Sweetness

Sweetness in the depth-psychology corpus occupies a surprisingly contested semantic space, ranging from the physiologically primitive — taste as the most elemental form of sensory discrimination — to the spiritually sublime and psychologically perilous. Aristotle establishes the baseline: sweetness and bitterness are the foundational poles of taste, by which the soul first learns to distinguish and judge. Plato’s Timaeus extends this into a cosmological account of flavour and pleasure. The Patristic literature, especially the Philokalia and Hausherr’s study of penthos, transforms sweetness into a spiritual diagnostic: the “sweetness of grace” represents genuine contemplative fruition, yet a counterfeit sweetness — seductive, dank, debilitating — may signal demonic deception. Edinger brings this tension squarely into Jungian alchemical hermeneutics: sweetness appearing in dreams signals either regressive, childish desirousness (a failed coagulatio) or, at the higher stage of the coniunctio, a legitimate call to incarnate insight into reality. Estés introduces the complementary warning from a mythopoetic-feminine angle: the too-sweet, too-good mother principle cannot long coexist with the wild. Across these registers, sweetness thus functions as a threshold marker — between regression and maturation, between authentic grace and its counterfeit, between civilised comfort and instinctual depth.

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when one is really dealing with the second stage of the coniunctio, then sweetness in dreams indicates that the time has come to bring certain conscious insights into concrete reality—to go for one’s desires.

Edinger argues that sweetness in dreams is a precise alchemical-psychological signal: at the regressive level it denotes childish desire, but at the second stage of the coniunctio it marks readiness to incarnate hard-won conscious insight.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995thesis

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the sweetness it experiences is an illusion of grace, coming from the deceiver with a counterfeit joy… the devil tries to lead the soul into an adulterous union with himself… seduced by that dank and debilitating sweetness.

Diadochos of Photiki identifies a false sweetness as a primary tool of demonic deception, distinguishing it sharply from authentic divine grace by its quality of being amorphous, disordered, and spiritually enervating.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis

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the sweetness of grace may help and increase your fruit. For the sweetness of the spiritual charism is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb (Ps 18:11). There is no great number of monks or virgins who have known this great sweetness of grace, only a few here and there.

Hausherr documents the Eastern Christian doctrine that the sweetness of spiritual grace — exceeding even honey — is a rare and supreme fruition of compunction, accessible only to the most advanced contemplatives.

Hausherr, Irénée, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, 1944thesis

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Although sweetness can fit into the wild, the wild cannot long fit into sweetness.

Estés positions sweetness as the hallmark of the over-domesticated, over-compliant feminine psyche, arguing that while the instinctual wild can momentarily accommodate sweetness, it cannot be contained by it without psychic impoverishment.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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sight discerns whiteness and blackness, taste — sweetness and bitterness, and in this respect the other senses are similar. But since we discern both whiteness and sweetness and the object of each sense by contrast with an object of that sense, what is it whereby we further perceive that they are the objects of different senses?

Aristotle establishes sweetness as the primary positive pole of taste-sensation, making it the paradigmatic case for examining cross-modal discrimination and the unity of sensory consciousness.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting

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sweetness in dreams are such things as ice cream, candy, cake, cookies and so on. As a rule, such dream images refer to regressive desirousness, childish tendencies, although dreams of chocolate, representing black sweetness, may refer to the assimilation of evil.

Edinger provides a taxonomy of sweet dream-imagery, distinguishing ordinary regressive sweetness from the darker valence of chocolate, which he links to the assimilation of shadow content in the alchemical coagulatio.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting

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Reinforcement of consumption of substances of abuse and of sweet foods share the same reward pathways in the brain… specifically, activation of mu-opioid receptors occurs following dopaminergic signals from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens.

Jeynes situates sweet preference within the neuroscience of addiction, showing that sugar and substances of abuse converge on identical mesolimbic reward circuitry, grounding the symbolic equation of sweetness with craving in biological substrate.

Jeynes, Kendall D., The importance of nutrition in aiding recovery from substance use disorders: A review, 2012supporting

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‘liking,’ or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine.

Berridge’s incentive-sensitization theory implies that the hedonic quality of sweetness (‘liking’) is neurologically separable from craving (‘wanting’), offering a scientific parallel to the psychological distinction between genuine and counterfeit sweetness.

Berridge, Kent C., Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction, 2016supporting

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With his sighing and his singing, Gentlest whispers in the branches, Softest music, sweetest odors.

Jung cites this mythopoeic passage from Hiawatha to illustrate how the courtship of the wind—an anima-figure of nature—is characterized by its sweetness, linking the quality to the numinous appeal of the archetypal feminine and to the theme of rebirth.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside

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over his head ‘tall trees hung their fruit, pear-trees and pomegranates and apple-trees with bright fruit and sweet fig-trees and blooming olive-trees, which when the old man reached out his hands to clutch them, the wind tossed to the shadowing clouds’.

Onians deploys the Tantalus myth to argue that sweet fruit — including the olive — represented the divine substance of life-force desired but perpetually withheld, connecting sweetness etymologically and symbolically to ambrosia and the liquid of immortal life.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside

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