Lover

the Lover, by whatever name, is the primal energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness, and passion. It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships

Moore’s foundational thesis defines the Lover archetype as the psyche’s root energy of sensory aliveness and passionate hunger, corresponding to Jung’s sensation function and orienting the mature masculine toward embodied relatedness.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis

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The Lover energy, arising as it does out of the Oedipal Child, is also the source of spirituality—especially of what we call mysticism. In the mystical tradition, which underlies and is present in all the world’s religions, the Lover energy, through the mystics, intuits the ultimate Oneness of all that is

Moore identifies the Lover archetype as the psychic source of mysticism, tracing its drive toward erotic union into the contemplative impulse toward cosmic oneness.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis

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In the history of our religions and the cultures that flow from them, we can see this pattern of tension between the Lover and the other archetypes of the mature masculine. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—what are called moral, or ethical, religions—have all persecuted the Lover.

Moore argues that the history of Western religion records a systematic suppression of the Lover archetype, expressed through prohibitions on sensory pleasure, erotic art, and the image-making unconscious.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis

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the absence of an erect and eager penis. This man’s sex life has gone stale; he is sexually inactive… At this point, the opposite pole of the archetypal Shadow may ‘rescue’ him by propelling him into the Addict’s quest for the perfect satisfaction of his sexuality

Moore delineates the Impotent Lover shadow configuration, showing how sexual and sensual deadness can precipitate a compensatory collapse into the Addict pole of the Lover’s bipolar shadow.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990thesis

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The Lover also expresses himself through polygamy, serial monogamy, or promiscuity. In mythology, this is shown in the Hindu Krishna’s love for the gopis… He loves each of them fully, with all his infinite capacity to love, so that each feels absolutely special and valued.

Moore charts the Lover’s mythological range across monogamous and polygamous forms, using Krishna as the archetypal image of inexhaustible erotic generosity.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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he felt the presence of ‘God’ as an exotic, sensuous Being, one who enjoyed the love-making right along with him. This was a revelation to him, and he began to access, with great benefit to himself and his sexual partners, the mature masculine energies of the Lover.

A clinical vignette illustrates how the Lover archetype can break through in a transformative dream-encounter, reconstellating a man’s erotic and spiritual life simultaneously.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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Shortly after he began his invocations of this image of the Lover, he went on a cruise. There he met, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful woman who felt that he was the most handsome, manly man she’d ever seen. She was experiencing the newfound Eros within him

Moore presents active imagination and mythological invocation of the Lover as a clinical technique capable of transforming a man’s erotic field and relational reality.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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His admixture with the Lover energy gives the Warrior compassion and a sense of connectedness with all things. The Lover is the masculine energy that brings a man back into relatedness with human beings, in all their frailty and vulnerability.

Moore describes the Lover’s moderating function within the masculine psyche, tempering Warrior aggression with compassion and relational sensitivity.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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The Hero wanted to conquer her, while the Lover wanted to just relate to her on a mutual basis… L: Yes, but that takes all the fun out of it. She has to want to be with us, or it’s no good. I’ll love her no matter what she does.

An active imagination dialogue illustrates the intrapsychic tension between the Hero’s drive for control and the Lover’s orientation toward unconditional relatedness.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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through self-knowledge the seeker comes to know his Higher Self… By forging the link with the Higher Self, not only does the lover come to know her own divinity but she also allows the Beloved to know His creation.

Vaughan-Lee articulates the Sufi mystical framework in which the lover-beloved dyad becomes the structural means by which the divine achieves self-knowledge through human interiority.

Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992thesis

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the Lover archetype, if experienced solely as an external reality, might result in Don Juanism. In such a case the young lover seeks completion and wholeness exclusively via a never ending series of liaisons, none of which brings him closer to the anima within

Nichols identifies Don Juanism as the pathological shadow of the Lover archetype when its drive for wholeness is enacted solely in outer reality, bypassing the inner anima work individuation demands.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis

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the Tarot Lover is doubtless scheduled for some big insights… conflict is the essence of life and the necessary prerequisite for all spiritual growth… It is often a seemingly insoluble conflict… that brings a person into analysis and starts him on the road to individuation.

Nichols reads the Tarot Lover card as an archetypal figure who must pass through irreducible conflict as the prerequisite for individuation and genuine self-knowledge.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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The Lover presents a situation which its central figure must ultimately confront alone… his fascination for the ‘anima blonde’ (however unconscious) will at least lure him away from the womb-like smothering of the mother type.

Nichols interprets the Tarot Lover’s triangulation with two female figures as an archetypal developmental moment in which erotic fascination with the anima propels the ego toward individuated autonomy.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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one young man involved with two women… he appears to be an ordinary human being, facing the world and its dilemmas with his feet solidly planted in everyday reality… He must therefore find within himself the strength to meet this confrontation

Nichols reads the Tarot Lover’s iconographic structure as a symbol of the ego’s first fully individual confrontation with the competing claims of eros and obligation.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside

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This is the work of the Ghostly Lover… In talking about the Ghostly Lover we are not dealing with something which is remote or unusual or which occurs only in abnormal or pathological conditions.

Harding establishes the Ghostly Lover as a widespread autonomous inner figure capable of drawing women into compensatory fantasy worlds as a substitute for outer relational reality.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970thesis

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when the Ghostly Lover calls and the woman follows she disappears, as it were, from reality… To herself it seems that she has become absorbed in an inner experience of great beauty and value which she cannot by any means share with another.

Harding describes the phenomenology of the Ghostly Lover’s grip: absorption in an inner world of private beauty that progressively displaces the capacity for outer relatedness.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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It is not the number ‘one,’ as we have seen in example after example, to which the lover’s mind inclines when he is given a chance to express his desire. Maneuvers of triangulation disclose him. For his delight is in reaching; to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight.

Carson argues against Aristophanes’ myth of original wholeness, proposing instead that the structural signature of the lover’s desire is triangulation and perpetual reaching, not union or completion.

Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986thesis

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as our question is whether the lover or non-lover is to be preferred, let us first of all agree in defining the nature and power of love… one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best

Plato’s Phaedrus opens the foundational philosophical debate on the lover by framing the question as a contest between desire and reason, asking whether the lover’s madness serves or harms the beloved.

Plato, Phaedrus, -370thesis

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the lover is not only hurtful to his love; he is also an extremely disagreeable companion… necessity and the sting of desire drive him on, and allure him with the pleasure which he receives from seeing, hearing, touching, perceiving him in every way.

The rhetorical speech of Lysias in Phaedrus presents the lover as a figure whose compulsive desire renders him dangerous, possessive, and incapable of genuine benefit to the beloved.

Plato, Phaedrus, -370supporting

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the custom of our country would have both of them proven well and truly, and would have us yield to the one sort of lover and avoid the other… testing both the lover and beloved in contests and trials, until they show to which of the two classes they respectively belong.

The Symposium presents a discriminating ethics of the lover, distinguishing noble from base attachment through the criterion of time, virtue, and resistance to material seduction.

Plato, Symposium, -385supporting

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The madness of love is unpredictable and dangerous. The person in love does not judge clearly… Transported by passion, this lover so dreads the young person’s separateness that he can neither correctly see nor kindly nourish his character and his deepest aspirations.

Nussbaum interprets the Socratic critique of the mad lover in Phaedrus as demonstrating how erotic passion systematically distorts judgment and forecloses genuine care for the beloved’s individuation.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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the traumatized psyche is kept alive in this way… Jung saw a transformation chamber in which the traumatized ego was broken down into its basic elements, dissolved, so to speak, in the nectar of the gods, for the ‘purpose’ of later rebirth.

Kalsched reads the Eros-Psyche myth as a model for trauma psychology, in which the lover Eros provides the archetypal fantasy sustaining a mortified ego until the conditions for genuine rebirth are met.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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The consistency of his own outlook permits the nonlover to accommodate change in the beloved… The nonlover will not be appalled when his boy’s physical appearance changes with age nor will he endeavor to prevent the boy from changing in other ways

Carson’s reading of Lysias foregrounds the non-lover’s atemporal stability as the defining contrast to the lover’s volatile, time-bound desire — a classical framing of control versus passion.

Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside

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Love’s desires, it now appears, are not just painful for both lover and beloved, they are also self-defeating. For it appears that the desires generated by love’s project of union lead to results that

Nussbaum, drawing on Lucretius, argues that the lover’s project of total union is structurally self-defeating, generating pain and violence in proportion to the intensity of its drive.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994aside

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every girl who saw his films could identify herself with the heroine of the play and so feel him in very truth her lover… the profession renders the individual particularly susceptible to the transference of the woman’s animus.

Harding illustrates the Ghostly Lover’s operation through cultural figures such as film stars, showing how the animus projects erotic idealisation onto figures whose public roles make them available for mass transference.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970aside

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