While the erotic can be a form of mania, as Plato said, it also beautifies. Moreover, beauty is the first attribute which draws Eros to Psyche. "To love," says Diotima, "is to bring forth upon the beautiful." We have had to neglect beauty in our work because, on the Oedipal model, it was regressive, seductively sexual, the attraction of Jocasta. On the heroic model, beauty too often represented the merely aesthetic approach, producing an embellishment rather than a meaning, a puer avoidance of the battles of purposeful achievement, and a neglect of the ugly bitterness of the shadow. Perhaps now we may realize that the development of the feminine, of anima into psyche, and of the soul's awakening is a process in beauty. This implies that the criteria of aesthetics-unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance-may be transposed to the psyche, giving us a new set of qualities for appreciating what is going on in a psychological process. The beauty of soul which alone surpasses the allure of Aphrodite will show in the aesthetic imagination of the psyche and the attractive power of its images. It will show in the ways in which the psyche gives form to its contents-for instance, the manner in which the anima contains the erotic. But mainly the beauty of psyche refers to a sense of the beautiful in connection with psychological events. By being touched, moved, and opened by the experiences of the soul, one discovers that what goes on in the soul is not only interesting and meaningful, necessary and acceptable, but that it is attractive, lovable, and beautiful.
The ultimate beauty of psyche is that which even Aphrodite does not have and which must come from Persephone, who is queen over the dead souls and whose name means "bringer of destruction." The Box of Beauty which Psyche must fetch as her last task refers to an underworld beauty that can never be seen with the senses. It is the beauty of the knowledge of death and of the effects of death upon all other beauty that does not contain this knowledge. Psyche must "die" herself in order to experience the reality of this beauty, a death different from her suicidal attempts. This would be the ultimate task of soul-making and its beauty: the incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, the visible transfigured by the invisibility of Hades's kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality. The Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone. Destruction, death, and Hades are not left out. Moreover, Aphrodite does not have access to this kind of beauty. She can acquire it only through Psyche, for the soul mediates the beauty of the invisible inner world to the world of outer forms. (Myth of Analysis, 101-102)
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