Jung on Why Men Confuse Eros with Sex
Sometimes Facebook coughs up interesting and useful nuggets. The one I received via the C.G. Jung Foundation in NYC fits the description. Jung writes in his 1927 essay “Woman in Europe”: Most men 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.” The Facebook quote ends here.
The rest of the quote: “For her marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. Since sex is a formidable thing on account of its consequences, it is useful to have it in a safe place. But when it is less of a danger it also becomes less relevant and then the question of relationship moved into the foreground.”
My first reaction was that I thought Jung had a point, having had more than a little experience confusing Eros and sex. I’ll leave that thought hanging fire. My second reaction was to laugh, wondering what this early twentieth century, somewhat formal and uptight Swiss guy, could teach us about the subject. Jung raises this question in his very first sentence of the essay, asking rhetorically “what can a man say about a woman, his opposite. I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands where a man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most valuable thing in the world. Thus, it is with the greatest misgivings that I set out to treat of this theme.”
So, Jung loudly rings the caution bell, more so, it seems, than when on his usual canters.
I will not go deep into the historical framework that Jung builds, other than to observe that he sees women in the early part of the twentieth century as being in transition and forging new careers and visions of the future. Like men of the age, women were also in transition. Jung understands contraception delivered woman from bondage to nature that in turn released psychic energies that inevitably seek an outlet. Some of his language and focus faintly anticipates the “MeToo” Movement.
Jung writes that a “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.” Jung suggests that in modern terms the concept of Eros could be expressed as psychic relatedness and Logos as objective interest. Jung suggests for the ordinary man, whoever he is, love coincides with the institution of marriage and anything else is adultery or platonic friendship. On the other hand, for woman marriage is not an institution but a human love-relationship. To her marriage is an exclusive relationship, a state she can endure without dying of boredom because she likely has children and close relatives with whom the woman has a psychic relationship that Jung suggests is far more important that the sexual relationship with her husband.
Again, all this a century ago.
Jung’s writing is based on his research and clinical activities. He tries not to generalize. But he’s seems emphatic when suggesting that a wife is in reality “distributed among the children and among as many members of the family as possible, this maintaining any number of intimate relations.” As noted earlier, Jung suggests that men are erotically blinded, confusing Eros with sex. And this is where a woman can run into difficulties with her husband “for the question of relationship borders on a region that for him is dark and painful.” In this instance, Jung writes, the man can face the question only when the woman “carries the burden of suffering, that is when he is the ‘contained,’ — in other words, when she can imagine herself having a relationship with another man, and as a consequence, suffering disunion within herself.”
Then it is the wife who has the painful problem and the husband is not required to see his own, which to him is a great relief. Jung writes that man always finds a discussion of personal relationships painful and boring. For the man, “Eros is a shadowland which entangles him in his feminine unconscious, in something ‘psychic.’” It is reasonable to ask how much progress men have made in this arena.
Jung observes that modern psychology, beginning with Freud, was powerfully influenced by women. He writes that psychiatrists’ waiting rooms were packed with woman and this helped create a new psychology of complex phenomena. The great number of psychological case studies involved women. Jung suggests that women were, unconsciously, going to great trouble to put their psychologies out there in plain view in the most dramatic fashion., demonstrating to the world the whole question of psychic relationships. This was the beginning of a true depth psychology.
For Jung it is not so surprising that women contributed so much to the development of a robust psychology. For Jung women are simply more psychological than men. For him men are usually satisfied with the facts and logic, and anything that has to do with feelings and fantasies, he wants nothing to do with. “So, it is naturally woman who is the most direct exponent of psychology and gives it its richest content. Very many things can be perceived in her with the utmost distinctiveness which in a man are mere shadowy processes in the background, whose very existence he is unwilling to admit.”
But this is the world man must enter, the realm of the psyche if he is to grow psychologically and in practical terms meet a woman half way. Women have been forced to acquire masculine traits so that they, in Jung’s words, would not remain caught in an antiquated, purely instinctual feminine, lost in a world of men. Likewise, according to Jung, a man must make adjustments and develop his feminine side and ‘’to open his eyes to the psyche and Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid, unless he prefers to go trailing after a woman in a hopelessly boyish fashion., worshipping from afar but always in danger of being stowed away in her pocket.”
Jung’s cautions that this is not easy work for either party because the task involves dealing with the inferior aspects of themselves. In short, the masculine of the woman and the feminine of the man are inferior qualities, psychologically speaking. These inferior or shadow parts of a psychology belong to the wholeness of the personality and not to recognize this means a denial of human nature and the link to humankind.
As Jung has noted, women are inherently more psychological than men for reasons discussed earlier. At times Jung sounds like a feminist, as in this quote about the modern woman. Women of today “give expression to one of the cultural tendencies of our time: the urge to live a complete life, a longing for meaning and fulfillment, a growing disgust with a senseless one-sidedness, with unconscious instinct and blind contingency …” Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion.
As noted, Jung was making these observations after World War I, in which he served. He writes that the European psyche has been torn to threads by the hellish barbarism of the war. He adds that as man turns to repairing the outer damage, women set about healing the inner wounds, and for this she needs “as her more important instrument, a psychic relationship.” For Jung, it is the function of Eros to unite what Logos has sundered.
This uptight Swiss guy seems to have something to teach us after all.
