Who is this Eros who demands my attention and pushes me to yield to his wild, sweet, terrible energy? Who has confused everything I thought I knew about myself and my capacity to become wholly myself?
If you do not consciously feel the force of Eros, consider yourself fortunate, for you can go about your usual way in relative peace. But if you have been suddenly, unexpectedly, overwhelmingly taken by this wild god, there is nothing for it but to enter the river and let yourself be carried.
For despite his popular image as a beautiful youth or as the little cherub, Cupid, the god Eros is no child. Though personal intimacy and sexuality are of vital importance, Eros is god of far more than these. Eros is the infinite terrible ecstatic power and mystery of Love in all its forms, without whose fierce arrows there could be no connection, no relationship, no urge to grow, no regeneration of life.
In his Theogeny, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said this of Eros:
“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” ( ll. 116-138)
“EROS was the primordial god (protogenos) of procreation who emerged self-formed at the dawn of creation. He was the driving force behind the generation of new life in the cosmos. He was also equivalent to Thesis (Creation) and Physis, (Nature).” (theoi.com).
Jung said, “Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so. … He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony.” (Jung, Eros Theory).
and that "Eros …might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself." (MDR)
"He [Jung] showed that individuation [becoming wholly oneself] is not possible without the differentiation of Eros" (ML v Franz, Feeling Function). How true!
"Generally we identify feeling with affect and emotion, but that is only inferior feeling. ….. Differentiated feeling, on the contrary, is to love that unique person for his or her uniqueness. It is difficult, for it presupposes that you are capable of seeing the uniqueness of the other person, of getting rid of all schematic psychological judgments. It is ultimately something irrational that has to do with one's own development." (MLvF, The Way of the Heart).
I can tell you from experience that "getting rid of all... judgements" about Love - what it is, how it should be expressed, what we expect from it...etc. is damn hard work. It requires being totally honest with ourselves, and taking responsibility for ourselves, which most people are too lazy or apathetic to do.
"It is ... the incapacity to love which robs mankind of his possibilities. This is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido [his psychic energy] towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them." (Jung, 2016)*.
With a long-repressed dominant feeling function, I confess that I am far from freeing myself from popular conceptions of Love as romance, being wanted, possession, obsession, and of 'spiritual' love as pure-hearted, unconditional, good. So it is, my hard task ahead.
*Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
*Jung, “The Eros Theory,” CW 7, par. 32
*Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Heart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXQTDTcup04&t=73s).
*ML von Franz, 1986, 'C. G. Jung’s Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function in Our Civilization.'
*Jung, C. G. (2016). The Psychology of the Unconscious: a Study of the Transformation and Symbolisms of the Libido.