04 Apr PSYCHE & EROTIC TRANSFERNCE

“Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity.” (Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld, 1979, p. 23)

In the classical Greek myth of Eros and Psyche (Apuleius, 2nd century), Psyche- ‘Soul,’ a beautiful young maiden, attracts popular adoration and worship and thereby also attracts the ire of the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite-Venus, who is bitter that devotion to her is being misdirected to a mortal. Aphrodite charges her son, Eros- ‘Love,’ with punishing Psyche for eclipsing her. When Psyche’s parents learn that their daughter has upset the goddess, they consult an oracle who divines that she is doomed and instructs them to prepare for a dismal and cursed marriage for the girl. On the appointed day, Psyche is delivered by her family in a funerary procession to her fate, then left at the edge of a cliff alone. After the grieving wedding party departs, Zephyrus, the god of the wind, lifts Psyche from the mountaintop and safely delivers her to an otherworldly palace where she is served and entertained by an invisible staff.

Each night, Psyche is visited by her bridegroom in the dark of night, but she is forbidden from knowing his identity. Fear of her invisible lover evolves into desire. Their affair goes on for some time in partial anonymity in the dark, until Psyche becomes determined to reveal the identity of her spouse, despite his wishes. One night, after making love, Eros falls asleep beside his bride. Psyche, fulfilling her premeditated plot, lights a lamp. Upon seeing the handsome, godly face of her lover for the first time, Psyche is awestruck and accidentally wounds her beloved with a drop of hot lamp oil on his wing. At the same time, she pierces herself with one of his arrows, causing herself to fall madly in love with Love himself. Physically injured, and betrayed, Eros leaps up and abandons Psyche, leaving her alone in the dark.

Bereft and with child, Psyche pursues the impossible task of finding her love. Aphrodite makes many attempts to thwart the girl by setting before her a series of impossible challenges. However, Psyche overcomes each trial with the help of divinities of the natural world. She is nearly defeated by the final task given to her by Aphrodite, but Eros finds Psyche in time to revive her. He takes her to the domain of the gods on Mount Olympus and her courage is rewarded with immortality. She, and her future child, Hedone, ‘Pleasure’ become divine.

This is the mythic story and heroic journey of the Soul as it yearns for reunion with Love. From a Jungian or depth psychology perspective, the myth of Eros and Psyche can be interpreted as an intra-psychic journey of integration through the marriage of Anima-Animus, feminine and masculine consciousness. In Erich Neuman’s commentary on Eros and Psyche, he translates the myth into the “psychic development of the feminine.” Before Psyche’s rebellious act of casting light upon her lover in the dark, “Psyche’s existence is a non-existence, a being-in-the-dark, a rapture of sexual sensuality which may fittingly be characterized as being devoured by a demon, a monster.” (Neuman, 1952, p. 74) From this perspective we can see that Psyche’s will and perseverance to reunite with Eros brings her out of her passive position of naivete, into the physical, relational, illuminated world of choices and consequences, the essential developmental process of individuation.

“It is not difficult to transpose psychology’s conceptual mythology into the mythology of the underworld, nor is it difficult to envision the relationship between day world and night world as the hero’s descent and our modern notions of the unconscious as reflections of Tartaros and Styx, Charon and Cerberus, Hades and Pluto. Pluto, especially, is important to recognize in our euphemistic reference to the unconscious as the giver of wholeness, a storehouse of abundant riches, a place not of fixation in torment, but a place, if propitiated rightly, that offers fertile plenty.” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979, p. 20)

The dark of Psyche’s bedchamber is the dark of the dreamworld, the dark of the underworld, the dark of the mysteries of the unconscious. Her divine lover, Eros, is the Lord of the Dark, her masculine soul, her Animus, arousing her from the childish slumber of maidenhood with erotic passion.

In psychoanalyst-psychiatrist, Franco de Masi’s paper “Erotic Transference: Dream or Delusion?” he writes, “Erotic transference can lie between two extremes: it can stem from the positive images necessary to build new shared emotional realities or it can be fueled with falsifications and distortions, namely fraught with dissociation from psychic reality. In the first case the erotic transference expresses the capacity to dream the affective relationship, and for this reason Freud highlighted its mutative aspects as “forces impelling to make changes.” (Freud, “Observations on Transference Love,” 1915)

Erotic transference refers to the phenomenon within a therapeutic relationship in which the client falls in love with their therapist. Freud believed “transference love is tantamount to some kind of transitional state, real and unreal at the same time, progressive and regressive, an attempt at coordinating fantasy and reality and, in particular, matching an old organization and a potential new one.” (Masi, “Erotic Transference,” pp.2-3)

In Psyche’s story, her desire for the dark lover is the erotic impulse of her own soul demanding personal growth. She leaves the closed world of fantasy to pursue her dream in the light of day. Out of bed, she must reconcile fantasy with reality. In the pursuit of her lover, she finds the substance she longs for within herself. Her Animus attraction awakens within her what was previously dormant, her own strength and determination.

Erotic transference then, with the dark lover of the dreamworld, or one’s therapist, can elicit and draw out what is emergent within the dreamer. Eros for the imaginal lover or the therapist can be a projection of self-love, seeing one’s own Venusian qualities – beauty and value – reflected on the face of an intra-personal / inter-personal / or trans-personal therapeutic partner who watches with attention the turbulence and reorganization of transformation unfolding before them.

Catherine Brooks, 2023

Painting: L’Amour et Psyché, François-Édouard Picot