The ultimate beauty of psyche is that which even Aphrodite does not have and which must come from Persephone, who is queen over the dead souls and whose name means “bringer of destruction." The Box of Beauty which Psyche must fetch as her last task refers to an underworld beauty that can never be seen with the senses. It is the beauty of the knowledge of death and of the effects of death upon all other beauty that does not contain this knowledge. Psyche must “die" herself in order to experience the reality of this beauty, a death different from her suicidal attempts. This would be the ultimate task of soul-making and its beauty: the incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, the visible transfigured by the invisibility of Hades's kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality. The Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone. Destruction, death, and Hades are not left out. Moreover, Aphrodite does not have access to this kind of beauty. She can acquire it only through Psyche, for the soul mediates the beauty of the invisible inner world to the world of outer forms.
In the darkness of this [analytical] initiation, the two people instinctively move nearer to each other. A bond forms, as if an eros between the dying, something that is other than the transference of past emotions, other than love between pupil and guide, between patient and doctor, a quite rare and inexplicable feeling brought by the mystery of the image.
I do not know what this kind of loving is, but it is not reducible to other more familiar forms. Perhaps it is an experience of the eros in Thanatos. Perhaps it is an experience of telestic eros, of which Plato speaks in the Phaedrus, the eros of the mysteries and initiations of the soul; or, it may have something to do with the creative eros that always occurs when one is close to soul, the myth of (Eros) and Psyche moving through our emotions. Whatever the nature, there is a loving in dream work. We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us- and this feeling of being loved by the images permeates the analytical relationship. Let us call it imaginal love, a love based wholly on relationship with images and through images, a love showing in the imaginative response of the partners to the imagination in the dreams. Is this Platonic love? It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
BlissNinja 