Eros and the Impulse to Create: A Coda

In the myth of the birth of Eros in Plato’s Symposium, Diotima, prophetess of mysteries and Socrates’ teacher, contradicts the other banqueters’ speeches on the nature of love. All of them, with the exception of the comic poet Aristophanes, praise Eros as a god, complete, magnificent, and beautiful on all counts. Diotima says that Eros is not a god, but a demigod, a mixture of human and divine. He is incomplete, but seeks completion. Eros is a daimon, filled both with human longing, and an innate knowledge of divine beauty.

Daimons are creatures moving through liminal spaces between earth and Olympus, offspring of gods and mortals. James Hillman (1975) calls such figures imaginal beings that tend to rise from unthought realms and show themselves in the figures of dreams. Daimons are always around us, communicating with us through image and symbol, the natural language of the psyche. It is through the conjuring of our imaginations that daimons become substantial enough for us to perceive and take in; they come to us, personified, with a vibrancy of meaning that ensures us of their presence. They make us feel erotic and alive.

Eros is such a creature, conceived in the garden of Zeus at a drunken party on the birthday of Aphrodite, goddess of Love and Beauty. Conceived from Poverty and Plenty, Eros is suffused with longing, but also recognizes the potential for beauty and completion within himself: a plenty that is innate, but that he cannot fully grasp. Eros’ nature is restless, because he is constantly longing to complete himself, as Plato (2006) says, to “give birth in beauty” (206 b). In our more prosaic analytic language, Eros’ nature is reflective of the longing we feel for a sense of relational completion when ruptures are experienced within ourselves or between ourselves and our patients. In suffering painful disruptions that evoke feelings of lack and emptiness, we are driven to seek unspoken, unknown places in our psyches in an effort to find healing, wholeness