Psyche herself could best be compared to all the young mythological daughters of the great mother goddess. From Kerényi’s paper on the Kore myth, and Jung’s commentary on it, in Essays on a Science of Mythology,15 we find out more about these two figures. One could take Psyche as a variant of the Greek goddess Kore. Besides the mature woman there is the young girl who simply represents the mother goddess in her rejuvenated form. Mother and daughter are one, in the same way as the Father and the Son in the Christian religion. We have to ask, however, what the difference is between the mother and the daughter goddess, and in general we can say, looked at mutatis mutandis, that the daughter goddess is closer to the human than the mother goddess, just as God the Father is more removed from man than Christ. The same difference is true in regard to Kore. The girl goddess is closer to humanity, being a more incarnated form of the mother goddess, and Psyche would correspond to a more humanized form of the Great Mother, a form which has almost completely reached the human level. Only her name still implies that she is divine. In the great Demeter-Kore myth, Kore sometimes has to live with her mother in the upper world, and sometimes with Pluto in the lower world. Psyche, too, is connected with the underworld through a daimon who seems to be a god of death. Only at the end is she redeemed and taken up to Olympus. So one sees that her fate is a new variation of the old Demeter-Kore myth, and that she herself is an incarnated form of the Great Mother. In a man’s psychology this myth represents the problem of making himself conscious of and integrating his anima.
If a man is capable of integrating the anima, of establishing human contact with his anima, then he brings something archetypal into the realm of his humanity. From the man’s side this would be making the anima conscious, but seen from the side of the unconscious itself it means that the archetype incarnates. As Apuleius believed, the gods are removed from man and cannot be contacted directly. When the archetype appears as a synchronistic phenomenon you cannot do anything with it. You can see a meaning in it but you cannot influence it. Gods are, so to speak, the archetypes among themselves, and among them is the mother archetype—the great queen of heaven. Closer to man comes Kore-Psyche, the archetypal image entering the personal field of a man’s ego. I would like to illustrate this with an example.
A young man who had a positive mother complex dreamed of a mother goddess, a huge green woman with huge green hanging breasts, who was quite terrifying. He ran away from her in many dreams, so I got him to do an active imagination on the dream, that is, to take up contact with her in a waking fantasy.16 He approached her in a little boat and tried to enter a conversation with her, but he could not get close to the figure, for she was too frightening. All the same he saw that the whole had to do with his mother complex and his romantic veneration for nature. Then in outer life he got into contact with a beautiful, hysterical woman who behaved as a nature demon would. I said that he should talk to this woman inside himself, and when he did this, she said, “I am the same as the green one with whom you could not talk.” This irrational, catty woman said she was immortal! He said that he did not accept that, but she answered that she was the beginning and the end, meaning that she was God. Then a long conversation started in which the whole of his Weltanschauung had to be rediscussed. He had to review his whole attitude to life, which she pulled to pieces bit by bit. The green woman on the first level would be practically unapproachable, and the next step would be the Kore figure, which had a personal connection with him and with whom he could make contact.
Ovid speaks of Eros as the puer aeternus. That is giving him the highest inner value. It has become a habit to speak of the puer aeternus, meaning by that a mother’s boy, as a bit homosexual, idealistic, and unadapted, someone likely to be artistic and to have megalomaniacal fantasies. But in labeling a man like this, we forget that we are using the name of a god. It is the name of the genius, Eros. Eros is the puer aeternus. He represents the phenomenon which we know mostly in its negative context. If a man is a mother’s boy and lives as though he were eternal, as if he did not need to adapt to reality and a real woman, if he lives in savior fantasies as the man who will one day save the world or be the greatest philosopher or poet, he is wrongly identified with the puer aeternus figure. He is identical with a god, and he has not yet detached his ego complex from it. It has not yet grown out of the archetypal background, and the puer is sheer destructiveness. Such boys, who are stuck in the mother complex, are absolutely unformed, and the collective scheme fits all the cases. When I lectured on the puer aeternus case, many people came up afterward and said that they knew who he was, and a lot of young men were named. However, I was lecturing on the case of a man who had never been in Zurich. It was just that the characteristics fitted an innumerable number of cases.
The positive mother complex in particular constellates the divine son-lover of the Great Mother. Both together play the role of goddess and god, as Jung describes it in the first chapter of Aion. For a young man it is a great temptation to stay with the eternal mother, and he joins in by being the eternal lover. They help each other to stay outside life and do not face the fact that they are ordinary human beings. The son cannot separate from the mother and prefers to live the myth and the role of the young god instead.
That is the negative aspect. If he grows up, however, and realizes that he has to adapt to reality and to leave the paradise of the mother, then the puer aeternus becomes what he always has been, something positive: an aspect of the Self.17 If he does not grow up, neither his ego nor the Self are pure, because everything is too contaminated. The ego is inflated, that is, it assumes the role of the archetype, and the archetype is not free either. Man assumes the role of a god, and the unfortunate thing for him is that he becomes unadapted, ill, and neurotic, and then the puer aeternus, in his aspect of the Self, is also infected and becomes poisoned from his contact with human nature.
If we ascertain that this or that figure represents the Self, then this is a somewhat indefinite statement, for the Self has many facets. Eros would represent therein the aspects of creativity and vitality, as well as the capacity for being gripped by and feeling the meaning of life, for devoting oneself to the other sex and the search to find the right relationship, for being able to lift oneself beyond the boredom of life, to be moved religiously, to look for one’s own Weltanschauung, to support other people and to be able to help them. A person who meets someone in whom Eros is alive feels the mysterious inner nucleus behind his humble human ego, for he has creativity, life, and vitality. A man who has assimilated the puer will, when he deals with a problem, shape it anew. One knows from literature that people of genius have a way of discussing problems from entirely new angles. There is a source of creativity within them which is a specific manifestation of the Self.
The image of the Self does not appear only as the puer but often also as the “wise old man,” but as puer it is eternally youthful and gives a creative impulse to man which enables him to see life from another angle. This can be felt especially in Goethe’s poems. In the “West-Eastern Divan,” for instance, the poet uses Islamic mysticism as the outer form: the tired old man calls a young slave to bring him wine, and he speaks to the youth with a slightly erotic tinge. That is an experience of the Self. The puer aeternus always conveys the feeling of eternal life, of life beyond death. On the other hand, where there is an identification with the puer one finds the neurosis of the provisional life; that means someday the boy hopes to become an important man. Such youths live in the wrong idea of immortality, missing the here and now, which has to be accepted because it is what makes the bridge to eternal life.
In the case of a positive mother complex the young man identifies with the puer aeternus and must give up this identification. In the case of the negative mother complex the man refuses completely the identification with the puer aeternus quality. He tends to be cynical and not to trust his own feeling, or women. He is in a state of constant restraint. He cannot give himself to life and smells danger everywhere.
One could say that in our novel, Milo symbolizes this kind of stinginess, he who does not risk anything and who always sees “the snake in the grass.” Therefore, in the man with the negative mother complex, the puer aeternus becomes a very positive inner figure which has to be assimilated so that he can progress out of his psychic narrowness and counterbalance his frozen attitude to life.
We know that Lucius wants to investigate the negative mother complex and therefore his big problem is the puer aeternus whom he must find. Contrary to Lucius, Eros himself has a positive mother complex. He has an incestuous dependency on Venus and therefore has some difficulty in marrying. His problem is exactly the opposite of Lucius’s.
Remember that at first Eros and Psyche live happily united in the darkness of a faraway castle. She is happy but does not know what her husband looks like. Her jealous sisters find out about this hidden happiness and instruct Psyche to take a knife and kill him, because, they say, he is a snake or a dragon. We have to think what the jealous sisters stand for inwardly in a man. Erich Neumann takes them as shadow figures of Psyche. If we take it as a problem of a woman, this is true; her shadow is then projected onto her sisters, who want to destroy her happy marriage with the man she loves. If we take it as an anima problem, the sisters would represent the negative aspect of the anima. Her outstanding characteristic is jealousy, which would cause the poisoning of the anima through the negative mother aspect. The feelings coming from the negative mother poison the inner experience of life. The negative sisters who ruin Psyche are both unhappily married, having married for money and power, and they obviously represent a destructive side of the power complex, which destroys every true feeling relationship. They symbolize the greedy, envious force, the jealousy, possessiveness, and miserliness of the soul which does not want to give itself to an inner or outer love experience, together with the inability to get away from the banal aspect of life.
The man with the positive mother complex does not know this, for in his conscious behavior he tends to trust women too much. But if one knows him better, one discovers that he has this distrustful jealousy somewhere in the background of his feeling. Where there is a negative mother complex, the man will be jealous, distrustful, possessive, and anxious in his behavior toward women, but in the unconscious behind that, he remains very naive and shy, only because he is afraid to expose his feelings too much.
I once analyzed a man with a negative mother complex who had lived with his aunt. She was a hysterical, horrible old woman. It was really a fairy-tale-like story. She imprisoned him to such an extent that he could not even leave the flat during the day. He had to make the beds and clean the floors, was never allowed to go out, and was even forced to live with her sexually. This was in 1940 in Switzerland! The man escaped his aunt, entered analysis, and spoke of all women as damned witches. After some time he decided to give up his homosexual leanings and intended to take up connections to young women. But one cannot escape such a problem by conscious decision, so he had to work a lot more. For some strange reason he trusted me completely from the first day, but in such an unreal way that my heart sank. He asked for the meaning of his dreams and believed everything I said. I was apprehensive because nothing is more depressing than to be trusted more than one deserves. He did not see that I was an ordinary human being, but took everything I said for gospel. The result was a miraculous cure: his symptoms disappeared in two months. It was uncanny to me and reached the borders of magic; then he fell too much into the optimistic puer aeternus attitude, the reverse of the negative mother complex. Fortunately, after much more analytical work he really came out of his troubles.
Since then I have learned to expect such a reaction, knowing that where there is a negative mother complex, suddenly the puer aeternus will come out in the divine form, a divine naiveté which is not up to life as it really is, or women as they really are. After having switched from one to the other, he had to grow up to a middle attitude and learn to go into relationships without complete distrust or the limitless trust of a little boy. But I could have done nothing for him if I had misused my power. I had to wait and avoid every power attitude. I tried from time to time to put a little skepticism into his trustfulness, and when I gave him the interpretation of a dream, I asked him if he really believed it, trying to get him to be more critical and to listen to his own judgment instead of saying, always, “Yes.” At the end it so happened that one day he needed me badly. At that time I had the flu and could not see him. That gave him a shock, and suddenly he saw that I was an ordinary human being who could even fall ill. For the first time he realized that I was not a divine daimon or goddess but could get the flu, and that gave him a hint that he should grow up, that to leave everything in my hands was not quite safe. So he pulled himself together and began to think about his relationship to me and what it meant.
In our tale one can say that in the figure of Psyche is personified a positive feeling relationship of man to women and to the unconscious, but one which is naive and still living in paradise, where everything is positive. At the same time, the jealous sisters are too skeptical, too cynical, and too much aware of the banal aspect of life. If one walks in the woods and sees the young couples who are in love with each other, then one realizes that they are living in a divine world. The people who pass by have a double reaction, for, on the one hand, they recognize that the lovers are in a divine world, and, on the other, everything looks so utterly common and banal. It is “the eternal Harry and the eternal Harriet,” and, like the jealous sisters, the passers-by make mocking remarks because they are aware of the couples’ banality and incompleteness, while the couples themselves see only their fairy-tale aspect. The two aspects are too far apart and one-sided. One who sees such a thing from a more mature attitude will know that there is always both, the divine and the banal aspect, and that is one of the greatest paradoxes our feeling must learn to accept.
A woman who was occupied with this problem, and who asked herself whether her love relationship was a divine experience or a banal love affair, dreamed once of a king and a queen wearing radiant crowns, walking ahead of her, accompanied by a cock and a hen. And a voice said, “These two pairs are one and the same thing.” This image represents fittingly the paradox of love, but practically it is a great problem, and to stand it, great maturity is required. In alchemy the symbol of the coniunctio, a union of the divine couple, can be represented equally as king and queen, as god and goddess, or as two mating dogs.18 The alchemists knew that these are all aspects of the same union, symbols of the psychic opposites in the unconscious wholeness of the personality.
6
Amor and Psyche II
We have seen that Psyche and Venus are two aspects of the same archetype, Venus symbolizing more the anima which is mixed with the maternal image and Psyche the actual anima which is no longer contaminated with the maternal image. One could imagine the archetypes like atomic nuclei in the field of the unconscious. Most probably, there they are in a state in which every element is influenced by all the others. Thus an archetype in the unconscious is in some way also identical with the whole unconscious. It contains in itself the opposites: it is everything, masculine and feminine, dark and light, everything overlaps. Only when an archetype approaches the threshold of consciousness does it become more distinct. In our story, Venus resents that she, the omnipotent goddess in the Beyond, has now a rival on earth. This is a widespread problem in late antiquity. It appears with variations, for instance, in the so-called “Songs of the Fallen Sophia,” which were written about the time of Apuleius. According to some Gnostic systems, especially in the book Pistis Sophia,1 there was with God at the beginning of creation a feminine figure or companion: Sophia, Wisdom. In the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, too, she is represented as the Wisdom of God. (See the Song of Solomon, Jesus Sirach, and Proverbs.) There she says: “Before God created the world I was there. I played with Him. . . .” But, since according to Christian teaching God is not married and has no feminine compan
ion, the interpretation of these texts gave some trouble to the Church Fathers, who therefore said that this was the pre-incarnate form of the “anima Christi” before his incarnation.
In many Gnostic systems it is said that Sophia was with God at the beginning of, or before, creation, but later she sank down into matter and was cut off from God. She had lost her connection, and in seeking Him when looking down into matter she saw a lion-headed demon, Jaldabaoth, and she thought that that was God the Father and went down, and Jaldabaôth caught her. There are very beautiful songs and poems in which she calls back to the Heavenly Father asking for his help to free her from matter and from her contamination with the demons and with Jaldabaôth. The Gnostics in late antiquity were the philosophers and thinkers in the early Church, and it is not by chance that they have amplified the myth of the fallen Sophia, because as Jung says, if a man identifies with the Logos or the intellect, his emotional and feeling side falls into the unconscious and must be redeemed from there.2 His soul then becomes contaminated with primitive chthonic passion. This myth, developed especially by the Gnostics, was forgotten after the Church decided to expel the Gnostic philosophers and declare their system as heresy.3
The Golden Ass of Apuleius Page 11
