only as a regressive, sexual, wish-fulfilling world into which the ego retreated (incestuous regression to the womb), Jung realized that the regressing ego went deeper, into the collective layer of the psyche, and there found itself sustained by transpersonal energies that were absolutely essential if the ego was ever to “progress” again.
The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the pre-sexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there is does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intrauterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“representations collectives”) in the whale's belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.
(Jung, 1912a, para. 654)
Here we have depicted the encapsulated world of what psychopathology knows as the “schizoid defense,” but with Jung's important addition of the life-sustaining energies available there. Inside this world of illusion, the mortified Psyche's fragile ego is kept alive like a hydroponic plant, feeding nightly on the nectar of Eros' love, i.e., on archetypal fantasy. It is one of the miracles of psychological life that the traumatized psyche is kept alive in this way (albeit at a tremendous price). Inside the crystalline palace of our story, Jung saw more than what D.W. Winnicott called the “cold storage” into which the true self retreats under traumatic circumstances (see Winnicott, 1960a: 140ff.) and more than the deep inner sanctum to which the “lost heart of the libidinal ego” retreats in the parallel image of Harry Guntrip (see Guntrip, 1971: Part II). Jung saw a transformation chamber in which the traumatized ego was broken down into its basic elements, dissolved, so to speak, in the nectar of the gods, for the “purpose” of later rebirth. In our story, the dissolving effect of Eros leads to a breakdown of Psyche's beleaguered “I” in the fused state of a divine/human “we,” so that the first stage in her healing is equivalent to the surrender of her “old” personality and its transformative inclusion in something larger. This something larger, under whose “spell” she falls at this stage, is precisely the religious element (Eros' divinity), and Jung saw in this archaic motif a profound truth about the psyche that pointed far beyond the apparent illusory escapism of religion emphasized by Freud.
Before going on with our story, it seems important to underscore the truly dangerous aspects of those self-sustaining illusions which grow luxuriantly in what we might call the crystal palace of the daimon-lover, where Eros takes Psyche and where he imprisons her “in the dark” for a long time. Entering this psychological “space” is equivalent to entering an altered state of consciousness. This is why all witches and daimons are “spell-casters.” If this “narcissistic” energy is appropriated by the ego, as it inevitably is to some extent, then a very refractory kind of inflation results, and the libido gets stuck in the underworld. The resulting constellation is both inflated (the god Eros) and infantile (the injured Psyche). People caught in this web are paradoxically both incredibly needy and proudly self-sufficient at the same time, impotent and omnipotent both – a “divine or royal person” and a “baby” simultaneously. This imperious infantilism is the dark side of the daimonic's influence over the ego – its tendency toward incest and “malignant regression.”
Freud very correctly warned about the addictive quality of this stage, because the glass bubble within which Eros and Psyche remain is not only the place of transformation, as Jung so optimistically thought; it is also the place of our compulsive addictions and “co-dependencies.” The “love” inside this space is incestuous, i.e., developmentally prior to self-object boundary differentiation and it is addictive precisely because here we have access to the “ambrosia” of divine energies. It was this fact that helped Jung to understand the “spiritual problem” behind alchohol addiction, which he saw as a misguided concretistic projection of the need for spiritual experience into the mind-altering “spirits” of alcohol. What Jung did not see (how could he have?) was how addictive his own psychological theories would become to people whose “New Age” proclivities inclined them only to the “light” or “healing” side of the numinosum.
People who are victims of addiction know how futile their struggle often is in the “dissolving space” supervised by the daimon-lover, and how important “turning the problem over to God” is in their own recovery. It might even be said that the daimon-lover exploits the psyche's longing to surrender in the service of neurosis. He is the seducer, the weaver of illusions and he demands total obedience. He tempts us into one more drink or one more candy-bar, or one more sexual adventure. His ministrations are always temporarily soothing, as the gods' ambrosia is sweet, but they are never fully satisfying because the daimon-lover is an inner substitute for the original caretaking “other” needed in infancy, and the encapsulated space in the psyche under his (or her) self-care system is cut off from the real world. Therefore, he can offer only inflated substitutes for what is really wanted – which is the imaginai link between reality and fantasy, not fantasy as a soothing defense against reality. What the daimon-lover supplies is always based on a genuine need, but it never fulfills it, and the more one indulges in the substitute, the deeper the real need is obscured.
D. W. Winnicott calls the “crystal-palace” stage in our two-stage process, “fantasy” (one dimensional) as distinguished from true “imagination” which is fantasy about something real (two-dimensional). He understands fantasy as a defense against both dreaming and living (see Winnicott, 1971a: 26ff.), and presents the case of a middle-aged woman who spent most of her life in fantasy. This patient had very early abandoned all hope in object-relating because of a too-early disillusionment in relationship to her mother. She was the youngest of several siblings who were left to look after themselves. In the nursery she struggled to belong and play, but she could only fit in on a compliance basis. So
while she was playing the other people's games she was all the time engaged in fantasying. She really lived in this fantasying on the basis of a dissociated mental activity … she became a specialist in this one thing: being able to have a dissociated life while seeming to be playing with the other children in the nursery … gradually she became one of the many who do not feel that they exist in their own right as whole human beings.
(ibid.: 29)
Winnicott says that, in her fantasy, “omnipotence was retained” and wonderful things could be achieved, but in this dissociated state, whenever the patient began to put something into practice, such as painting or reading, she found the limitations that made her dissatisfied because she had let go of the omnipotence that she retained in fantasying. Thus, fantasying “possessed her like an evil spirit” (ibid.: 33) – precisely our daimon.
In fantasy, “a dog is a dog is a dog.” Fantasy has “no poetic value,” whereas a true dream has poetry in it, i.e., layer upon layer of meaning related to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer reality. Fantasy, therefore, has no meaning. It cannot be interpreted (ibid.: 35).
The patient may sit in her room and while doing nothing at all except breathe she has (in her fantasy) painted a picture, or she has done an interesting piece of work in her job, or she has been for a country walk; but from the observer's point of view nothing whatever has happened. In fact, nothing is likely to happen because of the fact that in the dissociated state so much is happening. On the other hand, she may be sitting in her room thinking of tomorrow's job and making plans, or thinking about her holiday, and this may be an imaginative exploration of the world and of the place where dream and life are the same thing. In this way she swings from well to ill, and back again to well.
(ibid.: 27)
In a similar vein, Thomas Ogden has distinguished the realm of fantasy as a non-symbolic stage, all symbolism requiring what he calls “the capacity to maintain psychological dialectics” (Ogden, 1986), which in turn requires what Winnicott has called potential space. By potential space, Ogden means an intermediate area of experiencing that lies between inner reality and external reality – it lies “between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived” (ibid.: 205). In Winnicott's language, it is the “hypothetical area that exists (but cannot exist) between the baby and the object (mother or part of mother) during the phase of the repudiation of the object as not-me” (Winnicott, 1971a: 107) that is, at the end of being merged in with the object. In other words, it is the “space” of the interpenetrating mix-up between subject and object that aways precedes threeness and constitutes a “twoness in oneness.” The central feature of potential space is the paradox which both joins and separates baby and mother. The baby gets to the separateness of the object only through this intermediate area and its symbolic creativity.
This intermediate area of “twoness in oneness” is what the healing of trauma requires, whether in the transference or elsewhere. Ogden gives a beautiful example of the symbolic capacity developed within “potential space” after a trauma – a capacity that Eros and Psyche have not yet realized in their crystal palace, i.e., the “third” factor of their union in “twoness” (the baby) has not yet been born.
A two and a half year old child, after having been frightened by having his head go underwater while being given a bath, became highly resistant to taking a bath. Some months later, after gentle but persistent coaxing by his mother, he very reluctantly allowed himself to be placed in four inches of bath water. The child's entire body was tense; his hands were tightly clamped onto his mother's he was not crying, but his eyes were pleadingly glued to those of his mother. One knee was locked in extension while the other was flexed in order to hold as much of himself out of the water as he could. His mother began almost immediately to try to interest him in some bath toys. He was not the least bit interested until she told him she would like some tea.
At that point the tension that had been apparent in his arms, legs, abdomen, and particularly his face, abruptly gave way to a new physical and psychological state. His knees were now bent a little; his eyes surveyed the toy cups and saucers and spotted an empty shampoo bottle, which he chose to use as milk for the tea; the tension in his voice shifted from the tense insistent plea, “My not like bath, my not like bath,” to a narrative of his play: “Tea not too hot, it's okay now. My blow on it for you Tea yumm.” The mother has some “tea” and asked for more. After a few minutes the mother began to reach for the washcloth. This resulted in the child's ending of the play as abruptly as he had started it, with a return of all of the initial signs of anxiety that had preceded the play. After the mother reassured the child that she would hold him so he would not slip, she asked him if he had any more tea. He did and playing was resumed.
(Ogden, 1986: 206–7)
Ogden comments:
[Here is conveyed a sense] of the way in which a state of mind was generated by the mother and child in which there was a transformation of water from something frightening to a plastic medium (discovered and created by the child) with meanings that could be communicated. In this transformation, reality is not denied; the dangerous water is represented in the playing. Nor is fantasy robbed of its vitality – the child's breath magically changed dangerous water into a loving gift. There is also a quality of “I-ness” that is generated in play that differs from the riveted stare and desperate holding-on that had connected mother and infant prior to the beginning of play.
(ibid.: 208)
To reach a place where “reality is not denied” and “fantasy retains its vitality” is the goal of psychotherapy with all trauma survivors because with trauma, there is a collapse of what Ogden describes as the dialectical tension necessary to generate meaningful experience. In the case of our tale, this collapse is in the direction of fantasy, and reality is kept out of the encapsulated numinous world by the archetypal self-care system, which resists the loss of its control over inner feeling states. This resistance is vested in the diabolical side of our Protector/Persecutor and this destructive resistance is seen in Eros' obsessive concern with secrecy about himself and his insistence that Psyche remain unconscious of his true nature.
In psychoanalysis, an analogous danger is sometimes seen in the analyst's refusal to become more “known” and human to his or her patient, i.e., the analyst's insistence on complete anonymity or, alternatively, in the analyst's refusal to allow his patient any negative feeling. Nothing maintains “transference addiction” so much as the analyst's continued refusal to divulge anything flawed or personal to a patient who desperately needs contact with his or her partner's reality. The “spell” of transference can only be dissolved through encounters with the analyst's reality limitations and often the patient's curiosity about the analyst and insistence on penetrating his or her anonymity become especially strong towards the end of the work. Analysts who are always sympathetic, never confront their patients, and retain their idealized image as long as possible, keep their patients (and themselves) in a crystal palace and out of life and its inevitable suffering. In our story, the “call” of reality comes from Psyche's sisters in the tale and what this “call” ultimately wants is a sacrifice. This is what both the patient and the analyst caught in a seemingly endless unconnected positive transference would like to avoid.
We come now to that charming part of the tale where Psyche's sisters visit the mountain crag where she was left and begin to grieve for her. The sisters here represent the “call” of reality to the blissfully imprisoned Psyche. Eros makes Psyche promise she will not answer them, but left alone again, Psyche becomes unbearably lonely and begins to feel a captive in the walls of her luxurious prison, deprived of all real human conversation. Finally, she prevails upon Eros to allow her sisters to visit, and the three are tearfully reunited. This is the beginning of a series of visits by the sisters (three in all), the ultimate result of which is the breakup of the one-dimensional fantasy-world in which Psyche has been living with her unknown husband.
Curiosity is a major part of this process – curiosity about what is really going on underneath (shadow-side) all the one-dimensional blissful “love.” Curiosity is part of consciousness and the root of consciousness is “to know with another,” i.e., a “twoness” is necessary. The crystal palace of the daimon-lover is a one-dimensional space in which Psyche feels a “oneness” with her lover (projective identification) but she is not separate from him. She cannot see him and thus cannot know him. So, just like the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Psyche's sisters represent the individuation urge toward wholeness by emphasizing the shadow-side (dragon) of her blissful love.
Finally, Psyche's curiosity gets the best of her and in a moment similar to that slip of the tongue where Rapunzel's secret love for the Prince is betrayed to Dame Gothel, Psyche lights a lamp and illuminates the darkness surrounding her daimon-lover. In this paradoxical moment of simultaneous delight and horror Psyche beholds the beautiful winged Eros, who she has now betrayed.
Here we have the supreme paradoxical moment of our story, which is both a sacrifice and a birth. If it is the birth of consciousness, it is also the loss of a sustaining illusion; if it is an expansion of consciousness for Psyche who has now illuminated her lover, it is also a humiliation and narrowing of consciousness for the God. In the language of Sabina Speilrein's paper (1984), it is truly “Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being.” The ambivalence of this moment is also embodied in the winged daimon-lover who is both devouring monster and inspiring god. Viewed from the “outside” – the perspectives of Psyche's human sisters – this figure is truly a snake or a dragon, ensnaring her in illusions which dissociate her from life in reality. But, looked upon from “inside” – the perspective of Psyche herself – the daimon-lover is also a savior-god. He pulls her out of life-in-the-world, but this life, because of her trauma, was a false one. For Jung, this ambivalent imagery portrays the ambivalence of the libido itself-one part is “progressive” and strives for life in the world; another part is “regressive” and when necessary becomes “seductive” enough to pull the ego back into the crystal palace in order to transform it. Jung once said that the “fundamental thesis” of his book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was “the splitting of the libido into a positive and negative current” (Jung, 1925: 26), but this crucial point, with which Freud disagreed, has largely been lost to Jung's interpreters.
Around this sacrificial moment in our story, there cluster a series of negative emotions: envy (the sisters'), rage (Aphrodite's), woundedness (Eros') and despair (Psyche's). Almost all major psychoanalytic theorists have found in this pivotal moment a major threshold in psychological development. Winnicott called it the “moment of destruction” which separates object-relating from object-use. Melanie Klein called it the “depressive position.” Freud saw in it the universal crisis of the Oedipal renunciation which, if resolved, led to a capacity for symbolic internalization. And Jung called it the moment of the inflated ego's sacrifice – the dismemberment of the “old king” or the god to begin the renewal of the human. “Sacrifice” means to make sacred, and however we conceptualize this “moment,” the ego that emerges from it is a sacralized ego – one that holds the connection between the human and the divine.
The slow sacralization of the ego in our story can be seen in the way Eros “cooperates” with reality by letting the sisters in. He foresees the consequences of this intrusion, but lets it happen. This is an image of his continuing self-sacrifice in the interest of an ultimate relationship between “his world” and the human world of Psyche. The sacralization process is also symbolized by Psyche's pregnancy. The regression into total dependence has worked. The strong medicine of Eros' dissolving love has taken. This suggests nothing less than the birth of an internal world. In other words, Psyche takes an inner “image” of their relationship out with her after the bubble is broken. The “bubble,” so to speak, is now her fertile womb in which joy (Voluptas) is gestating. Simultaneously, Eros is wounded by the hot oil of illumination and retires to Aphrodite's chamber to nurse his injury. Yet this wound is also his “happy fault,” the dismemberment of a god through contact with the human which Jung saw in the universal mythic theme of God's sacrifice for man's redemption. All the healing gods are wounded gods.
With Eros' departure, the pregnant Psyche was in suicidal despair. She tried to drown herself in a river, unsuccessfully “because the river knew Eros.” But then, the goat-footed god Pan advised her to “cease from her grief and address Eros with fervent prayer, winning him by tender submission.” With this, Psyche set off in search of Eros. Meanwhile, Aphrodite discovered what the two lovers had done and, now enraged at Psyche, roamed the land hoping to kill her. So ravaged was the world by Aphrodite's rage that Psyche could find no refuge, even in the sanctuaries of gods, and was returned again to the verge of despair.
Then, in a moment of true self-reflection and acceptance of her fate, Psyche came to herself, saying “Come then, take heart of grace! Your poor hopes are shattered. Renounce them boldly and yield of your own free will to your mistress (Aphrodite) and assuage the fierce onset of her wrath by submission, late though it be. Who knows but you may even find the husband you have sought so long, there in his mother's house!” (38)
At this point, Psyche prepared for the uncertain fate of her submission. Aphrodite's first torture was to unleash her handmaidens Trouble and Sorrow on poor Psyche who received their scourging with whips and other torments. Then Aphrodite herself beat Psyche cruelly. Her rage satisfied, Aphrodite then set a series of humiliating tasks for her subject, the first being to sort a huge pile of seeds. As Psyche sat in despair and stupefaction at this task, ants swarmed over the seeds and sorted them for her. Seeing this, Aphrodite threw her a crust of bread. The second impossible task – to ‘ gather fleece from terrible man-eating sheep -was also made possible by supernatural intervention, this time by a green reed who told Psyche how to accomplish this. And a third impossible task – to bring black water from a dragon-invested Stygian spring – was also performed by supernatural forces – this time by Zeus’ Eagle. Finally a fourth task was assigned – to descend into Tartarus itself and bring back some of Persephone's beauty ointment in a box for Aphrodite. Again Psyche despaired and prepared to commit suicide from a tower, but the tower spoke to her and advised her how to proceed. But carrying her box with its special contents out of Tartarus, Psyche was again “overwhelmed with rash curiosity.” She opened the box and found no beauty ointment therein but only a Stygian sleep which overcame her.
Meanwhile Eros, now recovered from his wound came again to the spell-bound Psyche and this time was able to awaken her with a harmless prick from one of his arrows. Now deeply in love and reunited with his beloved Psyche, yet fearing his mother's wrath, Eros sought help from Zeus who, after hearing his case blessed Eros' marriage to Psyche and even brought the new bride to heaven to make her immortal. The nuptial banquet was set forth with all the gods and goddesses in attendance, and soon thereafter a daughter was born to them: in the language of mortals she is called Joy (53).
The first thing we note in this part of our story is the rage experienced by Aphrodite as she realizes the betrayal by her son – a rage which parallels the witch's rage in Rapunzel when she finds out about Rapunzel's betrayal. This rage is the inevitable result of a coming together of heretofore dissociated parts of the psyche and it represents a resistance to incarnation and to consciousness, which resistance is an inevitable by-product of the archetypal defensive processes we have examined. When the traumatized ego becomes the “client” of a transpersonal daimon or god, this daimon or god protects the stress-ego with the ferocity of a mother bear with her cubs. At this stage in our story, Aphrodite and Eros are an undifferentiated pair, with Aphrodite representing Eros' own rage at Psyche's betrayal. Only after this rage is satisfied, through the various humiliations that follow, is the love of Eros/Aphrodite allowed to prevail. So we must remember that for the traumatized psyche, integration is the worst imaginable thing and the self-care system (Aphrodite/Eros), with its numinous caretaking (and persecutory) energies, makes sure that the splitting necessary to adaptation is maintained (even though the gods secretly cooperate in the undoing of that splitting).
There is an interesting mythological amplification of this resistance to incarnation on the part of the archetypal self-care system in the early Christian myth of how the Devil broke away from the Godhead. In one tradition, Lucifer, in a rage, splits off from the Godhead and falls to earth because God wants to become incarnate as man. This tradition is found in several Jewish Apocryphal books discovered in the Qumran caves (see Forsyth, 1987: 162) and was elaborated further by Origen who based his exigesis on an early passage in Isaiah (14: 10–15) which alludes to a rebel angel Lucifer, Star of the Morning, who tries to ascend into heaven but is brought down to the Pit of Sheol by his pride, becoming “the prince of this world,” – the great Deceiver, Liar, Tempter, and Weaver of Illusions (see O'Grady, 1989: 3–22). We note with interest that these are all aspects of the archetypal defensive system we have been exploring.
Here is an abridged version of Alan Watts' engaging description of Lucifer's fall:
Now among the angels which God had created, there was one so surpassingly beautiful that he was named Lucifer, the Bearer of Light …. One of the first things that Lucifer noticed was the unbelievable grandeur of the being which God had given him. He realized that it would really be impossible for the Almighty to create anything more excellent – that he, Lucifer, was really the crowning triumph of God's handiwork.
He looked again into the heart of the Holy Trinity, and as his gaze went deeper and deeper into that abyss of light he began to share the divine vision of the future. And there, to his complete amazement, he saw that God was preparing a far higher place in heaven for creatures who were coarse and crude in the extreme. He saw that he was to be outclassed in the hierarchy of heaven by beings with fleshly and hairy bodies – almost animals. He saw that, of all things, a woman was to be his Queen. Far worse than this, he saw that Logos-Sophia, God the Son himself was to become man, and to set one of those “vile bodies” upon the very Throne of Heaven.
At all this Lucifer was inflamed with a mystery called Malice. Out of his own heart, by his own choice, he preferred his own angelic glory to that of the Divine Purpose – which was to “corrupt itself” with humanity. Lucifer could see at once what his malice would involve. Nevertheless, he considered it more noble to rebel and rebel for ever than to surrender the pride of his angelic dignity, and to pay homage to a body less luminous and spiritual than his own. He was convinced that God's wisdom had gone astray and he determined to have no part in such an undignified aberration in the otherwise beautiful scheme of creation. Certainly he would have to submit to the utmost wrath, to complete rejection from That which was, after all, the Being of his being.
Along with Lucifer, there were many other angels who felt the same way – and all together, with Lucifer at their head, they turned their backs on the Beatific Vision, flying and falling from the Godhead towards that ever-receding twilight where Being borders upon Nothing, to the Outer Darkness. It was thus that they put themselves in the service of Nothing rather than the service of Being, and so became the nihilists who were to do their utmost to frustrate the creative handiwork of God, and most especially to corrupt the fleshly humanity which he intended to honour. In this manner a whole host of the angels became devils, and their prince became Satan, the Adversary and Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.
(abridged from Watts, 1954: 41–3)
This mythical tradition gives us amplificatory evidence of what happens to the whole Self and its integrated connection to the ego as “affiliate” (see Neumann, 1976) when trauma makes embodiment impossible. The Self's darkness cannot remain connected to its light and is retained in archaic, unhumanized form as fierce, rebellious Will (resistance to change). Only as affect-tolerance grows through the psychotherapeutic process is embodiment possible, and at this point the dark and light sides of the Self begin to integrate. But the process is stormy – like Aphrodite's wrath at the discovery that her divine son has stooped to love a mere mortal.
The next thing we notice in this part of our story is the way Psyche finally “comes to herself” and voluntarily submits to the wrath of Aphrodite, whom she has offended. Here Psyche is making the final atonement for the hubris with which our tale began. All the beauty and esteem she had “stolen” from the goddess then, Psyche now symbolically gives back to its rightful “object.” This is the moment of “voluntary sacrifice” that so interested Jung. It initates a process of humanization in which bodily pain and humiliation are experienced (scourging and beating). The suffering of impossible difficulties (tasks) is undertaken, but now the “sacralized” ego comes under the guidance of the divine. Each impossible task is made possible by a miraculous intervention from the “divine” side of life so that the transpersonal is now cooperating in the ego's development. This can only happen after the sacrifice of an identification with divinity.
A moment similar to Psyche's voluntary sacrifice is found in Christ's crucifixion. Of this moment, Jung once said:
the utter failure came at the crucifixion in the tragic words “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize that they meant that Christ saw that his whole life, sincerely devoted to the truth according to his best conviction, had really been a terrible illusion. He had lived his life absolutely devotedly to its full and had made his honest experiment, but … on the cross his mission deserted him.
(Jung, 1937a)
Despite Christ's and Psyche's “disillusionment”, this paradoxical moment is pre-eminently an integrating moment initiating suffering in the service of an ultimate unity between the human and divine which has been severed. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann points out that the last cry of Jesus means “not only ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ but at the same time, ‘ My God, why hast thou forsaken thyself?’” (Moltmann, 1974: 151; emphasis added). This is also paradoxically, Lucifer's cry when he realizes God's intention to become incarnate, and represents the cosmic protest of the spiritually identified ego who, until this moment, refuses to embody. If God is by nature relationship between the divine and human, then this moment is not a forsaking of God by God, but the very beginning of the incarnation.
After these theological speculations, let us return to our story. Psyche's attitude of humility and vulnerability in the face of the divine wrath of the offended goddess tempers Aphrodite's sadism and, like Yahweh, faced with Job's humble suffering, secretly she begins to cooperate in Psyche's evolving struggle towards eventual reunion with Eros. We see this cooperation in her bemused acceptance of Psyche's successful completion of her impossible tasks and in the way the positive side of the numinosum constellates every time Psyche despairs of her ability to do what she is assigned. In Winnicott's language, omnipotence is slowly given up as each time Aphrodite (our story's infantile queen) “destroys” her object, and the object (Psyche) “is there to receive the communication.” Aphrodite can then say “Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you” (Winnicott, 1969: 222).
An additional sign that the trauma defense, with which our story started, is now in a process of healing, is the fact that Psyche is pregnant. This child, whose name will be Joy, constitutes the missing third or, in Ogden's language, that missing capacity for the symbolic which was nowhere to be found in the seamlessly interwoven “twoness in oneness” enjoyed by our couple in crystal palace of Psyche's daimon-lover. So while Psyche's impossible tasks involve self-doubt and suffering, there is now a sense of inner sustainment. She is operating, as it were, out of a deeper center in pursuit of her goal, which is the recovery of a relationship with her lost capacity for love, and this means a relationship between the human and the divine which had “collapsed” in the traumatic circumstances of our tale's beginning.
However, the tension between Psyche's compliance with her divine mistress' instructions and her human – all too human – curiosity (ego-willfuness) can be seen in her last and final task, where, in carrying out of Hades the box with Persephone's beauty inside, she cannot resist her curiosity once again. But this time the revenge of the gods is mild – a sleep from which Eros – now transformed and “humanized” by his wound can easily awaken her.
The final act of our drama is one which cements the relationship between the personal and transpersonal worlds in the ultimate symbolic aim of our story – a divine/human marriage. Eros seeks the blessing and aid of Zeus toward this end and Zeus replies, to our great delight:
My son and master, you have never shown me the honor decreed me by the gods, but with continued blows have wounded this heart of mine … and have brought shame upon me by often causing me to fall into earthly lusts; you have hurt my good name and fame by tempting me to base adulteries in defiance of public law and order, why, you have even led me to transgress the Julian law itself; you have made me foully to disfigure my serene countenance by taking upon me the likeness of serpents, fire, wild beasts, birds, and cattle of the field. Yet, notwithstanding, … remembering that you have grown up in my arms, I will grant you all your suit on one condition. You shall be on your guard against your rivals and, if there be on earth a girl of surpassing beauty, shall repay my present bounty by making her mine.
(Neumann, 1956: 52)
In this hilarious admission of helplessness in the face of Eros' power to compel the gods to involve themselves with the human world, including embodiment as animals and so on (a helplessness Zeus insists on experiencing again if an attractive maiden turns up!), we see how important Eros is in drawing God down into the human heart and how much the divine ostensibly needs the human in order to become real.
In the final act of our story, Zeus summons all the Oympian Gods to a banquet, where he presents the young Eros, announcing the limits he is about to set for him:
I have thought fit at last to set some curb upon the wild passions of [the young stripling whom you see before you]. Long enough he has been the daily talk and scandal of all the world … the wanton spirit of boyhood must be enchained in the fetters of wedlock. He has chosen a maiden, and robbed her of her honor. Let him keep her, let her be his forever, let him enjoy his love and hold Psyche in his arms to all eternity.
(ibid.)
Then, Zeus sends Hermes to fetch Psyche to heaven where he gives her a goblet of ambrosia, making her immortal, thus assuring that her marriage will endure forever. Soon after the nuptial banquet, a daughter is born to them and the myth tells us that “in the language of mortals she is called Joy” (ibid.: 53). With Psyche now immortalized, we might ask whether Joy is human or divine. Here we must remember Eros' warning to Psyche – that if his visage were ever “illuminated” in her presence – if she ever really saw him as “other” in the crystal palace, her child would be a mortal. In other words, she could assure her child's divinity (and that of her lover) only by remaining unconscious. Yet Psyche did risk the destruction of her divine lover by uncovering its daimonic aspect, and this does not prevent her from being elevated to Olympian stature. Our tale is thus a poignant warning that the gods must not always be heeded especially when their presence as archetypal self-care figures cuts us off from living. Our story leaves this issue unresolved – a paradox, in fact. It says that Joy is both human and divine, not either/or, and that the way to this Joy is a passion of ecstasy (Psyche) and humiliation (Eros) in which both the human and divine are transformed, through the agonies of human relationship, into love.