Eros from Diotima to Jung

The Lineage’s most direct classical-to-Jungian transmission runs through Diotima’s speech. Jung cites the Symposium not as illustration but as source: in the 1928 revision of the “Eros theory” chapter in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, he makes the citation load-bearing — “‘Eros is a mighty daemon,’ as the wise Diotima said to Socrates” (Jung, CW 7 §32) — and the structural features he inherits are Diotima’s features. Eros as daimōn, as bridge, as child of lack, as the power that “orders the empire of the gods” (Symposium 197b) is the Eros Jung receives.

The Red Book records the moment of reception. In the 1913–1914 descents, Jung encounters the figure Salome as an “unspiritual principle of feeling that could be called Eros” (Red Book Liber Primus commentary), paired with Elijah as Logos. The Platonic daimōn appears here as an inner figure, not as a philosophical term. The text of Plato has been converted into an encounter — this is what Jung’s method does to the Lineage’s concepts.

The thread continues through Aion (1951), where the Eros/logos polarity is formalized; through the Corti letters of 1929, where Eros is installed as the animus-counterpart in a woman’s psychology; and into the Dream Analysis seminars, where Eros receives its most compact Jungian definition as “a principle of relatedness.”

The thread’s significance is methodological. It shows that Jungian psychology at its technical points is not novel invention but the reactivation of classical concepts through direct citation. The graph must carry the transmission as a transmission — not as Jung’s discovery and not as Plato’s prefiguration, but as one concept walking across 2,300 years.

Sources

• plato: Symposium — Diotima’s speech on Eros as daimōn (202d–203a)
• carl-jung: CW 7 “Eros theory” revision; Aion ch. III; Letters I (to Corti, 1929); Dream Analysis 1928–1930
• jung-red-book: Salome/Elijah passages as the visionary reception of the polarity