Neumann: Amor and Psyche

[Francis A. Miniter]

I have just finished reading Erich Neumann's _Amor and
Psyche - The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A
Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius_ (1956), an amazing
work of psychology, which provides a deep Jungian
interpretation to this classical myth of love. Neumann sees
the story as the integration of the great archetypes of
human development. Apuleius wrote in the 2nd C. c.e.

In brief, the story (which is about 50 pages long) tells of
Aphrodite's jealousy over the world's entrancement by the
maid Psyche, "the new Aphrodite". Aphrodite commissions her
son-lover Eros (aka Amor and Cupid) to destroy Psyche but
Eros falls in love with her. Her father seeks counsel of
Apollo and is told that she will have a marriage of death,
which is then prepared on a cliff. But Eros has Psyche
brought safely to a dark grotto where he makes love to her
unseen in the dark. Eventually, urged on by her envious
sisters, Psyche, now pregnant, breaks Eros's one taboo (not
to look on him in the light) and lights a lamp to look at
him while he sleeps. Eros awakes, is injured by hot oil
splashing from the lamp, and runs home to his mother
Aphrodite to be nursed. Psyche loses the paradise of
darkness in which she lived with Eros and learns that
Aphrodite is out to crush her. She confronts Aphrodite and
is given labor after labor, four in all, to complete by way
of punishment. As she successfully completes the fourth
(she has just emerged from a visit to Proserpine in the dark
underworld), she again disobeys by looking into the sealed
container and falls into a deathlike sleep, from which Eros,
now healed [by her labors according to Neumann - and now a
man, no longer a child-youth] awakes her in the light. She
is made divine, assumed into heaven and their child
Pleasure/Joy is born.

There are obvious parallels to the Genesis story including
the taboo, violation and expulsion from a sort of paradise.
And there are parallels to the suffering and redemption
myth of Christianity But Neumann sees much more in it,
namely the archetypal development of the feminine through
various stages of matriarchate, patriarchate,
internalization of the masculine and final self-recognition
of the feminine. One of the insights Neumann has is stated
as follows:

--------------------------------
The conception of the archetypal feminine as a unity is one
of women's fundamental experiences. The ancient pantheon
with its antithetical goddesses still represented this
conception, but in the patriarchal world it was dissolved.
In the patriarchate the split into the Good and Bad Mother
caused the negative side of the feminine to be thrust back
very largely into the unconscious. And moreover, precisely
because this splitting-off of a "bad" from a "good" feminine
archetype was only partially successful, the goddess was
entirely banished from heaven, as in the partiarchal
monotheistic religions. The deification of the human Psyche
in our myth represents a kind of countermovement to this
degradation of the goddesses.
-----------------------------

This countermovement never got a chance because at that
point in history, Christianity triumphed and pushed the
feminine as far back as possible. Neumann notes that it was
not until the Enlightenment that Western culture again
examined the role of the feminine at all, and then it took a
long time. He notes that the new appreciation of the
feminine archetype occurs at almost exactly the same moment
when the Catholic Church (1950) announced as dogma the
Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven, providing the world
with a sanitized, de-sexualized substitute for Psyche.

I strongly recommend this book. A commentary by Camille
Paglia may be found at:
http://www.bu.edu/arion/Volume13/13.3/Camille/Paglia.htm

[ozandy]

"Francis A. Miniter" <***@comcast.net> ha scritto nel messaggio news:gn9qb6$153$***@news.motzarella.org...

[snip]

Interesting post. I tend to feel there is something anachronistic about this
kind of analysis, however, as it is in the tradition of Nietzsche, it must

The deification of the human Psyche in our myth represents a kind
of countermovement to this degradation of the goddesses.
-----------------------------
This countermovement never got a chance because at that point in history,
Christianity triumphed and pushed the feminine as far back as possible.
Neumann notes that it was not until the Enlightenment that Western culture
again examined the role of the feminine at all, and then it took a long
time. He notes that the new appreciation of the feminine archetype occurs
at almost exactly the same moment when the Catholic Church (1950)
announced as dogma the Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven, providing
the world with a sanitized, de-sexualized substitute for Psyche.

This repression thesis seems to me doubtful. The existence of the cult of
Mary from very early in the christian period shows that the christians
failed to repress the godess until the time of the Reformation. Ave Maria,
plena gratiae. The virgin and child iconography is directly in the tradition
of mother/child pairs such as Aphrodite and Eros. The popular religion
always had room for the feminine. The priesthood and its civil equivalent
the clerks failed to reflect this in high religious and secular textual
culture. However religious artists continued to be in touch with the
feminine. This is not repression unless you view the text-using upper
classes as somehow the analogue of the conscious and the masses and artists
of the unconscious.

In fact, the biblical female cast, with its good and bad women, covers the
field of the female archetype, although split as in Greek religion. Perhaps
it would be interesting to explore why the feminine archetype refracted
under the domination of the horse- and sky-gods.

This shows there is a problem in analysing society from a psychoanalytic
p.o.v. by viewing only elite literature.

Andy