The Myth of Analysis
“Initiation as a transformation of consciousness about life involves necessarily a transformation of consciousness about sexuality. Crucial to any comparison of loving in regard to its effects upon the psyche will always be the role that Aphrodite plays in the #myth of Eros & Psyche. Psyche is the servant of the Goddess, a priestess or one consecrated to that form of love. In this relationship, Aphrodite is manifestly against the eros-psyche union. The opposition of Aphrodite is not merely a folktale motif of the bad mother who is an obstacle to love. Aphrodite rather expresses the fundamental anti psychic component of “one sort” of loving. Our tale tells of a difference between Aphroditic and psychic loving. Psyche may be a devotee of Aphrodite, but she must nevertheless find her own style of love, which is not Aphroditic. Aphrodite would keep both Psyche and Eros for herself by keeping them from each other. She seems to not want love to find #soul or soul to find eros. She not only represents the #archetypal anti psychic component of loving, but she also blocks the transformation of eros by preventing it from connecting with soul. Because the love of Eros is aimed at Psyche, it becomes the task of Psyche in each individual, when under fiery compulsion, to discriminate, between those movements of eros which are soul-making and another kind of love which insists that all psychic events be servants of Aphrodite’s needs and shallow loving. Eros connects the personal to something beyond and brings the beyond into the personal.It leads (#psychopomp) the soul to the gods and brings some glimmer, sublime horror of the divine into the soul. Eros as intermediary creates his own psychic space, a world between, by a peculiar sort of psychic interference, the inexplicable. Psyche in the end lays her life on the line for Eros, soulmaking, rather than the constraints of the "terrible mother" or infantile ego."
Excerpt from The Myth of Analysis by James Hillman
Books mentioned:
The Myth of Analysis by James Hillman
