13

Eros

 

SINCE its inception, depth psychology has consistently recognized the special role of eros in its work. In fact, psychoanalysis has been as much an eroto-analysis as an analysis of soul, since its basic perspective toward soul has been libidinal. The omnipresence of eros in therapy and in the theory of all depth psychologies receives this recognition under the technical term transference.

Archetypal psychology, analogously to Jung’s alchemical psychology of transference, imagines transference against a mythical background – the Eros and Psyche mythologem from Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Hillman 1972c) – thereby de-historicizing and de-personalizing the phenomenology of love in therapy as well as in any human passion. “By recognizing the primacy of the image, archetypal thought frees both psyche and logos to an Eros that is imaginal” (Bedford 1981). The imaginal, mythical transposition implies that all erotic phenomena whatsoever, including erotic symptoms, seek psychological consciousness and that all psychic phenomena whatsoever, including neurotic and psychotic symptoms, seek erotic embrace. Wherever psyche is the subject of endeavor or the perspective taken toward events, erotic entanglements will necessarily occur because the mythological tandem necessitates their appearance together. While Apuleius’s myth details the obstacles in the relation between love and soul, R. Stein (1974) has developed an archetypal approach to the incestuous family hindrances that prevent eros from becoming psychological and psyche from becoming erotic.

The idea of a mythic tandem as basis of transference was first suggested by Freud’s Oedipal theory and elaborated by Jung in his anima-animus theory (CW 16). Archetypal psychology has gone on to describe a variety of tandems: Senex and Puer (Hillman 1967b, UE 3); Venus and Vulcan (M. Stein 1973); Pan and the Nymphs (Hillman 1972a); Apollo and Daphne; Apollo and Dionysus; Hermes and Apollo (López-Pedraza 1977); Zeus and Hera (M. Stein 1977); Artemis and Puer (Moore 1979a); Echo and Narcissus (Berry 1979b); Demeter and Persephone (Berry 1975); Mother and Son (Hillman 1973b). Guggenbühl-Craig has discussed the archetypal fantasies operating in the patient-helper relationship (1971) and in the dyad of marriage (1977). These tandems provide occasion for the examination of diverse forms of erotic relationships, their rhetorics and expectations, the particular styles of suffering, and the interlocking mutualities that each tandem imposes. These tandems are imagined also as going on intrapsychically, as patterns of relations between complexes within an individual.

Since love of soul is also love of image, archetypal psychology considers transference, including its strongest sexualized demonstrations, to be a phenomenon of imagination. Nowhere does the impersonality of myth strike a human life more personally. Thus transference is the paradigm for working through the relations of personal and literal with the impersonal and imaginal. Transference is thus nothing less than the eros required by the awakening of psychic reality; and this awakening imposes archetypal roles upon patient and therapist, not the least of which is that of “psychological patient,” which means one who suffers or is impassioned by psyche. For this erotic – not medical – reason, archetypal psychology retains the term “patient” instead of client, analysand, trainee, etc. The erotic struggles in any relationship are also psychological struggles with images, and as this psychomachia proceeds in an archetypal therapy, there is a transformation of love from a repression and/or obsession with images to a slow love of them, to a recognition that love is itself rooted in images, their continuous creative appearance and their love for that particular human soul in which they manifest.