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 ungraspable, the incomprehensible, that idealization that is attendant upon all love and that is always beyond capture. If himeros is the material and physical desire of eros, and anteros the relational mutuality and exchange, pothos is love's spiritual portion. Pothos here would refer to the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit. When pothos is presented on a vase painting (fifth century, British Museum) as drawing Aphrodite's chariot, we see that pothos is the motive force that drives desire ever onward, as the portion of love that is never satisfied by actual loving and actual possession of the object. It is the fantasy factor that pulls the chariot beyond immediacy, like the seizures that took Alexander and like Odysseus's desire for "home." Pothos here is the blue romantic flower of love that idealizes and drives our wandering; or as the Romantics put it: we are defined not by what we are or what we do, but by our Sehnsucht: Tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. Pothos, as the wider factor in eros, drives the sailor-wanderer to quest for what cannot be fulfilled and what must be impossible. It is the source of "impossible love," producing the Tristan complex that refuses himeros and anteros in order to maintain the transcendence of pothos. This side of eros makes possible living in the world as a scene of impossible mythical action, mythologizing life. This component of eros is the factor, or the divine figure, within all our senseless individuation adventures, the phallic foolishness that sends us chasing, the mind's mad wanderings after impossibilities, our forever being at sea, and the fictive goals we must set ourselves-all so that we may go on loving.
— James Hillman
Pothos names the specific portion of love that cannot be satisfied by the thing you longed for once you have it. This is not failure of will or a defect in the beloved; it is the structure of the longing itself. Hillman is pointing to something that runs beneath all ordinary erotic life — a fantasy factor that was already pulling the chariot before you knew where it was going, that intensifies rather than dissolves when the object is obtained. Odysseus reaches Ithaca and the longing reconstitutes itself. Alexander seizes another horizon. The Romantics knew what they were naming when they said Sehnsucht is identity — not you at rest, but you at reach, defined by the impossible image that moves ahead of every arrival.
What makes this hard to hear is that pothos does real spiritual work. The same component that drives senseless wandering also prevents love from collapsing into mere satisfaction, into himeros alone. It is, as Hillman notes, love's spiritual portion — the erotic side of spirit, the pneumatic side of eros. The soul does not simply burn off pothos through enough fulfillment; it reorganizes its impossibility around the next idealized image. Recognizing this is not a cure for wandering. It is an account of why the wandering feels like who you are, and why every apparently fulfilled desire arrives already pointing toward the horizon that refuses to resolve.
James Hillman·Senex & Puer·2015