Here are Marie Louise von Franz’s last comments on the end of the story of Amur and Psyche, from which we learn more important things about the development of the soul and the embodiment of love on Earth.
“In this ultimate, tragic moment, Eros comes down from Olympus and wakes Psyche, and, with the help of Zeus, a happy ending occurs in the Beyond. On Olympus, Eros may marry Psyche and have her child, and Venus is reconciled. The story ends suddenly with a beautiful festival, a nice party of the gods on Olympus. From the human standpoint, Olympus means the unconscious. Thus the whole play of fate disappears.
There is a solution, but it disappears; it is in the unconscious and not integrated in the human realm. It remains suspended as an open problem.
Despite the uncertain ending of our story, it is clear that Psyche had to open the box, otherwise Eros would not have come to free her. This is basically the same problem as in the story of the Garden of Eden. For if Adam and Eve had not eaten the apple we would still be sitting with long tails, scratching ourselves on trees. Therefore the Catholic Church calls the guilt of Adam and Eve a felix culpa, meaning a sin which brought forth the most positive consequences.
All such nonallowed deeds in fairy tales and myths are felices culpae, for in the end they lead to a higher consciousness.
As far as the problem of the beauty ointment in feminine psychology is concerned, I am convinced that this motif does not apply to woman’s psychology. Women have other problems. The hairdresser, cosmetics, and all these things indeed play an enormous role in a woman’s life, but these have to do with parts of her persona and her conscious social personality and not that which comes at the crucial turning point of a deep process of individuation. I am confirmed in this opinion by the fact that the beauty-box problem does not occur in other folktale parallels, whether old or new. So we are justified in assuming that it is an addition from Apuleius and illustrates specifically an anima problem. However, it is also a problem for women, since the anima attitude of a man influences them.
It is instinctual in a woman to wish to appear as the man who loves her would want to see her. There is no conscious calculation here.
It belongs in a certain way to the essence of feminine nature to carry, to a certain extent, the projection of the surroundings, and to act it out quite unconsciously. Certain women are very gifted in this way, and we talk about them in our psychological practice as anima types. It is practiced even by very small girls. A girl wants chocolate, which she does not get from her mother, because it is not good for her teeth. When Papa comes home, she gives him an absolutely melting, beautiful smile and says, “Papa, just this once?” Naturally, he melts, being tired after the office and seeing his little girl only in the evening. So she gets from him all that Mama has forbidden. Little girls of three and four already play perfectly the role of the father’s anima.
This is an instinctive reaction; but if it becomes a habit, then it produces the classical type of the anima woman.
Although a seductive attitude is quite legitimate up to a certain point, sometimes such a woman gives up her personality entirely and only plays the anima. When alone in analysis with another woman, she will collapse into a heap of nothingness, for she is nothing in herself. She does not know who or what she is or what she would be if she did not represent the anima of her partner. She borrows, so to speak, her right to existence through carrying a man’s anima projection and is annihilated in her own feminine personality. But then the man misuses this situation, and there comes the occasion when the woman knows that as a human being she has to take a stand and must differentiate herself from the projection of the man who loves her, even with the risk of disappointing him or of a severe disturbance of the relationship.
Many women do not have enough love, courage, or honesty for this. It is a marriage problem par excellence and very difficult for women who deeply love their husbands. They do not want to risk the relationship but prefer to continue playing the role, and so deny some instinctual truthfulness they feel within themselves.
In that way they keep the man in the unconscious too; for he can never become conscious of his anima, since his wife always represents it.
But if she one day does not do that, then the man must say, “She is different from what I thought!” Jung told us once how he discovered the existence of the anima. A woman in whom he was very interested suddenly behaved differently from what he had expected, and he was deeply disappointed. But instead of running away, as most men do in such a case, he went home and asked himself why in hell he had expected her to be different! Then he suddenly realized that he had carried within him an image of the ideal woman, or “how a woman should be.” And now this woman in whom he was interested had not behaved in that way. That was for him a step toward becoming conscious of his anima.
So if a woman always plays the role of the anima, the image expected of her, she prevents her man from realizing the inner image, his anima. But since women know that as soon as they behave differently from men’s feeling expectations, many men will just throw them over, they naturally do not want to take the risk. Such women get into a conflict between their own inner honesty and the risk of the loss of the relationship; then begins the plotting.
The opening of the box was a felix culpa: Psyche has to become unconscious and Eros has to rescue her. If you think of Psyche as the archetype of the anima and of Eros as the archetype of the animus, it is a subtle ultimate reversal of role. In the human realm the man normally makes the effort of wooing the woman, otherwise there is a slight shift of normal values.
In the human realm, the man usually makes an effort to woo the woman, otherwise there is a slight shift of normal values.
Many mother’s boys are too lazy to go after a woman, but are caught themselves by some active woman, which is not usually very successful. Normally it is the man who in the visible world, as an ego, has to actively press his interest in a woman.
In the deepest sense, however, in the Beyond realm of animus and anima, it is very often Eros, the highest animus quality of a woman, which is the logos spermatikos—the seed spirit of love. The French, who know more about the subtleties of love, have a beautiful way of putting it. They say, “Elle choisit celui qui devra la choisir” (“She chooses the man who shall later choose her”).
It can easily happen that on meeting a man for the first time, the woman knows somehow that this is her fate; then she has chosen him. Her active Eros, her inner flame, has touched his sleeping soul, which he perhaps discovers five years later, though something in her has known it all along.
So Eros is that active, invisible principle in woman.
Jung has said that if a woman really loves, right to the bottom of her heart, that is, if her Eros really loves—and that is something she cannot bring about with her will or ego, or by plotting—she can get any man. It is something which happens to him as an inner fate.
Psyche falls into a deathlike sleep, and it is then that Eros comes to save her. Eros, as Merkelbach has remarked, is a prefiguration of Osiris, who appears in Lucius-Apuleius’s final initiation at the end of the book. The Greeks identified Eros with Osiris; indeed, for the Egyptians, Osiris taught men and women genuine mutual love. Eros and Osiris are both, psychologically, symbols of the Self.
This divine psychic core of the soul, the Self, is activated generally in cases of extreme danger. Eros appears again only when Psyche is at the end of her capacities.
But then he takes her away to Olympus, to the world of the gods. This has to do with the fact that Eros appears in this story as an immature youth. It seems as if Lucius had not yet suffered enough to experience the Self inwardly, and as if he were not yet mature enough for the deep religious experience which occurs at the end of the book.”
Marie Louise von Franz, “The Golden Donkey of Apuleius“
- Source.
I have gained a lot from Marie Louise von Franz’s books and so I have eagerly passed on what she has written on this so important topic – love and how to embody it in life. In case you missed the beginning of the story, here are all the previous articles on this topic.
- Marie Franz: The incarnation of Venus is the embodiment of the god from the feminine side of development
- Eros is Puer aeternus
- Psyche’s First Descent into the Unconscious and the Symbolism of the Lamp
- Psyche’s first task – sorting the seeds
- Psyche’s second task and the golden wave of wild sun rams
- Psyche’s third task – water from Styx’s ice waterfall
- Psyche’s fourth task – the beauty cream box from Persephone
Kameliya Hadziyska
