Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest. In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or "platonic" friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship-at least that is what she would like to believe. (Since her Eros is not naïve but is mixed with other, unavowed motives-marriage as a ladder to social position, etc.-the principle cannot be applied in any absolute sense.) Marriage means to her an exclusive relationship. She can endure its exclusiveness all the more easily, without dying of ennui, inasmuch as she has children or near relatives with whom she has a no less intimate relationship than with her husband. The fact that she has no sexual relationship with these others means nothing, for the sexual relationship is of far less importance to her than the psychic relationship. It is enough that she and her husband both believe their relationship to be unique and exclusive. If he happens to be the "container" he feels suffocated by this exclusiveness, especially if he fails to notice that the exclusiveness of his wife is nothing but a pious fraud. In reality she is distributed among the children and among as many members of the family as possible, thus maintaining any number of intimate relationships. If her husband had anything like as many relationships with other people she would be mad with jealousy. Most men, though, are erotically blinded-they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Eros-relationship is the real and decisive one. For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is working here with genuine phenomenological observation — the different weights men and women tend to place on relational bond versus sexual claim — but the theoretical frame he reaches for is already a bypass in motion. Eros as "the great binder and loosener," Logos as "objective interest": these are clean, almost relieving categories, and their very cleanness should make you suspicious. The soul's actual texture is not clean. It is distributed, partial, evasive, and the passage itself admits this: the woman's Eros "is not naïve but is mixed with other, unavowed motives." That admission is the most honest sentence in the passage, and Jung moves past it quickly.
What the passage actually discloses, beneath its typological scaffolding, is the way the soul secures itself against loss through diffusion. The woman distributed among children, relatives, and husband is not simply more relational by nature — she has found a way to make the central bond less catastrophic, to spread the risk of abandonment across a field of connections. That is not Eros as cosmic principle. That is a very human strategy for not being annihilated by the failure of any single love. The man who "possesses" through sex is running a parallel strategy — locate the bond in something he can initiate, something that feels conclusive. Neither strategy survives the test it is designed to pass, and the jealousy Jung describes is what shows up when the strategy is threatened.
Carl Gustav Jung·Civilization in Transition·1964