When Eros Leaves;
When Eros Returns

Lyn Cowan
Copyright © 2004

                                           

            First, I want to say a large and warm thank you for the invitation to be here in this beautiful city, and for your welcome.  It is obvious that Eros himself must visit this place often.

            It seems that there are two things that most psychotherapists, and especially Jungians, do not talk much about:  one is sensual desire, the other is pleasure.  We talk much about the suffering involved in the process of individuation, and about sacrifices the ego must make to come into a new relationship with the Self, and about the importance of containing impulses and not acting out, and about the great influence of parental images in the individual psyche.  But we do not talk much about sensual desire and pleasure, and yet it is in these movements of psychic life that much of the individuation process unfolds.  For after all the analysis, and interpretations, and adaptations, and changed attitudes in many areas, we are still left with the stubborn fact of sensual desire that wants and wants and wants, and with the pleasure that we simply crave and cannot and will not give up.  The very fact that we have so little understanding of, and control over, sensual desire and pleasure tells us that perhaps this is an area where we are still rather unconscious.

            So in these two presentations, I will try to offer some thoughts on the nature of sensual desire as we know it through the appearance of Eros in the psyche, and on pleasure, who is the mythic daughter born of the union of Psyche and Eros, and how the comings and goings of Eros affect our individuation.

            Most of the time we, and especially we Jungians, speak of Eros as Jung did, as the “principle of relatedness,” the force in the psyche that brings persons together into relationship.  We also speak of him as that power in the psyche that makes for sexual attraction between persons, that makes love physical and not just metaphysical.  He is the Erotic One, and without him sex would be not much different than washing the dishes or sweeping the floor -- necessary things, but not much fun.

            In these two lectures I will be speaking of Eros from a slightly different angle than these ways in which we usually think of Eros.  I want to speak first about the problem we all face when Eros leaves Psyche, and then, tomorrow, to see what happens in the psyche when Eros returns, and why we seem to pay so little attention to the pleasure that is born from his return.  In both conditions, I am more interested in the phenomenology of erotic movements, rather than the symptomatology of eroticism.  When Eros leaves and we feel his loss, this is not a pathological condition, even though his departure makes us feel “sick” at heart.  It is a just-so fact we must deal with, a recurring enactment of a mythic event in the psyche.  And when Eros returns, the wild awakening and often uncontrolled lust we experience is not in itself pathological either, although it may cause all kinds of trouble with family, friends, and lovers.

            Let me also say that I am not drawing a clear line between ourselves as clinicians and those who are our patients.  The problems patients bring to us are not very different from the problems we must deal with in our own lives; we suffer the comings and goings of Eros just as our patients do. Each of us, in our own way, is engaged in a process of individuation, which means, at least in part, coming to terms with both the heartache caused by Eros when he leaves, and the great joy we feel when Eros returns.  So, much of my focus will be on us as therapists, analysts, clincians, doctors of the soul, because we need as much attention as we give to our patients. 

            You are all probably familiar with the ancient tale from Greek mythology of Psyche and Eros: but if you don’t know it or remember it, let me give it to you briefly.  It is the story of Psyche, a mortal woman, who arouses the wrath of Aphrodite, goddess of Love, because of her great beauty.  Aphrodite commands her divine son Eros to shoot one of his arrows that will cause Psyche to fall in love with the ugliest creature available.  But when Eros sees the beautiful Psyche, he falls deeply in love with her and disobeys his mother, asking Apollo to arrange the marriage.  (Please note here that Psyche has nothing to do with any of this -- she is the involuntary and innocent subject of these manipulations.)  So Psyche is given to Eros in marriage, but since the match has been arranged against Aphrodite’s wishes, Eros forbids Psyche to look upon him so that his identity will remain secret.  He comes to her only in the night.  And soon Psyche falls in love with Eros in the darkness, hearing his soft, gentle whispers, only guessing at what he might look like, but feeling in her body his tenderness and desire for her.

            She is alone in the great palace Eros has provided for her and asks that her sisters be allowed to visit.  Eros agrees and the sisters come.  As soon as they see the magnificent palace, they become madly jealous.  On the second visit, when they discover that Psyche has never seen her husband, they terrify her into believing that he will turn into a monstrous serpent who will creep right into her womb and devour her and the baby she is likely to have. 

            Torn between her wish to honor her husband’s command and her sisters’ dire warnings, Psyche finally gives in to her curiosity and fear, and that night, going to her bed, she takes a lantern and a dagger with her.  After Eros comes and has fallen asleep, she lights the lamp and holds it to his face, raising the dagger to kill him.  But when she sees how beautiful the face of the god of love truly is, she is startled, and a drop of hot oil falls on his shoulder and wakes him.  But now that Psyche recognizes him as the son of Aphrodite, Eros rises up in pain, flees the palace, and leaves his beloved wife. 

            Psyche falls into despair, filled with grief and remorse.  Not knowing where to turn, Psyche goes to the palace of Aphrodite for help.  But Aphrodite, jealous and vengeful, enslaves her, assigning her four impossible tasks knowing that each is more impossible than the one before.  Desperate to win Aphrodite’s help in her search for Eros, Psyche attempts the tasks.

            Of course, Psyche is caught in a love madness by now, almost ready for the psychiatric ward.  She has lost her love, her desire, her heart -- all of which is Eros.  She has no idea she has been set up to fail by Aphrodite’s jealous rage.  She took on her sisters’ fear as her own, rather than listening to her own inner knowledge that her husband was kind and loving.  She doesn’t know that Aphrodite is jealous of her or why; she doesn’t know that Eros loves her deeply and that his love is a disobedience to his mother’s command.  She is in a desperate mess.  She is so miserable she wouldn’t even think to go to an analyst or a therapeutic support group.

            The story has a happy ending: the tasks are accomplished, Eros returns, a child named Pleasure is born to the happy couple, Aphrodite forgets her anger (perhaps because she’s now a grandmother), Psyche is given the nectar of immortality to drink, and all live happily ever after.

            But while the story has a happy ending, it is not easy getting to it, and it is the middle part of the story that concerns us here.  Because to get to the end of the story you have to go through it, and that means accomplishing the impossible tasks, and accomplishing them without heart or desire or interest.  These tasks are impossible also in that they require more of Psyche than she has -- more skill, more knowledge, more concentration, more focus, more energy, more time.  The four tasks are that Psyche is to sort a whole roomful of mixed seeds, bring back a hank of wool from man-eating sheep, fill a jar of water from the terrible and freezing River Styx, and descend to the Underworld and return with a jar of beauty ointment from Persephone, queen of the Underworld. 

            And yet, though her soul’s love and her heart’s desire is gone, the nearly impossible tasks are accomplished.  How does she do the impossible?  The same way we each get through life when we are without Eros, bereft, grieving, suffering loss and enduring a deepening disinterest in the world and the people in that world.  Like Psyche, we fall back on the dissociated parts we are not always conscious of but which emerge to carry us through.  Psyche is too exhausted and grief-stricken to question or interfere with these dissociated parts, and we can learn something from her here -- we can learn how to dissociate creatively, doing the tasks that our lives demand of us while we wait for Eros to return.

            In each of the tasks Psyche is given help -- even salvation -- by a colony of ants who sort the seeds, by a reed who tells her how to take advantage of the sheep to retrieve the wool, by an eagle who appears suddenly and swoops down and fills her jar with water from the Styx, and by a tower who carefully instructs her how to navigate her way to the underworld, how to behave there, and how to return safely.

            While Psyche wanders through her own story in despair and thinks seriously about suicide, other parts of her come to her rescue.  Put in psychological terms, she is saved by the lowest life forms, the most unconscious aspects of functioning:  by insects (ants), even by an anonymous reed, a piece of lowly vegetation, which we rarely consider as a carrier of psychic wisdom. She is saved by a sharp-eyed eagle who can both go deeply into and transcend the dilemma.  And she is saved by a tower, a human construction, perhaps symbolizing culture made from human consciousness, which contains the collective wisdom of our species and carries the memory of how life was before Eros left, and the knowledge and faith of rebirth, of how to descend to the Underworld and return to the living again.

            What is remarkable about this tale is that we see Psyche unable to do anything.  She is practically paralyzed with traumatic loss.  She toils through her own story, aware only of her misery.  She is so stricken with grief that -- fortunately -- it does not occur to her to obstruct or interfere with the deep instinctual movements that preserve her life.  She plods on, like an ox that pulls a plow row after row after row after row, not knowing or caring what crop is being planted or what it will mean to harvest it.  Psychologically, the way these tasks are completed in this story teach us that when you cannot cope, when you lose heart, when you have no desire to relate or must suffer through the absence of warmth and love in life, there is a deeper autonomous instinct that takes over and gets you through.  We sometimes jokingly call it flying on automatic pilot, but the truth is, there is an automatic pilot -- a level of the psyche that knows exactly what to do for itself in crisis or times of great pressure, and how to do it out of necessity when Eros is no longer a motivating power in the soul.  Necessity was known as a goddess to the ancient Greeks, named Ananke, and when Eros leaves, we act according to her demands rather than according to the sweet desire of Eros. We act like Psyche in despair: stare at the ants while they sort seeds, listen to the small voice of the unnoticeable reed and do what we’re told, let an ally, an eagle, literally a bird out of the blue, give us a higher perception of what is happening even though we can’t change it or even understand it, and let the great cultural wealth of humanity feed and nurture us while we are unable to make our own contribution.

            While poor Psyche is living her part of the story, Eros, who is just as desperate as Psyche to find his lost mate, goes to Olympus to seek help from Zeus, the Father of the Gods. Eros tells him everything that has happened, pleads that Psyche has been punished enough, and asks that he be allowed to lawfully marry her.  Zeus consents.  Eros happily rushes off to find his lost soul, the beautiful Psyche.

            But then, just as we are about to have the happy ending, Psyche fails.  As it is with most of us too often, just when we are about to emerge from a terribly difficult and painful experience, having accomplished something nearly impossible at great cost and suffering -- we fail. We cannot take the next step.  We cannot be satisfied with what we have, or have done; we want more, or think more is necssary.  We cannot hear wisdom, or remember the same mistake we made before, or take advice.  We have been without Eros for so long, we cannot get him back fast enough, or get enough of him.  Ego suddenly reasserts itself and ruins everything.

            Psyche has almost left the Underworld when her curiosity to see what the jar holds and her desire to win back Eros combine to lead her to an almost fatal act:  against strong warnings from the helpful Tower not to do so, she opens the jar and is immediately overcome by a deathlike sleep, which is what the jar really contained.  But as love would have it, Eros himself finds her in this condition, brings her back into life with a divine kiss and carries her up to Olympus, where their marriage is celebrated by all the gods.  

            One of the things we learn from the myth of Psyche and Eros is that individuation does not stop when Eros leaves.  It merely happens in another way.  And I think we can see it happening in the phenomenology of Eros’s absence:  how the Psyche experiences this absence.  And I stress that when Eros leaves, we do not automatically fall into a pathological condition. Again, I am thinking in terms of phenomenology, not symptomatology.  The psyche’s individuation process continues without Eros, not through the integration of various troublesome complexes, and not through the resolution of a transference, but through the experience of protracted grief and through loss, kept alive only by Necesssity.  It is the way the alchemists in former times called the via longissima, the longest way, and also the slowest way, by sorting the tiniest seedlings of daily events and by listening carefully to the barely recognizable stirrings of our reedlike, vegetative selves.

            The unrelatedness we feel when Eros leaves, the absence of sensual desire, the inability to delight in the colors and tastes of the world, are all perhaps best decribed by the word “cold.”  But in this Eros-less condition, Psyche is still capable, not only of surviving, but of continuing her quest -- for meaning, for transformation, for love.  Without the warmth of Eros, psychic movement does not freeze; it just slows down.  Instead of individuation moving along with bright spots of insights and the increasing light of conscious recognition, it takes place near the North Pole, the coldest place on the planet -- an image of barren wasteland where nothing seems to happen -- or maybe once a century or so an iceberg breaks apart and changes the landscape. 

            Let me tell you a dream of a 36-year-old American Caucasion woman who I will call “Ann,” a college instructor in English Literature, who went into analysis with a male colleague of mine.  She went seeking help and relief from a life-long sense of general dissatisfaction and a depression which worsened dramatically shortly after her marriage of 10 years ended.  Even though she was the initiator of the divorce, she felt unexpectedly abandoned and sad.  This was one of the first dreams she had after beginning analytical work:

 

                        I am at a small cabin somewhere in the arctic regions  A handsome man                         seems to be my companion and guide, though his face is usually turned               away from me.  Too vague to describe, although he seems to have light                  hair.  Linda Ronstadt [a popular American singer, especially in the 1980s]                      is there, with 3 or 4 others.  I tell her I especially liked her recording of the                 song, “Blue Bayou.”   She is very friendly and gracious.  The man takes                       me outside, and down completely to the center of the earth.  (This is a               sudden shift.)  The scene is a snowscape, majestic and beautiful.  There                         are ice mountains in the distance.  Then the angle shifts and we are high              above the ice floor (although there is an ice ceiling, several miles up)                         looking down on a vast panorama.  As far as the eye can see there are ice                     mountains, but all angular and planed, vast valleys, everything made of                  smooth ice.  I am stunned by the frozen brilliance, the endlessness of it, the                 millions of reflecting angles.  At first I’m afraid of falling, but the                          profound beauty of it wipes out all other feelings.

 

            Ann said this about her dream:  “This dream is amazing.  I was amazed and awed by the ice world.”  To the image of the arctic regions she associated “just cold.”  She had no associations at all to the handsome man, but of Linda Ronstadt she said, “I really like her music, she’s very versatile.  She has a lot of feeling in her voice, no matter what she’s singing.”  And to the song “Blue Bayou,” Ann said, “It’s one of my favorites by her [Linda Ronstadt].  I can never catch the words, but the music has a nice lilt that feels kind of bittersweet, almost sad.”

            I think we can clearly see from this dream that to be without Eros is to be in an ice world, cold and empty.  There is a place deep, deep in the soul that is frozen and uninhabitable.  One can visit, but not live there.  And yet -- this is exactly the place where the dreamer is able to feel amazement, awe, and a profound appreciation for beauty.  It is here that she is able to see everthing -- her life, her loss, her desire -- from a million different angles.  This is a place of infinite reflection, a vast expanse of cold interiority where Eros is not. There is a crsip sharpness to this inner world, a complementary precision to Ann’s own vagueness about the things she loves:  she loves the song “Blue Bayou” because it expresses a familiar and important emotion for her; but she can never remember the words and so remains inarticulate about and largely unconscious of her important emotions.

            The handsome man who’s face is turned away from her may be her analyst, or Hermes, guide to the Underworld, or Hades, who is lord of the Underworld.  Or perhaps it is Eros himself, her own larger-than-life desire to experience the deepest part of psyche in order to truly appreciate its beauty and infinity.  The divine Eros she does not recognize brings her to envision a new relationship with her own inexhaustible possibilities, and this becomes for Ann a religious experience of awe.  When she awakens, she awakens to her daily, above-ground life, but having had a guided visitation to the depths, she returns with at least a million new angles from which to reflect upon her life, and with the knowledge that there is indeed a guide, and a small spark of hope that maybe -- just maybe -- his face will not always be turned away from her.  After all, Eros is seeking soul, just as Ann is drifting through her life seeking Eros.  Without realizing it, sheis living the ancient mythic story.

            When Eros leaves, he takes the heart with him.  Eros is not just a principle of relatedness, but the very embodiment of desire and sensuality.  Without the erotic sensibility that he confers, the delight in the sensual world, the love he inspires, and the desire he instills -- for he is, himself, a potent mix of all these -- the heart fails.  The problem is not so much that one’s heart has been broken (although it may be), but that it has been lost altogether and cannot be found.  Now there is just an empty space where the heart used to be, and one has no heart for anything; hope for the future dwindles, faith that there will be a future fails.  And we also lose a sensate connection to the world: we become almost impenetrable, nothing touches us and we do not reach out to touch.  Silky fur, the color of a sunset, the taste of sweetness, a solo Spanish guitar heard in a warm evening -- all these pleasures are now far away from us, and feel irrelevant.

            This condition has been known historically as deep melancholia; in its extreme form it was known in Latin as “acedie,” best translated as “spiritual despair,” a condition all too well known to medieval monks and nuns, but also very much a modern condition that may visit any of us at any time.  “Acedie” is a despair so dark that the problem is not that you’ve completely lost your faith -- it is that you don’t care that you’re lost your faith.  The condition is described well in a less serious way in a recent Woody Allen movie, titled, “Anything Else,” in which the main character says, “I have so many problems even suicide wouldn’t solve all of them.

            When the beautiful god Eros leaves us, we lose the spark of divinity that enables us to feel connected to the world and other people, and to some core sense of self.  And of course the sense of unrelatedness and disconnect, the feelings of being cut off from life, the lack of desire to be related and involved and engaged, doesn’t just happen interpersonally -- it happens intrapsychically as well, which makes the pain of losing Eros even worse. 

            In past times, the alchemists who were attempting to make transmutations of lead into gold -- transmutations in psychic life, as we understand it today -- spoke of those times when Eros leaves as a serious problem of sulphur.  Of the three substances of which all things are made -- mercury, salt, and sulphur (and some alchemists included lead) -- sulphur, they said, was the most difficult to manage.  (Of course, they said this about the other substances as well, but the alchemists never worried about contradicting themselves.)  Sulphur is the substance that gives life its color and sensual pleasures, it is the “fat” contained in all things that makes sensual experience rich, lush, tasty, and vibrant.  It was recognized as a divinity not only because of its power to enliven and vitalize, but because it is necessary for life.  Without it, we are psychologically dead, in an ice world like the dreamer Ann, like Psyche wandering through a life of impossible tasks.  Sulphur is the burning desire to live and experience all there is in life.  Sulphur is the hot rage to live.  In modern terms we would call it the “affective basis of the ego” -- motivation, that which moves us.  When sulphur cannot be controlled, it appears in the form of various compulsions, unconscious acting out, a sense of drivenness and unrealistic ambitions.  So the alchemists recognized that sulphur, with all the attributes of a god, was at the same time also the devil: red, fiery, evil-smelling and capable of great destruction. 

            It seems to me that whether we mean to or not, we psychotherapists tend to worry more about the destructiveness of Eros than to celebrate the great pleasures he brings.  In this, I think we reflect the modern cultural bias against Eros.  The bias may not be as pronounced here in Brazil as much as it is in America, but my impression is that, to some degree, it is a problem of repression and denial in those parts of the world with a long historical tradition of religious prohibitions against anything associated with eroticism, and this includes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

            We have been, largely unconsciously, afraid of Eros since the world was split long ago into two apparently exclusive realms, the body and the soul, or the body and the spirit, forcing us into a schizophrenic double-bind of having to choose only one, even though we know both are necessary.  The split has been reinforced through Christianity’s insistence on the superiority of the spirit; through the ancient Greek insistence on moderation and our own modern psychological goal of “balance;” through society’s disapproval of all strong feelings (this is perhaps particularly so in America); and through mainstream psychology’s failure to recognize that behind most addictive, compulsive behavior is an unmet spiritual need and an unrecognized religious ritual.  Erotic matters, whether they have to do with love affairs or food diets, are too often framed in terms of “either/or” rather than “both/and,” and are judged in moralistic terms of “good/bad” or “positive/negative.”  We know, however, that if we judge Eros, we cannot understand him.

            Perhaps there is so much fear of Eros because this god brings home to us the shocking reality of how little defense any of us have against emotional depth, emotional intensity, and the wrenching pain involved in loving and losing.  So great is the collective fear of Eros that most of this god’s blessings have been turned into curses: sexuality into pornography, love of pleasure into selfish gratification, intimacy into invasion, aesthetic display of the human form into exhibitionistic bad taste, lust into criminal obscenity, romantic poetry into therapeutic platitudes.  Much of the English language has been de-eroticized and deadened; no one speaks in sulphuric rhetoric or tones anymore -- not even politicians, who try desperately to appear reasonable and calm and righteous.  (If you have been observing the current American presidential campaign, you might have noticed that one of the original Democratic party candidates, Howard Dean, lost his party’s endorsement to John Kerry.  People were afraid that Dean was too passionate, too hot, so they chose John Kerry, who never loses his cool.) 

            Four hundred years ago, John Donne, an English Anglican priest filled with Eros, was able to write a scorching sonnet and say fearlessly to the world, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.”  But today we settle for the anemic and flaccid expressions of popular psychology, as in, “I need you to know that I want to be in an intimate relationship with you.”   If you have the impression that my country, the United States, is a nation that specializes in the practice of superficiality, I must sorrowfully confirm that impression.  We don’t even know how to enjoy dinner anymore without counting calories, worrying about carbohydrates, checking for omega fatty acids, deciding if two glasses of red wine is bad for the liver or good for the heart.  But it also may hold true elsewhere in the world, that much of life, which we delusionally think is under our conscious control, is lived from a guilty conscience.  And perhaps much of this guilt is rooted in our inability -- and even more, our unwillingness -- to consciously choose what we deeply, truly desire as opposed to what we have been told is good for us.

            Many of you may remember the character of Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey) in the movie of a few years ago, American Beauty.  I want to introduce him here as our clinical case.  Lester is the most ordinary of ordinary people, who for about 20 years has been going through his daily life as if under heavy sedation, as if wading through quicksand, sinking slowly but surely into a psychologically semi-comatose state.  Eros has left him; or, he has driven Eros away.  He goes to work, eats, sleeps, snipes at his shrewish wife, hardly knows his teenage daughter.  But the movie opens by telling us, in Lester’s own voice, that he is dead, and as he looks down on his life as it was, with a god’s-eye view, he tells us that he was not always this way.  [Clip: 1:19 - 4:22]

            Watching his perfectly dressed wife cut perfectly grown American beauty roses through the window, he says, “She used to be happy.  We used to be happy.”  The melancholic Lester watches, lamenting the loss of passion, even of minimal interest in anything.  The sulphur that once made his marriage joyful and lively has burnt out, and now nothing ignites him. He is disconnected from everyone, including himself.  He does not act, he merely goes through habitual motions.  He does not live his life, he watches himself pass through life.  The erotic flame that once made sexual sparks fly between him and his wife has shrunk to a cold physical necessity, lovemaking reduced to a once-a-day jerk-off in the shower.  He is pathetic, and we can all feel his pathos, his suffering, in that place in our own psyches where we bear the scar and memory of how it was with us when Eros left.

            There had been a divine visitation once, and he remembers the possibility, although he doesn’t know how to make another visitation happen. 

            But even at those times when Eros withdraws from our psychic life because we have neglected or rejected or distrusted him, we still keep, thankfully, the memory of his presence.  And this is perhaps where memory of what-has-been meets the hope of what-might-yet-be:  for if we remember the sensate pleasure and spiritual joy of love now gone, it is enough to keep us alive, and the memory holds within it the possibility that love might come again.  Once brushed by the wings of Eros, once having had even just a fleeting glance at his beauty, the soul opens itself for his return, even if it is with the terrible uncertainty of interminable waiting.  The British novelist Charles Morgan once wrote these lines about the comings and goings of divinity:  “Visitation is necessary, and whoever has been made aware of the possibility of it waits for it always; his life has no other continuous meaning or purpose...” (Sparkenbroke, 385).  Lester Burnham tells us he had something once, and lost it -- but its never too late to get it back.  Meanwhile, when Eros has gone, we do the difficult daily tasks, feeling empty and sometimes close to despair, but right next to that, holding the memory of a visitation, of a time when Eros came and lit up the heart, and now, remembering that possibility, we wait for him to come again, to show us his beauty, to pierce us through the heart so that we can fall in love again.  And again. 

            Tomorrow we will welcome his return.

 PART II  --  WHEN EROS RETURNS

             Yesterday, we left our patient, Lester Burnham in the film, American Beauty, waiting for Eros to return, waiting for a visitation without knowing that is what he was waiting for.  And Eros returns -- as he always does -- in a most unexpected way and begins to disrupt everything. 

            The departure of Eros years earlier in Lester’s life has left him in a deadened psychological condition, where he cannot be revitalized by anything in his well-known world.  In fact, his well-known world is much too well-known: it holds no surprises, no threats.  His wife cuts American Beauty roses, but he does not think to smell them.   His wife, Caroline, is in just as much psychological trouble as Lester is, although her distress takes the form of a kind of manic, almost hysterical, denial that she is in distress:  she, too, is without Eros, and so she rushes through life with a false emotionality that avoids the truth of the situation, does not notice the real pain either of them are in, and is locked into a determined superficiality.   Among other serious problems, neither Lester nor Caroline are capable of real pleasure at this point in their lives and in their marriage.  Or, perhaps this is the most serious problem in their lives and in their marriage.  What could be more serious than to lose the sense of pleasure and the desire to be with another human being, to be without love?  Of what use is it to grow a perfect rose if you are only going to cut it, admire its perfection, but never inhale -- or internalize -- its lovely scent?

            And then, against all moral prohibitions, and with a suddenness that nearly puts Lester into a trance, he experiences a visitation.  One night at a basketball game at his teenage daughter’s school, he sees his daughter’s friend, Angela -- beautiful as an angel, he thinks -- and Eros shoots him in the heart at that moment with a golden arrow to arouse his lust, his desire, his greed for real life, his ferocious feeling which has lain dormant for years and years.  Angela comes to him like a redeeming angel, and it is interesting to note that her name in Greek means “messenger.”  Angela now fills Lester’s fantasies by day, as he tries to make himself attractive by working out, and by night, as she fills his erotic fantasies in which he feels himself being showered with the softest, most delicate rose petals.  [Clip 15:15 - 20:03]

            Now Lester enters the phase of the Eros-return in which the work with sulphur begins.  He begins to act compulsively and impulsively.  The fantasies are autonomous, they have a life of their own, and all of Lester’s life revolves around the erotic, alluring, Angela.  We could say that unconsciously he is under a new spell of anima, a young soul-figure who beckons to him at night through falling rose petals, promising him youth, sexual potency, fulfillment, the gratification of every desire, even life itself.  He wants her.  Now begins the joining of Eros with Psyche, for Lester’s lost eros has been seeking his soul for a long time, and Lester’s soul has been without love for a long time.  Through Angela, he is seduced back into erotic life.  When she comes to the house to spend the night with Janey, his daughter, they meet in passing in the kitchen -- but he imagines a kiss with her, and gently takes a rose petal from his mouth.  Later that night he feels compelled to find her and goes into the bathroom, where again the seduction fantasy lures him:  [CLIP 42:27 - 46:19]

            The fantasy is quickly replaced by mundane reality, as he masturbates in bed.  Reality crashes in again.  His wife is disgusted, and I would say, deeply threatened by his new outrageous autonomy and refusal to accept her stinging criticism.  As he turns away from her, we see a satisfied smile on his face, and then as narrator we hear him say, “It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.  Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.”

            Clearly, Eros has returned.  Lester begins to feel life coming into him again, and it makes him reckless, free, obnoxious, unruly, and good humored -- all at the same time.    He makes other changes, some of which are viewed with growing alarm and annoyance by his wife:  he quits his boring, humiliating job, gets the car he’s always wanted (a red sports car, as erotic as they come), refuses to let his wife dictate to him.  It is significant that at the climactic moment, when he is finally about to literally live out his fantasy of making love to Angela, the fantasy stops:  he discovers that she is a virgin, very unsure of herself and a little frightened.  She is only 16.  The fantasy stops, but it is fulfilled:  it is not Angela who fills the void his life has become, but Eros, the winged god of love who awakens him from his deathlike state.  Angela was the messenger, not the message.  Lester suddenly becomes shockingly conscious of what he is doing with this virginal American Beauty rose -- and it is his moment of redemption, a sudden coming to consciousness, a recognition of who he is, what his reality is, how he has been living for so long -- and he looks at her and realizes it is not Angela he wants, really:  it is Psyche he wants, soul, with its depth and passion.  Once presented with Angela’s vulnerability, her fragility, her insecurity, her innocence, Lester begins the return to his deeper self, still very much alive with the erotic wildness of his youth, but no longer the compulsive, sulphuric desperate need to act on or out every erotic fantasy.  Having been struck by the golden-tipped arrow of Eros, Lester regains what he lost so many years earlier: that divine power of desire that resurrects his emotional intensity.  For the first time in a very long time, Lester’s heart begins to beat again, and he falls rapturously in love with all the wondrous beauty of the world.

            There is one other figure in this film I want to mention, because he plays the role of the redeemer, the one who is so filled with Eros that Lester is captivated by his freedom to fly wherever he will.  This figure becomes the guide to Lester in much the same way as the handsome man in Ann’s dream came to guide her to the depths.  This is Ricky, the handsome young man who is attracted to Janey, Lester’s daughter, and whose own family is a study in misery: his mother lives an unchanging nightmare of neglect and abuse from his father, who is so frightened and disgusted by his own homoeroticism that he ends up committing murder.  And yet, like a rose among weeds, Ricky blooms into manhood with an eye for beauty that is heartbreaking.  He sees beauty everywhere.  He allows desire to grow, even nurtures it.  No heart is closed to him, even Janey’s, who is at first annoyed and suspicious of him, and then curious, and then engaged, and then completely responsive.  He is alive to every moving and living thing in the universe.  His Eros flows naturally and unselfconsciously, bringing him into genuine relationship with all those with whom he comes in contact .  

            And it is Ricky who is first to approach the dead body of Lester Burnham, with an expression on his face that makes us think, perhaps, that he is able to see a strange harsh beauty even in violent, sudden death.

            So this is our case study.  Has Lester individuated?  I would say so.  He loves, then loses love, then finds it again.  If individuation is a process of living fully, deeply, erotically, and being able to reflect upon what is happening in one’s soul, then Lester leaves the world about as individuated as one can become.  He learned what he loved and desired most, made profound changes when necessary, acted responsibly, extended compassion, and acquired wisdom.  He died at the very point in his life at which Pleasure had been born from the union of his Psyche with its returned Eros, and while we may feel sorrow at such a premature end to his life, there is yet something satisfying about the whole of his life.  At the end of the story, looking back on his life after his death, Lester says he could be pissed-off -- but he reflects: “It’s hard to stay mad when there’s no much beauty in the world.”

            It is possible to work analytically and psychotherapeutically with individuals with Eros as guide to the process.  After all, he is the one the soul is seeking, so it would seem that he is a central figure in the individuation process.  And I prefer to place Eros in the center of the individuation process rather than what Jung calls the Self, for two reasons:  first, language is important -- the names we give things and experiences matter greatly.   Second, personifying is a natural function of the image-making psyche, whereas conceptualizing is a mental activity.  Personifying recognizes the inherent capacity of persons to move us -- real persons, mythic persons, living persons.  Conceptualizing works as a kind of convenient shorthand, a vocabulary of ideas with which we can

communicate, but which do not particularly evoke a deep emotional response.  To speak of the Self is to speak of a concept, not of a living figure.  By itself, the term “Self” does not arouse emotion, compel awe, or fascinate with mystery.  It is merely a conceptual formulation that stands for those things, but it is not itself any of those things.  But Eros is a god, and is experienced like a god who strikes us first with his beauty and desirability and then ignites us with compelling force, wonder, arousal, mystery.  He appears in the psyche as a living person, with specific attributes (such as beauty, wings, heat) and performs specific functions (calling us into relationship, drawing us into love, bringing the misery of unrequited love and abandonment, enlivening the world we live in.)  We fall into his world as we fall in love, and within that world, one comes to know oneself as never before:  we are, after all, defined as much by what we desire and love as by what happened to us in childhood or by what career we have chosen.

            Eros, and the pleasure he brings, was so important to Freud that he elevated it to a principle.  In his later work, as you may recall, Freud hypothesized that there were two principles at work in the psyche.  One was the principle of life, which was forward moving, and which Freud called Eros; and the second principle which moved backward, to the dissolution of living substance to a state of inanimate matter.  Freud’s followers later called this principle, “Thanatos,” or death.  Freud recognized that human beings are not merely a collection of unruly instincts which we repress and which then cause us to become neurotic as adults; he came to see that the tendency of life, or Eros, was to continually want more of itself.  He came to believe that Eros was far more than just sexual instinct -- it exists in each living cell and drives the living entity to expand as far as it can.  We need not take Freud literally here to appreciate his insight:  that Eros, that sulphuric, heated compulsion to live life as expansively as possible, to the farthest edge and deepest level, is the unstoppable force in the psyche that keeps us in life.  As Freud came to attribute the highest importance to Eros as the bringer of life, from a Jungian perspective we can see that Eros is indeed the animating force that urges us to become more and more and yet more of who we are, to go as deeply into ourselves as possible, to understand that at some deep level of the psyche, our great task in life is not to defeat death, but to find Eros.

            Another way of elaborating on Freud’s idea is to consider that Eros seeks to become conscious of himself through the desire he puts into us;  that desire, in some sense, seeks itself, or longs to know itself -- an idea paralleled in Jung’s provocative book, Answer to Job, in which Jung suggests that God seeks to become conscious of himself through his creation. In mythic terms, Eros, the god who is all our desire, seeks to become conscious of himself through each of us.  And conversely, Eros is the means through which we come to deeper self-knowledge.  We know who we are by what we desire.  Practicality, or practical consideration, is the enemy of imagination.  You must allow your imagination to fill you with fantasies of desire -- not so you can literally have what you desire, but so that you can know who it is in you that is doing the desiring.           

            I have been talking about the phenomenology of the comings and goings of Eros, his dramatic entrances and painful departures.  When Eros leaves, the world, both daytime upper-world and night-time underworld, becomes an empty, endless expanse of ice, brilliant, awesome, and cold.  When Eros leaves, the alchemical fire that ignites us goes out, and the sulphur begins to stink and turns black.  When Eros leaves, all our senses become dull -- we cannot smell roses, we see no beauty, and what was once an act of love in the making is now a joyless jerk-off in the morning shower. 

            But when Eros returns, it is as if a match has been struck in the dark, and suddenly there is light, life, music, vivid colors, the scent of roses, and beauty everywhere.   As we attend to the comings and goings of this god, whom the ancient Greeks called “the first-born and fairest of the Gods,” we engage in a process of individuation that happens as an aesthetic process.  Coming to consciousness is an awakening to Eros through the beauty of the world, and the beauty of the soul.  It is Psyche’s beauty, you recall, that first drew Eros to her.   James Hillman says this of Psyche’s beauty:  “...the beauty of psyche refers to a sense of the beautiful in connection with psychological events.  By being touched, moved, and opened by the experiences of the soul, one discovers that what goes on in the soul is not only ineresting and meaningful, necessary and acceptable, but that it is attractive, lovable, and beautiful.”  [Myth of Analysis, 101-2] 

            Beauty feeds us, sustains us, and gives us incomparable pleasure.  And like the daughter born to Eros and Psyche, Pleasure is immortal and lasting -- if not in the literal flesh of our bodies, then in the memory we retain of indelible sensations and images.  “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” said the poet Keats.  It is an entirely legitimate goal of the process of individuation to seek to give birth to Pleasure, for she is the lovely creation of the union of the soul with its true love. 

            Eros is a generative, creative force.  He brings love and generates pleasure.  As we have seen, when Eros leaves, we lose desire: the desire for sex, for work, for attention to children, for serious conversation -- even though we know these are all very important, and we can perform necessary tasks even though we don’t feel engaged in them.  We become like Lester Burnham.  The most important thing to remember in this condition, perhaps, is that while Eros is gone, and while we are doing what must be done whether we desire to or not, Eros is trying to find a way to return.  And he always returns, as Freud said the repressed always does, just like the heart’s irrepressible desire to love, just like the rose that will always open itself to the sun even when it is planted in a patch of weeds.

            Eros resides not only in the soul, but out there in the world, in everything that attracts us, arouses us, and that promises pleasure: the chocolate that wants to melt in your mouth, the cat fur that wants stroking, the sleek new car that wants to be driven at 100 miles per hour, the sunset that wants a poem written of its beauty.  These daily occurrences in our lives are not merely daily occurrences:  they are urgent manifestations of the winged god Eros.  It makes all the psychological difference in the world if we imagine the sleek new car only as a vehicle for transportation and not also as beautiful sculpture.  It makes all the difference in the world to imagine a fine Belgian truffle as a piece of lethal sugar and fat and not also as one of the sweetest concoctions ever produced by civilization.  And it makes all the difference in the world to imagine the sunset not only as just one more routine inevitability, but also as a magnificent cosmic poem.

            When the Eros within meets Eros without, sparks fly, we are aroused and intensified and galvanized.  Every molecule in the body, every fantasy in the psyche, every possibility of the imagination suddenly moves at warp speed.  The arrows from Eros’s quiver fly back and forth and one wants only to be caught in the crossfire, even though right reason is probably warning us with flashing red lights that we are now in danger -- danger of losing control, of dismissing reason altogether, of following the impulse of those molucules, of allowing every forbidden fantasy to flood consciousness.  And it is amazing how sometimes it takes so little, such a small thing, to capture us.  If you remember the tale in the Book of Genesis, you will remember how easily the serpent, no doubt with the aid of Eros and his well-aimed arrow, persuaded Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil.  “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.”  (Gen. 3:6)  Nothing wrong with Eve’s erotic imagination!  She anticipated the fruit would taste good, it was good to look at, and it satisfied her desire for wisdom.  (And it’s a good thing she ate of it, or both she and Adam would have stayed in the Garden forever and we would have no story.)

            I know exactly how and why Eve did what she did because I’ve done it myself -- not with such dire consequences, thank God, but my experience is an ordinary example of how Eros strikes suddenly, moves us to act compulsively without interim thought or reflection, and makes so much out of what appears to be so little.  The best part of my story is that it didn’t involve any sin at all, no breaking of commandments, although it did drive my companion quite insane while I was in thrall to Eros and this particular gift.  I don’t normally speak of such private things in public, but to bring this to a close I want to tell you how I once made love to a Greek peach.

            I was traveling with a friend through the Greek island of Rhodes on a motorbike, in July, 1987.  We were riding along the coast of the island, it was very hot, the sky was an unclouded brilliant blue, the mostly stone buildings of the small villages were blindingly white, and here and there people moved slowly, languidly, in the heat.  My friend and I stopped at a tiny cluster of shops not far from the sea’s edge to enjoy the public stone water fountain, built right under a huge shady tree.  Just a few yards from the fountain was a fruit stand, shaded by a large umbrella.  I glanced at it and Eros instantly shot me through the heart with one of his gold-tipped arrows:  there, in the middle of this collection of fresh fruits, reclined an enormous peach, a peach the size of a large grapefruit, a peach larger and more beautiful than any I, a peach connoisseur, had ever seen.  It was soft gold with two streaks of purplish-red, covered with an incomparable fuzz.  Perfectly shaped to fit exactly into my open palm.  Desire flooded me.  I dug frantically into my pocket for money, nearly ripping my shorts, trying not to salivate all over the fruit seller’s produce.   He handed over to me the Aphrodite of peaches, the only such peach ever to grow on the planet, and now it was mine, all mine, and I could not take my eyes off it nor could I stop caressing its soft fuzz as I brought it gently to the stone bench under the solitary tree, as if carrying it into a bridal chamber, and the peach whispered to me, “Take me, I’m yours.”  And I closed my eyes and bit into it, and it was like making love to the most gorgeous creature and going to heaven and understanding the meaning of life all at once.  I sat impervious to the fidgeting of my friend who was eager to get back on the road again, taking nearly an hour to eat that peach, the juice running down my chin and neck, into my shirt, sweet liquid coolness dripping gently into secret places.  

            I have not eaten a peach since then, because once having experienced perfection, nothing less than an equally divine, perfectly beautiful peach will satisfy me, and such a peach requires a stone bench near a beach in Greece on a hot summer day.  The memory, the peach, the god -- all come together.  It was a visitation, and now that I have experienced it, I wait for it always, even though I know it will not come again.

            The genius of Jung was that he taught us the power and reality of the psyche’s imagination.  It is the imagination that makes things real, not the literalism of the event.  A peach by itself is just a peach -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar -- but the erotic imagination makes that peach into a sensual experience of beauty, far beyond its mundane peachness.  My imagination has even given the peach an identity:  it is a Grecian peach, and I can muse upon it as Keats did upon a Grecian urn.  Aesthetically lovely, sensually attractive, erotically stimulating -- all this in a golden peach, but only because my erotic imagination makes it so, and the rest of me follows my imagination as it pulls me, always,  irresistibly toward the divine object of my desire.