Pothos

Pothos — πόθος — names, in the classical anatomy of eros, the longing for the unattainable, the un-graspable, the incomprehensible. “That idealization which is attendant upon all love and which is always beyond capture” (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 286). It stands beside himeros (physical desire for the immediately present, to be grasped in the heat of the moment) and anteros (answering love) as the third of three classically differentiated portions or persons of Eros.

The distinction is operative for any ratio desiderii. To mistake pothos for himeros — to read a longing-for-the-unreachable as a longing-for-this-object — is to set out to acquire what cannot be acquired and to call the inevitable disappointment a failure of the object rather than a misreading of the desire. The triangulated, impossible loves Hillman catalogues — “the dead lover or bride, unrequited and humiliating love, the love choice of the ‘wrong’ person” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. 97) — are pothos in operation. The arrow strikes where the soul’s structure of longing is constituted, not where the ego’s program would prefer it to land.

In Hillman’s reading, pothos corresponds to the four grades of the anima (four-stages-of-anima) not as their object but as the means by which eros sees itself: “the figures are not the eros itself but the objects of its longing… They are reflections of love” (Hillman, Anima, on Jung’s CW). To know what one pothos-longs-for is to know the form one’s anima takes.

Relationships

• three-faces-of-eros
• eros
• anima
• four-stages-of-anima
• ratio-desiderii

Primary sources

• hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989)
• hillman-anima-anatomy-personified (Hillman 1985)