Love's Torturous Enchantments

Thomas Moore on Hillman in A Blue Fire

If each god has his own logos, then Eros, too, has his special logic and necessities. In art he has often been pictured as a handsome adolescent, and in the story of Eros and Psyche, which James Hillman takes as his primary myth of psychoanalysis, he is the wild son of Aphrodite, easy to love and difficult to abide with. He brings the psyche promises of pleasure and many occasions for suffering. He pleases without measure, and he tortures without any apparent misgiving.

Rather than present a program of painless love, the aim of many psychologies, Hillman explores the betrayals and impossibilities of love as valuable initiatory moments of the soul. Initiation is a rite of soul-making. Innocence may have to be punctured. Idealized notions of self, other, and love may have to earn their ripening shadows. A third element may have to appear to keep the two in love from closing their world in on themselves. Primal, Eden-like trust may have to mature so that one doesn't go about life with an innocence frequently shocked and undone by disappointment and betrayal.

Hillman speaks for love that is soulful, rounded with psychological reflection, and he speaks for psychological life that honors love as its principle. Eros always leads to psyche. Even, and perhaps especially, impossible loves invite interiorizing. As the ancient tale spells out, the soul tortured by love is in an ordeal in which specific initiations are carried out. The psyche's attachment to the love that is so difficult keeps it within the work of initiation. Its leaning toward death echoes the subtle relationship between eros and death, both enticing consciousness away from the logic of reason and pragmatics.

The centering of psychology on love, affirmed as a fundamental principle in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and made into a primary motive in humanistic psychologies, in Hillman is absolute. In this he follows his romantic ancestors, William Blake for example, for whom desire far outweighed reason as a measure of wisdom and ethics. Desire, longing, attachment, intensity, endurance, receptivity—these qualities of soul in league with erotic demands of fate are prized in Hillmanfs writings.