Three Faces of Eros

Hillman’s retrieval from late antiquity of Eros as internally differentiated into three “portions or persons”: himeros (physical desire for what is immediately present), anteros (answering or reciprocal love), and pothos (longing toward the unattainable). The differentiation refuses the modern conflation of eros with sexuality and returns the erotic to its classical complexity.

“There are three portions or persons of Eros that have been classically differentiated: himeros or physical desire for the immediately present to be grasped in the heat of the moment; anteros or answering love; and pothos, the longing toward 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, 1989, “Eros”). Pothos is the decisive face: it names the longing that never arrives, the reaching-toward that constitutes erotic life as such.

This reshapes Jung’s four-stages-of-anima (Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia). Hillman insists: “the feminine images are not the eros itself but the objects of its longing (pothos). A drive has a corresponding projection, a goal it seeks, a grail to hold its blood” (Hillman, Anima, 1985). The anima-images are the containers Eros seeks; they are not Eros. This preserves the autonomy of Eros as daimonic agent and keeps the anima from collapsing into merely “the feminine.”

The three faces also mark the differentiation Hillman takes as lost in modernity: “the loss of distinction between the Gods, and between the masculine and feminine, we can attribute our loss of erotic identity. Masculinity has come to mean the rejection of the erotic as effeminate, leading to a compensatory coarsening of eros or to substituting sexuality for it” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 1972). Restoring himeros/anteros/pothos is restoring the structure of eros to the life that has forgotten it.

Relationships

• eros
• four-stages-of-anima
• anima
• eros-psyche-tandem

Primary sources

• A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman (1989), “Eros”
• hillman-anima-anatomy-personified (Hillman 1985)
• The Myth of Analysis (Hillman 1972)