---
slug: marie-louise-von-franz-eros-ffe2ea2d
title: "Marie-Louise von Franz on Eros"
author: "James Hillman Marie-Louise von Franz"
work: "Lectures on Jung's Typology"
section: ""
year: "2013"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - eros
fragment: |
  Eros refers to the principle of Jungian, attraction towards and attachment to, connection, relation, involvement that binds together. It has roots in desire and specific affects such as longing, burning, ascending, dying, and specific symbols such as wings, arrows, child, fire, ladder. As an archetypal dominant, eros differs both from the anima as a psychological complex and from feeling as a psychological function, even if both may take on shades of eros and come under its sway in that eros is metapsychological, a god or daimon, and a wider category than either anima or feeling.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Eros is not a feeling you have. That distinction matters more than it first appears. Hillman is careful to place eros above the level of function or complex — not a capacity of the psyche that can be developed, not a figure you encounter in a dream, but a metapsychological principle, something the soul operates *within* rather than possesses. The moment you treat eros as a feeling you could cultivate or a relationship quality you might improve, you have already shrunk it into something manageable, something the ego can work on. The god refuses that reduction.
  
  What the passage names — longing, burning, ascending, dying — are not metaphors for emotional intensity. They are eros's actual grammar: a movement toward that simultaneously consumes the one moving. The ladder goes up; the fire eats what feeds it; the arrows wound before they connect. Every image in this list carries a cost, which means the principle of attraction and binding is also a principle of transformation by loss. What draws you is already changing you in the drawing. That is why eros sits wider than feeling — feeling can be educated, regulated, refined. What eros does to a life does not answer to those operations.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The stakes of the word "metapsychological" are easy to miss on a first reading. It is not a synonym for "very psychological" or "deeply psychological" — it names a different register entirely: Eros as a principle that governs psychology from outside it, the way gravity governs objects without being one. This is where Hillman quietly parts company with the tendency to domesticate the archetypal into the personal — to say "your Eros" the way you might say "your anima" or "your feeling function." For Hillman, the god is not yours. You come under its sway; it does not come under yours. The list of affects — longing, burning, ascending, dying — is itself a kind of proof: these are not psychological states you choose or manage. They arrive as visitations. Somewhere you are probably already inside one of them without quite having named it yet.
parent_id: MarieLouisevonFranz_2013_Lectures_on_Jung's_Typology__par0041
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Franz writes:

> Eros refers to the principle of Jungian, attraction towards and attachment to, connection, relation, involvement that binds together. It has roots in desire and specific affects such as longing, burning, ascending, dying, and specific symbols such as wings, arrows, child, fire, ladder. As an archetypal dominant, eros differs both from the anima as a psychological complex and from feeling as a psychological function, even if both may take on shades of eros and come under its sway in that eros is metapsychological, a god or daimon, and a wider category than either anima or feeling.

— James Hillman Marie-Louise von Franz

Eros is not a feeling you have. That distinction matters more than it first appears. Hillman is careful to place eros above the level of function or complex — not a capacity of the psyche that can be developed, not a figure you encounter in a dream, but a metapsychological principle, something the soul operates *within* rather than possesses. The moment you treat eros as a feeling you could cultivate or a relationship quality you might improve, you have already shrunk it into something manageable, something the ego can work on. The god refuses that reduction.

What the passage names — longing, burning, ascending, dying — are not metaphors for emotional intensity. They are eros's actual grammar: a movement toward that simultaneously consumes the one moving. The ladder goes up; the fire eats what feeds it; the arrows wound before they connect. Every image in this list carries a cost, which means the principle of attraction and binding is also a principle of transformation by loss. What draws you is already changing you in the drawing. That is why eros sits wider than feeling — feeling can be educated, regulated, refined. What eros does to a life does not answer to those operations.

---

James Hillman Marie-Louise von Franz · *Lectures on Jung's Typology* · 2013