Love, with its passion and pain, becomes an urge toward individuation.
That is why there is no genuine process of individuation without the experience of love —
for love both torments and purifies the soul.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Below is an excerpt from Marie-Louise von Franz’s book The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man, in which she reflects on the myth of Amor and Psyche.
I chose to present this passage because it offers a profound psychological insight into one of the most essential human longings — the longing for love — and into the inevitability of suffering that arises when we choose to follow it.
I have always been deeply struck by the hidden intelligence that lies behind every profound experience of falling in love. As von Franz repeatedly emphasizes, libido is not blind. There is a fully rational — though not ego-rational — reason why we sometimes fall irrationally in love with someone who does not reciprocate our feelings, who disappoints and hurts us, and from whom we seem unable to detach ourselves.
Such experiences mark the moment when the soul is ready to awaken and the desiring nature must undergo transformation. By sheer ego-will we cannot extract from the heart the arrow that comes from the realm of the gods. What we can do, however, is understand the deeper meaning of what is happening to us — and in doing so, transform this experience into spiritual gold.
In Jungian analysis, this process of inner awakening is called individuation, and it inevitably unfolds through suffering.
Here is how Marie-Louise von Franz illuminates this process through one of the most difficult oppositions to integrate — the polarity of romance and banality (see the foot note∗):
Eros and the Purification of the Soul
“Eros is often depicted holding a butterfly and sadistically burning it with his torch — an image that conveys the idea that Eros, the god of love, is both the great tormentor of the human soul and its great purifier.
Love, with its passion and pain, becomes an impulse toward individuation. This is why no true process of individuation can exist without the experience of love: love torments, but it also purifies the soul.
Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, symbolizing the soul as it is developed and tormented by the god of love. On a beautiful gemstone, the goddess Psyche, with her hands bound behind her back, is tied by Eros to a column crowned with a sphere. This image expresses, in a strikingly beautiful way, the very essence of individuation: wholeness realized through suffering.
At times one may wish to escape from the person to whom one is bound, in order to flee dependence — yet Eros compels consciousness precisely through this bond. Love dares us to risk everything, and through that daring it leads us back to ourselves. This is why one of Eros’s ancient epithets was “the purifier of the soul.”
Whenever a deeper love experience unfolds between a man and a woman, another dimension of reality opens up. A divine dimension invades the psyche, washing away its ego-centered pettiness. There is always an element of romantic unreality in such experiences — especially in their early stages — a kind of Olympian spring, where everything appears divine and, paradoxically, more real than reality itself.
This is why lovers so often become objects of ridicule. If they are wise, they withdraw from ordinary society, for they already dwell in the realm of the gods. Yet alongside this divine beauty there is also a strange sense of loss — as though something essential to the human realm has been temporarily abandoned: pettiness, envy, narrow-minded cynicism, and other less pleasant traits of higher mammals. It is precisely this condition that gives rise to the jealousy of Psyche’s sisters.
The Jealous Sisters and the Shadow of Love
The classical philologist C. S. Lewis, in his novel Till We Have Faces, offers a brilliant modern paraphrase of the myth of the jealous sisters. He interprets them as a shadow figure of Psyche. The term shadow must be used cautiously here, for Psyche is not a human being but a daimonic figure. Does a daemon have a shadow? One might say yes — though in a somewhat altered sense of the word.
Cum grano salis, the sisters represent Psyche’s shadow: the other aspect of the goddess’s humanization — her pull into the all-too-human realm.
Young people rarely perceive this realistic and cynical side of love. Only later in life, after having encountered love’s divine dimension, can one develop immunity to its cynical distortion. When the ideal side of love dominates excessively, the darker side is suppressed — and it then inevitably returns as a dangerous external force.
No adult can remain a pure romantic. Life experience teaches us that love also has a deeply human aspect. This dimension is embodied by the sisters, who whisper distrust into Psyche’s ear and heart, urging her to betray Eros’s request. In Lewis’s novel, the central character is one of these sisters — the figure who ultimately destroys the first union of Eros and Psyche. She embodies the woman who refuses the love of the god.
In the myth, Psyche represents a positive but still naive attitude toward the unconscious — one that lives in paradise, where everything appears good and beautiful. The sisters, by contrast, are excessively skeptical, cynical, and acutely aware of life’s banal dimension.
If one walks through a forest and observes young couples in love, one senses that they inhabit a divine world. Passers-by react ambivalently: they recognize the lovers’ divine absorption, yet simultaneously perceive everything as utterly ordinary and banal. These are the “eternal Harry and Harriet.” Like Psyche’s sisters, the onlookers mock them, seeing only banality and incompleteness — while the lovers perceive only the fairy-tale.
From a more mature perspective, one understands that both dimensions are always present — the divine and the banal — and that learning to hold this paradox is one of the great psychological tasks of love.
The Paradox of Coniunctio
A woman once struggling with this very question — whether her love affair was a divine calling or merely a banal entanglement — dreamt of a king and queen wearing radiant crowns, walking before her, accompanied by a rooster and a hen. A voice declared: “These two couples are one and the same.”
This dream image beautifully expresses the paradoxical nature of love. In practice, enduring this paradox requires great maturity. In alchemy, the symbol of coniunctio — the sacred union — may appear as a king and queen, a god and goddess, or even two mating dogs. The alchemists understood that all these images point to the same union: the integration of psychic opposites within the unconscious totality of the personality.”
I am deeply moved by the dream image of the radiant royal couple accompanied by a rooster and a hen. What a powerful symbol sent from the unconscious — revealing what the union of opposites truly looks like in every deep love relationship.
When we are lifted by the flight of love, when the other appears as a prince or princess and we feel chosen, the rooster and the hen walk beside us at the same time — clucking and crowing. And when we feel submerged in banality and daily routine, royalty walks behind us — the god incarnated in a human body. Our own body.
Because the theme of love is so profoundly important, and because Marie-Louise von Franz illuminates it with such depth and clarity, I will share further passages from this work in the future.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
∗This text is presented in English translation from Bulgarian; all section titles have been added for clarity and reader orientation.
