Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine by Erich Neumann

Author:Erich Neumann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Postscript

THE STORY of Amor and Psyche transmitted to us in the Golden Ass was not the invention of Apuleius. What was narrated in the form of a tale by Apuleius, born in A.D. 124, actually originated in a much earlier day.1

Like almost all folk tales, this one contains mythical substance that was excluded from the mythology recognized by the dominant culture. The Egyptian tale of Bata, for example, has preserved the original myth of Isis and Osiris. But the tale of Psyche is unique in far more than this. The most fascinating aspect of it is that, along with its abundance of mythical traits and contexts, it represents a development whose content is precisely the liberation of the individual from the primordial mythical world, the freeing of the psyche.

The scholarship of recent years has disclosed a wealth of actual and possible sources and influences which seem to have converged in the tale of Psyche. But this discussion is only of secondary interest to us. What concerns the psychologist is not so much the origin and history of the parts as the meaningful unity of the whole in relation to its parts.

But just as we can often arrive at the meaning of a dream only by an amplification of its parts, so an understanding of the new synthesis of the traditional material throws light on the meaning of the whole. It is neither surprising nor very illuminating that comparative research should have disclosed a large number of folktale motifs in the tale of Psyche,2 for this only means that the same archetypal motifs occur in different places. And the question of whether we have to do with a migration or with a spontaneous reappearance of these motifs is irrelevant for our purposes.

It has been said that in this tale “the destiny of the human soul purified by diverse trials is represented after the model of the Platonic allegories.”3 There is no doubt a certain banal truth in this statement, but taken as a generalization it is just as false as the confusion between Platonic symbols and allegories.

Like all interpretations that disregard the complexity and originality of the Psyche myth, this one, which makes Apuleius’ Platonism responsible for the whole tale, must be rejected. Still, there is no doubt that a tradition transmitted by Plato played an important part in shaping the myth, and of this we shall have more to say below.

Yet it is equally absurd to speak of an “ethical purpose” in the Golden Ass, which has not yet become clear in the tale of Psyche.4 Here, as so often, Bachofen intuitively5 perceived and interpreted highly important relationships. It is true that we agree with him only in certain points, because we are no longer hampered by the Christian-ethical dogmatism of Bachofen’s time, and take the insights of depth psychology as our starting point. Be that as it may, Bachofen was the first writer to see that the story of Psyche reflects an important sector of feminine-psychic development. In this

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