What Does Psyche Want?
It’s simple. Psyche seeks Love.
In Apuleius’ classic tale of Psyche and Cupid, Psyche is a beautiful young woman, who goes, literally, where the wind carries her. She falls in love—but with whom? Her love is mysterious. He has set this limit on their relationship: she only knows him in the dark, she cannot see him, and she doesn’t know who he is. (Pssst! He is the God of Love!) Of course, she desires to know him fully, but her curiosity leads her to wound him, and threatens their relationship. In order to save their relationship, she is given some difficult and dangerous tasks by his mother, Venus. (Psssst! She is the Goddess of Love!) Psyche never shirks her fate, though her very life is at risk. Where once she was ungrounded, she becomes sure and committed. Ultimately, she is transformed by her quest for love.
Psyche is often defined as “soul,” though Jung made a distinction between the two:
By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a "personality."
Jung, CW Vol 6 para 797
Psyche yearns for what it loves. What is it that motivates you, calls you, leads you on? Psyche brings us images of what we love, what we seek, what we crave.* (Since psyche is both conscious and unconscious, images can come to us from anywhere; not just through rational means of knowing, but also through dreams, events, intuition—anywhere.) We can choose to follow—or not. If we choose not, then we will have to contend with that nagging sense of a life unlived.
Following the call, following your bliss, as Campbell would have it, is the path to individuation (psychological integration). Remembering that following your bliss is not always a blissful experience, it takes commitment and dedication. Remembering psyche as the totality of psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious, you don’t always know what it is that you’re after, or how you’re going to get to it, or whether you’re going to get to it.
Are you in?
*Jung also said that “the psyche consists essentially of images” (CW 8, para. 618).
