A "Rehabilitation of Eros": Cultivating a Conscious Relation with Love

Author(s): Alexandra Fidyk

Source: Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche , Vol. 3, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 59-68
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.2009.3.4.59

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 A “Rehabilitation of Eros”
Cultivating a Conscious Relation with Love

alexandra fidyk

Marie-Louise von Franz’s lecture “C. G. Jung’s Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function
in Our Civilization,” recently published in Jung Journal, highlights Jung’s call to de-
velop a differentiated relatedness. In my response, the call is addressed through the re-
telling of the Greek myth of Erōs’ birth in Plato’s Symposium. This example of love is a
more subtle, complex, and inclusive interpretation of erōs than contemporary render-
ings. Such redress advances a “rehabilitation of Eros” (von Franz 2008, 18) and offers a
striking image of differentiated feeling.
Plato’s Symposium describes a banquet given by Agathon, in honor of Socrates,
where orators give speeches on the subject of Love, not simply erōs the concept but
rather Erōs the god.1 Socrates alone does not speak, because he assumes he does not
know, so he requests that others speak. The young men in the Symposium, who desire
only what is beautiful, are driven to possess it. This form of erōs objectifies the other
where love is an emotional, romanticized, bodily event that one falls in and out of.
Sometimes the lover is driven to mania, suffers from depression, and becomes neu-
rotic. Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon—by a dialecti-
cal progression—prepare the way for the praise of erōs by Diotima,2 the Mantineian3
priestess.
When Agathon declares that love is beautiful and gracious, Socrates asks him
if love is the desire for what one has or for what one does not have. If love is the
desire for what one does not have, and if love is the desire for beauty, love cannot be
beautiful himself. After Agathon admits this view, Socrates does not propound his
own view of love; instead, he cites Diotima’s lesson from Greek mythology. Dioti-
ma’s understanding of love is based upon the mythical origin of Erōs through the

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 3, Number 4, pp. 59–68, ISSN 1934-2039, ­e-ISSN 1934-2047.
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 60 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:4 / fall 2009

union of Poros and Penia. To Diotima, if love exists relative to something that it
lacks, it cannot be a god, contrary to the others’ praise, but a daimon—a being that
is between god and human, immortal and mortal (Plato 1989, 202e). Erōs exists
between two opposing orders of reality—between the divine and the mortal—and is
a mediator, a between-two, an interpreter (Ruprecht 1999; Benardete 2001; Rhodes
2003). The daimon plays a role in mystery initiations, in the incantations that cure
illnesses of the soul and body, as well as in the gods’ communications with humans,
both when awake and asleep.
Significantly, Plato makes Socrates’ teacher a woman, Diotima, who speaks of Erōs
through a myth of this daimon’s birth (Plato 1989, 203aff ): On Aphrodite’s birthday,
the gods held a feast attended by the god Poros (Plenty or Portal). As was the custom,
beggars came to ask for food at the end of the meal. One of these was Penia (Poverty
or Privation). She managed to be invited in, and she lay next to Poros and conceived a
child by him. Erōs, the offspring of their union, reflected the paradoxes of his parent-
age, neither mortal nor immortal, neither rich nor poor, neither wise nor foolish. The
story having been told, Socrates challenges the paradox, asking, “Who are the lovers of
wisdom, if the god of love is not wise?” Diotima answers,
[T]hey are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is
a most beautiful thing and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philoso-
pher or lover of wisdom . . . Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The
error in your conception of him . . . has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved,
which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the beloved is the truly beautiful,
and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature. . . .
(Plato 1989, 203–204)

When Socrates asks Diotima who engages in the pursuit of wisdom, if neither the
wise nor the “senseless” do, she replies,
It is those in the middle, midway between the two; and Love is one of them. For wisdom
is, no doubt, one of the most beautiful things; but Love is love of the beautiful. Love must
therefore be a philo-sopher, and as a philosopher, he must be midway between the wise
and the senseless. The reason for this is his birth; his father is wise [sophos] and inventive;
his mother, senseless and without resources [en aporiai]. (Hadot 2002, 44)

We need to remember that beneath the features of Erōs lies the philosopher, and
Socrates, who, like “senseless” people, declares himself not to know anything but that
he has the awareness of not knowing anything. He differs from “senseless” people by
being conscious of his lack of knowledge and his desire to know. Socrates, or the philos-
opher, is thus like Erōs, intermediate—neither “a sage” nor “not a sage.” He will never
attain wisdom but he can seek it. According to the Symposium, philosophy (philos-
ophia—the love or desire for wisdom) is not wisdom, but a way of life and discourse.
“Philosophy is defined by what it lacks” (Hadot 2002, 47)—that is, by a transcendent

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 Alexandra Fidyk, A “Rehabilitation of Eros” 61

but fugitive norm that it nevertheless possesses, for, in Pascal’s Platonic words, “You
would not seek me if you had not already found me” (47). Perhaps Penia or “lack” con-
nects to something beyond the name Poros, a portal to something.
In the Symposium, the self-aware philosopher is like Socrates, neither quite inside this
world nor outside it. He is indifferent to mortal temptations, beauty, wealth, and every
sort of advantage. Diotima finds that he alone lives the valid life and acquires excellence
(arête) or true virtue (Plato 1989, 211d–212a). Here the pursuit of wisdom appears as an
experience of love. Thus, Socrates approaches the status of a daimon, a mixture of divinity
and humanity, for he, like Erōs, “always stands at the gates, threatening to make the more
traditional pantheon disappear in post-Olympian shadows” (Ruprecht 1999, xv). Such a
mixture of divinity and humanity is necessarily linked to a “lack of balance or inner disso-
nance” (Hadot 2002, 49). Yet, as an embodiment of love, Socrates demonstrates the bal-
ance of need and resourcefulness, the very parents of Erōs (Osborne 1994).
To Socrates, Diotima offers erōs as a dynamic energy that plays between emo-
tional extremes, yet is not emotion itself. Likewise, Jung names affect and emotion as
“hallmarks of undifferentiated feeling” and stresses that “when [feeling] is differenti-
ated, it is not emotional at all” (von Franz 2008, 16); thus, “this new form of love, a
whole-making effect of a certain kind of Eros” is clearly not an emotive, driven love
(von Franz 2008, 16). According to von Franz, Jung believed that love “is a dynamism
which needs form and direction” (17). She goes on to note, “a differentiated feeling
relationship would include a deep empathy and closeness to the other and a certain
distance . . . an understanding and a non-understanding, the latter consisting of a silent
respect of the mystery of the other’s individuality” (17).
Such love is symbolized in alchemy by the “strange image of a rosy-colored
blood” that emanates from the Philosopher’s Stone (homo putissimus) and heals all
people ( Jung CW 13, ¶¶389–390). Akin to the Symposium’s portrayal of Socrates,
homo putissimus means “most pure” or “true man”; he is “no other than just what he is”
(von Franz 2008, 16).
Similarly, Plato’s erōs as described by Socrates is not founded on self-interest,
personal emotion, or longing, but a coming to life in beauty of both body and soul.
Socrates unites the search for truth and love and connects loving with a more philo-
sophical kind of knowing. Erōs and erōtika do not denote only “sexuality.” Perhaps “the
best English translation for the Greek term, erōs, might just be ‘true love’—this, and
not simply [desire or] ‘sex’” (Ruprecht 1999, xiii). This love includes and transcends
the body’s limits, even mortality, and it rings of “a certain Eros which unifies the indi-
vidual as well as the multitude in the sign of the rose and makes them whole” ( Jung
CW 13, ¶290). Such rosy-colored blood connotes a love coupled with insight, not
blind love that is “driven and leads to destructive consequences,” as expressed by some
young men at the banquet (von Franz 2008, 17).

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 62 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:4 / fall 2009

Erōs has no end. Erōs is and always has been here. And erōs is neither mortal
nor immortal, but rather something “between the two”—something that holds the ten-
sion while keeping them in relation. Erōs blurs that precise line between self and other,
between teacher and student, between you and me. Erōs affects the soul by opening into
the limitless, encouraging risk, rewarding vulnerability, and accepting that we are not
in control of some essential human matters whose origin lies outside of us. Erōs invites
life in the passive as well as active voice, neither manifests in binaries nor seeks clo-
sure. From Erōs we accept the wound from an arrow that has chosen us—should we be
deemed worthy of it!
Today erōs is often mistaken for or reduced to the sexual. Many Jungian scholars
understand erōs to be the desire for connection (Neumann 1956; Jung, Emma 1957;
Jung 1962; Vaughan-Lee 1996; Hollis 1998; Goodchild 2001; Paris 2007). Erōs rep-
resents creative energy, which combines the spiritual, emotional, and physical aspects
of sexual energy. It is the intense bond created by those involved, yet the bond is not
created by them alone. Erōs is always present, at least implicitly, when connection is
sought, though the god himself may be forgotten, ignored, violated, trivialized, or par-
adoxically adored. Regarding the erotic—music is erotic; prayer is erotic; violence is
erotic; language is erotic—because these activities are all embodied and where the
body is, the erotic is. The ancients from both the East and West suggest that wherever
there is depth, there is also the divine. The gods ask only that we attend them and bear
conscious witness to their energies, of which their forms are but the material shell.
If we do not serve the depth energy that a god represents, then we violate something
profound.
Sexuality might be narrowed to the study of the body and its pleasure, but
the erotic requires attending the soul—“soulful pain” as well as “bodily pleasure”
(Ruprecht 1999, xii). When the soul and body come together, eroticism suggests “a
complex continuum of pleasure and pain” (Ruprecht 1999, xii). In Plato’s Symposium,
dialogues about love and the subtext about erōtika introduce paradox. Though the
men’s discussion and actions center on love and their largely homoerotic longing, the
most compelling statement about erōs comes from Diotima, a woman. “I was her pupil,”
Socrates tells the crowd, “and she taught me erōtika.” Only here and in Menexenus
does Socrates convey not what he thinks but what someone else has told him (Plato
1995; Ruprecht 1999, 41). Socrates’ receptivity to Diotima is the model for human
loving, human knowledge, and human learning.
Diotima’s differentiated feeling allows Socrates to question his own assumptions
and opens up the topic. Diotima advocates for the otherness, even the in-betweenness,
of the lover: to love or desire that which is of oneself would invoke Narcissus and death.
Thus, if erōs desires beauty and goodness, Diotima playfully argues in a Socratic way,
then he must not possess these things:

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 Alexandra Fidyk, A “Rehabilitation of Eros” 63

“How can you say that, Diotima?” I demanded. “Can Love then be evil . . . or ugly?”
But she said, “Be quiet! Do you think that whatever isn’t beautiful must necessarily be
ugly?”
“Of course.”
“And that anyone who isn’t wise is ignorant? Don’t you realize that there is something in
between [metaxu] wisdom and ignorance?”
“What?”
“Don’t you see it yet?” she asked. “Having correct opinions without having the words for
them. That isn’t knowledge (for how can something without reasons be knowledge?),
but it’s not ignorance either (how can it be ignorance, if it happens to be true?). Correct
opinions are just this way—in between understanding and ignorance.”
“What you’ve said is true,” I admitted.
“Then don’t insist on the thing which isn’t beautiful being ugly, or on the thing which
isn’t good being evil. And when you can bring yourself to agree that Erōs is neither good
nor beautiful, it won’t be necessary anymore for him to be ugly and evil. Rather he is
something in between these two.” (Plato 1989, 201e–202b)

Diotima rejects dichotomous thinking to embrace the third, as another way, as

a paradoxical and relational knowing. Love knows what it knows even though it can-
not give “reasons” nor “hav[e] the words for [it].” When philosophy aspires “to give
an account” of the things it investigates, it tends to the rigidity that the shape-shifter
erōs denies. That one cannot speak of whom one loves or why does not render the love
“untrue,” nor does it disqualify philosophical questioning. Rather such loving suggests
the limits of human knowing and language. When love no longer knows how to con-
template, it wants to possess, hence, the disappearance of Platonic love—that which
proceeds not from the imagination but from the soul. Perhaps the best way to consider
Platonic erōs is to contemplate what is not conditional, not ego-bound. As erōs tran-
scends polarities, he embraces not one or the other—homosexual or heterōsexual, man
or woman, body or soul—but both. Erōs lives “in-between” all the messiness and the
particularities that comprise an embodied human life.
Transcendence through silent respect of the other’s individuality and love is
human transcendence by descent, delving more fully into oneself and one’s humanity
and becoming deeper and more expansive as a result. Through careful attention and
responsiveness to the other, a precision of feeling and thought can be cultivated and
modeled.
Yes, we are fearful when the gods return—when Erōs is re-cognized, such as at the
scene of learning between youth and adults—but he never actually disappeared. The
“problem” is how to bring erōs and pedagogy into an appropriate, balanced relation
without diminishing either. We need a “both—and” approach rather than the ostensi-
bly clearer “either/or.” We need the creative tension of holding together in our aware-
ness those oppositions that rational analysis splits into alternatives. And we need an
ethics that respects the spirit of this relationship.

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 64 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:4 / fall 2009

Before Socrates learned through his conversation with Diotima, his way of see-
ing and of knowing was limited by his gendered, political, and cultural arena. When
it comes to education and ethics, both are at risk of becoming a form of rhetoric when
not relational. As Derrida warns, “Rhetoric may amount to the violence of theory,
which reduces the other when it leads the other, whether through psychology, dema-
gogy, or even pedagogy which is not instruction” (1978, 106; quoted in Todd 2003, 7).
If pedagogy is not instruction, it is rhetoric, which does violence because “it seeks to
shape, influence, and ‘lead’ the other in a particular direction without consideration for
persons as distinct subjects of difference” (7).
From Diotima, we learn that conversation is a form of love in action. To be heard,
seen, recognized, and respected is of value in the eyes of the other. Note that silence,
presence, and bodily feeling are other modes of being acknowledged. A new way of
knowing creates a new way of being. Rollo May, for example, states that “the encoun-
ter with the being of another person has the power to shake one profoundly. . . . It
may also be joy-creating. In either case, it has the power to grasp and to move deeply”
(1958, 38; quoted in Huebner 1999, 80). There is a way of listening that is a way of giv-
ing, another way of listening that is a way of refusing others or refusing oneself. Only
when the listener surrenders to the speaker can the latter find the support to search
for that which has yet to be expressed. Listening is necessarily dialogical, involving at
the very least the “intermingling of another’s words” with the text of the other’s expe-
rience (Davis 1999, 336), creating a space of rupture where knowing can be produced
and not simply reproduced. In listening with an inner ear to the many social, histori-
cal, and contextual voices, we can accept the dynamic interplay of evolving and emer-
gent meanings. And we can give ourselves over to the other with full attention to the
present. This giving over is erōs.
In this mutuality, Plato gives Socrates, the pedagogue, a new strategy when
Diotima becomes the go-between, the intermediary, a mentor who assists in
the birthing of something new. This image of Socrates as midwife or accouch-
eur offers a model for teaching as “a performative act of creation” (Burch 2000,
41), a knowledge of “being with another” that is more than technical or theoret-
ical knowledge. Diotima’s willingness to accompany him through the passageway
between the knowing self and the self-known provides an image of teacher as psy-
chopomp, a kind of hermetic pedagogy. This approach implies that the movement
of thought, of learning, is inherently a process, a transformative act, a search without
completion.
Luce Irigaray (1985) suggests that such a hermetic pedagogy intends not to block
or disable the process of understanding, but to obvert it: to swing into view the sides
and facets that are typically turned away and unseen. So when the new breaks forth,
these moments are not seen as unplanned ruptures to be contained but as creative

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 Alexandra Fidyk, A “Rehabilitation of Eros” 65

spaces challenging common sense’s inertia and desire for sameness. Hélène Cixous and
other French feminists urge,
to shift the balance this way, that way; to swerve, disrupt, multiply; to renounce the priv-
ilege of the single unified voice/self and so to affirm and yes even unequivocally to cel-
ebrate not only what we know already of difference but all that it is not yet possible to
know. (Alcosser 1989, 3)

In Diotima’s understanding of erōs, when two beings come together in love, a

third is created (Plato 1989, 206ff, 212). This birthing is both a bodily experience
and a numinous moment. The relationship to the third perpetually achieves and loses
its connection to the divine, an ongoing process living “in between” the conditions
of lack and fulfillment. Just as we do not come to thoughts—“they come to us” when
we are ready (Heidegger 1971, 6)—we do not come to erōs. Erōs is not an act of voli-
tion. We are grateful (or ungrateful) erotic recipients. Ruprecht’s “erotic mutuality”
is being fully and deeply “attentive to the lover, in his or her inescapable otherness”
(1999, 91). By tuning in with our third ear, in a form of trialogue, we may hear the
presence of the infinite, the “manifestation of something [trans] personal and divine”
(von Franz 2008, 18). This image of a whole, a union of opposites, breaks the one-
sided image of erōs as pursuer and pursued, where so many become trapped. Similar
to the way Jung “met every patient with his own personal feeling reactions, positive
and negative” (von Franz 2008, 10), we can choose to open to the emergence of the
other, by attuning to what is.
By extension, Audre Lorde believes the pleasures of the erotic can operate in every
aspect of our lives, “whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, exam-
ining an idea” (1984, 57). She argues that “we are taught to separate the erotic demand
from most vital areas of our life other than sex,” but for her,

the erotic functions . . . in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any
pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic,
or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for under-
standing much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their dif-
ference. (56)

Erōs is a fleshy form of knowing; it calls for both body and mind. bell hooks (1994)
writes that “to call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial”
inherited from the scientific paradigm (191). Thus, a shift to a hermetic, erotic peda-
gogy subverts the mind-body split, and we learn to approach the other whole.
Revisiting the myth of Erōs’ birth challenges contemporary enactments where the
ego-self more often than not desires, believes, and promotes the kind of love charac-
terized by the young men in the Symposium, who desire only what is beautiful and are
driven to possess it. This form of erōs objectifies the other where love remains that

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 66 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:4 / fall 2009

which one falls in and out of. While this, too, may be part of the experience, Diotima’s
alternative form of erōs is a love that enlivens the body but is inspired by the need to
know and relate. It is akin to Jung’s call to rehabilitate the feeling function, where love
is understood as “a dynamism which needs form and direction” (von Franz 2008, 17).

endnotes
1. This is the only Platonic dialogue “devoted to a god” (Benardete 2001, 17).
2. Diotima was a priestess, philosopher, and teacher of Socrates. She lived in Mantineia circa
470–410 BCE. The fact that she did not live in Athens is significant, for her particu-
lar “climate” shaped her understanding of love. In Mantineia, one loved mutually and
reciprocally—or not at all. This statement is critical because homoeroticism in classical
Athens was excessively regimented and disciplined. There were rules about how a free-
born Athenian male could love and be loved, but one could not do both with the same
person. Even the grammar illustrated this separation (see Fidyk, forthcoming). Diotima’s
understanding of erōs is the source of the concept of “Platonic love,” a far more complex
idea than simply nonsexual love. In addressing love of men for women and love of men
for other men, Diotima taught that love for the beauty of another is the beginning of a
lifelong search for understanding love, beauty, and spiritual oneness.
3. Ruprecht (1999) suggests Mantineia was in a wild and undeveloped region of Arkadia in the
interior of the southern Peloponnese and was particularly independent politically and
economically, though the city’s geographical location between Athens and Sparta forced
her to side with one and then the other. The politics, architecture, language, and history
of Mantineia conjure up images of metaxu. Mantineia’s political fence-sitting conforms
erotically with suggestions of androgyny (temples, deities, goddesses, and worship) and of
erotic mutuality. Here, the Greek word metaxu refers to the neuter case—neither mascu-
line nor feminine, but something in-between.
Diotima used the word erotikoi for her model lovers to connote reciprocity and mutuality,
to remove the erastes (a lover) and eromenos (a beloved) dichotomy. As a Mantineian, she
lived outside the restrictions and conventions of a particular culture so she understood
erōs differently. Conversely, in a love-relationship in upper-class Athenian eroticism, one is
either erastes or eromenos, a lover or a beloved, a pursuer or a pursued (Nussbaum 1986).
Both words are born of erōs, yet, syntactically, one is passive and the other is active. The
erastes is “he who erōs-es;” “he who does the erōs” (Ruprecht, 1999, 52–53). Conversely,
the eromenos (the suffix -menos is the passive form) is “he who is erōs-ed;” “he who has the
erōs done to him” (Ruprecht 1999, 52–53).
For Diotima, erōs is something that happens, not something which is merely done. Eros is not
merely a physical thing. For example, erōs happens because I am in relation with you—by
being with you and by being with students around a topic. I cannot love you as something
that is done, as something that I have decided. Nor can I make you love me. Erōs requires
a coming together of one and the other regardless of its tricky nature. Like a question that
arises, erōs breaks open the being of the object—the thou—for it takes hold of us (Fidyk,
forthcoming).

note
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and
paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and
Princeton University Press (USA).

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 Alexandra Fidyk, A “Rehabilitation of Eros” 67

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 68 jung journal: culture & psyche 3:4 / fall 2009

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alexandra fidyk, ph.d., Jungian psychotherapist, holds the positions of Assistant Professor
in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Canada, and adjunct
faculty in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. She has written
and co-authored numerous articles, poems, dialogues, and chapters. Recent work includes
Silence and Eros: Beckoning the Background Forward (forthcoming from Sense Publishers),
Addressing Silence & the Sea: Poetic Musings with Pablo Neruda, “Gypsy Fate”: Carriers of Our
Collective Shadow, stillness became me, Rebraid: Repeated Narrations, and ‘Invisible Loyalty’:
Approaching Suicide from a Web of Relations. Correspondence: Department of Secondary
Education, University of Alberta, Rm 250 Education South, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G5
Canada or alexfidyk@yahoo.co.uk.

abstract
In response to Marie-Louise von Franz’s last public lecture, “C. G. Jung’s Rehabilitation
of the Feeling Function in Our Civilization,” the author responds to Jung’s call to develop
a differentiated relatedness through the retelling of the Greek myth of Erōs’ birth in Plato’s
Symposium. This example of love is a more subtle, complex, and inclusive interpretation of erōs
than contemporary renderings. Such redress advances the “rehabilitation of Eros” (von Franz
2008, 18) and offers a striking image of differentiated feeling, particularly in the context of
pedagogy and ethics.

key words
daimon, differentiated feeling, Diotima, Erōs, erōtika, feeling function, Greek myth, love, peda-
gogy, philosophy, Plato, Socrates, Symposium

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