Love and the Soul: Psychological Interpretations of the Eros and Psyche Myth

Graham Jackson is a Jungian psychoanalyst and author of The Secret Lore
of Gardening.

For anyone curious about the possible psychological meanings of the
story of Eros and Psyche as it appears in Apuleius’ 2nd-century novel
The Golden Ass, James Gollnick’s study is nothing short of exhaustive.
Gollnick, a psychologist in private practice, explores the origins and
nature of this story, from the debates surrounding its actual literary
form (myth? allegory? fairy tale?) and context (it is part of a larger
work) to the 20th-century viewpoints defined by Freudian and Jungian
psychoanalysts. There are five of the former and six of the latter whose
reworkings of the story are considered and reconsidered, compared and
compared again.

If anything, Gollnick errs in the direction of too much weighing and
counterweighing of evidence, so that the reader is often left feeling
that he or she has read something more than once before. When the author
reaches the fourth and final chapter, he recapitulates (like Wagner in
Gцtterdдmmerung) everything that has gone before; only in the last 25
pages or so does he make good on his promise to correct the oversights
of his predecessors by placing the story within the context of The
Golden Ass as a whole. This he does by interpreting it as a kind of
dream compensating for and/or complementing the life of the novel’s
hero, Lucius, who, through a misuse of magic, has been transformed into
an ass; only by eating roses can he be redeemed.

Gollnick, who seems to be far more in tune with the Jungian than the
Freudian school, gives a comprehensible reading of the myth-as-dream,
but by the end, I felt cheated at not having more of his own ideas to
play with. In fact, although I wondered why he didn’t make more of the
ass symbolism, and why he didn’t make a clear connection between Eros
and the roses Lucius must eat, and why he didn’t quote Esther
Harding’s views on these matters (she’s in his bibliography), and
even why the editor didn’t check his repetitiveness and infelicities
of syntax, what I mainly wanted to know was Gollnick’s reasons for
pursuing his subject so relentlessly. Although academic books—which
this assuredly is—generally ignore personal considerations, an
exploration of love and the soul should surely qualify for exemption
from this stricture; in this case, it is extremely disappointing that it
does not.