The warrior within you

This is how the story of Psyche and Eros will make you strong

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This post is for anyone who fears they lack the courage required to live the life they want as the person they truly are – anyone who knows what it's like to feel disconnected from themselves, others and the world around them, too.

So, take a moment to relax. Close your eyes if you like, and settle in for the myth of Psyche and Eros. We’ll talk about how you can use it to reclaim the strength and independence your mind tries to hide from you, as well as the true connection that awaits out there in the real world. I hope you enjoy it.

The myth of Psyche and Eros

Psyche – whose name means "soul" – was a mortal woman of unparalleled beauty. In fact, she was so beautiful that people were abandoning the cult of Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love and beauty) to worship Psyche instead. This vexed Aphrodite, as you can imagine, and so she sent her son, Eros (the god of physical love and sexual desire – you know, the one with the arrow) to curse Psyche.

The plan was this: Eros would find the ugliest beast he could, lead it into Psyche’s chamber at night and pierce her skin with his lust-inducing projectile so that, when she awoke, the first thing she'd see would be this pig and she would fall madly in love with it.

This should have been a foolproof plan. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? But while in the process of delivering this stinky beast, Eros, the clumsy oaf, accidentally pricks himself with the tip of his own arrow, causing him to fall deeply in love with Psyche. Whoops! Tail between his legs, he slips away and leaves Psyche none the wiser.

Meanwhile, Psyche's parents – the King and Queen – are not happy with her because she refuses to marry, and what's the point of a daughter who will not wed? Perplexed, they consult the oracle of Apollo to learn her future, and receive the distressing news that she needs to be sacrificed to the most hideous, dangerous being known to man, and that if she isn't, this beast will destroy the entire kingdom.

So, they lead poor Psyche to the top of a hill, tie her to a rock and leave her there to be ravished or eaten or whatever it is this beast will do. But that doesn't happen. Instead, Zephyrus – the West Wind – magically unties Psyche and transports her to a beautiful (but totally empty) palace in some faraway forest. Once there, she's washed, dressed and fed by invisible handmaidens while heavenly music whispers ethereally through the trees. Sweet.

This is, of course, Eros's magical palace and he visits her under the cover of darkness every night to make love to her, with the strict instruction that she must never try to find out who he is. It's worth noting that the ancient Greeks had different views on consent to those we're used to today. But it turns out Psyche is kinda into it anyway, and although she's still in the dark about Eros's identity, she takes a trip home to gloat to her two nasty sisters about her palace and burgeoning relationship.

The problem is that Psyche's sisters are jealous and manipulative, and they tell Psyche that her man can't possibly be the beauty she's decided he is. Rather, her lover must be the hideous beast the prophecy foretold and she must, therefore, light a lantern while he sleeps to shine a light on his true face. They also tell her to kill him, just for good measure.

This, she did that very night – not the killing part, though, because after laying eyes on the stone-cold hottie that is Eros, in her excitement, she both pricks herself with his arrow and accidentally spills hot oil from the lantern on the naked skin of his shoulder. He wakes up furious that she's disobeyed his one instruction, and leaves her alone in the palace, which rapidly starts to deteriorate around her.

Symbolism: Psyche’s act of looking at Eros’s face represents curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge, which are often seen as both a source of enlightenment and a potential cause of trouble. In Jungian terms, it can be related to the concept of the shadow—hidden or repressed aspects of the psyche that come to light through exploration.

Psyche, at this point, having lost everything, is close to ending it all. But before she can take action, the mischievous fawn god Pan finds her and convinces her to take revenge on her nasty, nasty sisters – which she does post-haste, killing them in the process.

While all that's going on – and with the god of love out of action because he's angry, grieving his lost love and in great pain from his shoulder wound – the kingdom is now also in trouble. People stop falling for each other, stop marrying. Eventually, they grow unhappy enough to pray, once again, to good old Aphrodite, who therefore learns that Psyche had not only escaped her original punishment, but has wreaked all this other havoc, too, including the humiliation of her son, Eros.

Furious, Aphrodite captures Psyche, throws her in a dungeon, and sets her a series of four impossible tasks that she must complete in order to regain her freedom. With each task, Psyche starts out hopeless, but with the help of kindly ants, a river god, Zeus's eagle, and finally, a sentient tower, she manages to succeed in all of them.

There's a hitch, however, during the last task, which was to journey to the underworld and retrieve a little of Persephone's beauty – the Queen of Hades – in a golden box. Psyche gets the beauty but, once back above ground, she succumbs to the temptation to look in the box, hoping to steal a little of its contents to make her even more beautiful to Eros. The moment she lays eyes on Persephone's raw beauty, Psyche falls into a deep, death-like sleep.

Thankfully, Eros, having finally pulled his socks up, comes to Psyche's rescue with a kiss to awaken her from her slumber. In the end, she's promoted to goddess and gets to live out eternity with Eros and the rest of the gang up on Mount Olympus. In other words, the ultimate happily ever after.

Now, let's break this intriguing story down.

Psyche's journey is a Tenderfoot's tale (in the main, at least). What that means is that Psyche is a representation of the Maiden archetype – or the Tenderfoot, as I prefer to call it – and as such, she is on a journey to self-actualisation and individuation, coming up against the archetypal antagonists of Authority and the Predator.

Individuation: becoming our authentic selves

So, Psyche starts by flying the familial nest (the home of the King and Queen), and in doing this, she begins to disentangle herself from the forces of Authority – that is, the rules of her upbringing, her conditioning and societal expectations (i.e. to be a good girl and to marry herself off, etc). In short, Psyche is, at this point, taking the first step in becoming her own person.

What I love about Psyche's story as a Tenderfoot's tale is that it's not even vaguely linear, easy or tidy. She leaves the apparent (if unappealing) safety of her family home and has to weather the four trials on her own, but her journey of growth isn't full of grit and determination. Psyche really struggles to let go of her naïvety, and crashes down into a state of hopelessness multiple times before she finally succeeds, which is what personal growth and psychological healing is really like. We don't just set off and then get there; we struggle along the way.

Now, if you're thinking that Psyche doesn't ever really succeed because, in the end, she gets rescued by the knight in shining armour that is Eros, then hold that thought. You're in the right place, and the fact you're thinking this probably means you're absolutely the person to be reading this post. Let me explain.

The Hero’s healing kiss

You probably recognised similarities between this narrative and fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, which are just a couple of the many, many stories that have their roots in this myth. These tales all end with a dashing princely hero-type saving the damsel from certain death of misery – often with a kiss – and then fulfilling all of her greatest wishes by whisking her away to be married and to live happily (domestically) ever after.

This, I think we can all agree, is extremely annoying. We like to believe that we've come a long way in terms of gender equality since the women's lib movement began in the late 1960s. In some ways we have, but the vast majority of rom-com films, romance novels and many other stories still follow this tiresome and troubling blueprint.

Thankfully, though, if we just put our literalism to one side, there is a better way of reading this narrative arc.

Myth and Fairytale through the lens of archetypal psychology

In terms of Jungian psychology, all characters and other elements of myths and fairy tales are understood to represent different aspects of the psyche or self, not individual, external people. So, both Psyche and Eros represent aspects of the human personality – parts of you and me and everyone else, regardless of our gender.

But, more importantly, this also means that Psyche can be seen as an aspect of Eros, and Eros as an aspect of Psyche. The Jungian interpretation of this kind of story, then, is that the Tenderfoot (Psyche, in this case) is saved not by an outer hero, but by the awakening of their own, inner Hero – the more assertive, protective part of the personality that can fight their own battles, stand their ground and carve out an authentic path in life. That healing kiss represents the moment of change – the point at which a new version of self is born as a result of psychological integration.

In therapy and personal growth, we call this shadow work – it's the process of bringing forth repressed aspects of self from where they have so far hidden in the unconscious.

If you think about it, Eros is first known to Psyche as the nameless, faceless, terrifying beast to which she is sacrificed. Anyone who has done shadow work or talk therapy knows that this is how it starts – a repressed aspect of self is repressed precisely because we believe it to be dangerous. In reality, no part of the personality is ever as monstrous as we might imagine, and so once we start to get a better sense of it, just like Psyche, we can find our lost and forgotten aspects to be desirable, empowering, healthy and helpful in many ways.

The process of integration, though, is not often that straightforward – not in reality and not in this story, either. Psyche doesn't get taken by the beast and then immediately transported to live out her eternal bliss up on Mount Olympus. There's a whole lot of other stuff that has to happen before her heroic self can really come to the rescue – including spells of loneliness, doubt and repeated despair, dangerous trials, and, of course, living for some time with a semi-conscious Eros who has not yet revealed his true face.

Shining a light on the warrior's face

This part is key. The moment Psyche lights the oil lantern to reveal Eros's identity marks the point at which she decides (with the help of her sisters who are also parts of her personality) that she just has to know. No matter how pleasant her new life in the magical palace might seem to be on the surface, she just can't carry on without learning who her lover really is. And quite rightly so. That curiosity initially appears to be punished when Eros storms off in a huff of toxic masculinity but, without that act of defiance, Psyche would never have been able to fulfil her quest to individuation and, ultimately, divine wholeness.

So this moment is where Psyche's journey of growth truly starts, and from that point on, the story demonstrates the challenge of realising – or birthing – a new version of self and learning how to own it in the big, bad real world. Psyche faces rejection, desperation, anger and vengeance, and everything she has to come up against in the four trials set by Aphrodite. Only after all of that is Eros awakened fully as protector and warrior and a representation of inner strength, union and wholeness.

So, how can we use all this for our own personal growth?

According to Jungian theory, archetypes reside in the collective unconscious, and are therefore shared by all of us. They may not be active in everyone, of course, nor expressed in the same way. But the potential is there.

So, the inner protector is universally available, and universally needed as well. In which case, rather than reading these stories as indications of the frailty of women or of anyone's need for a hero to come along and save the day, is it not better to read them as calls to action? Or even as maps to follow in order to step up and into our whole selves? I think so.

Individuation as a courageous act of defiance

And how do we do this? Well, just like Psyche, we need to dare to shine a light on repressed and resisted parts of the personality so that we can be true to ourselves. We also need to push and question the boundaries within which we live: the expectations made of us; the choices we're "meant" to make; the lives we're "supposed" to lead. The rules we're told to follow.

In the archetypal story arc of the Tenderfoot's tale, the primary antagonist is Authority. If the Tenderfoot does not rebel, they do not succeed on this quest, because defiance and rebellion are a part of how we grow. It's only by challenging the norm and fighting for what we authentically need, want and value can we get to work out who we are as people, and where our place in the world is.

In reality, we'll take and retake our Tenderfoot tales multiple times over the course of our lives, whenever we face a new challenge or context – leaving school, leaving home, changing jobs, or anything of that kind. We walk this path whenever we need to update our sense of self and learn how to stand on our own two feet.

I'm not saying it's easy. In fact, it almost definitely won't be. It's painful and difficult to shed one skin and step into another. This process involves fear, uncertainty and ultimately grief, because this kind of transition is a type of psychological death – or ego dissolution – and it means leaving things behind, some of which we will have benefited from in one way or another. But that's the deal – in order to grow, we have to be brave enough to relinquish the apparent safety or comfort of whatever we currently have in the hope that what follows will be better.

When Psyche lit the lantern, her world changed irrevocably. Up until that point, she had been living in a magical palace with handmaidens to wait on her, a lover who kept her safe, and tended to at least her physical needs at night. She could have stuck with that. It wouldn't have been the worst fate. But it would have been lonely – there was no connection in that palace for Psyche. Nothing real. The handmaidens, invisible. The lover, faceless.

To choose reality was to give up a comfortably protected world of denial and half-truths. Ultimately, this was all for the better, but it didn't seem that way at first, and she almost didn't make it through.

The courage to be ourselves

So we can't expect it to be easy, but if we do the same – if we dare to light our own lanterns – we can also awaken our inner Eros-like protectors and reap the rewards of a stronger, more integrated life.

I've waited until the end of this post to point out that Eros represents more than just an assertive inner saviour in the hope that what I'm about to say will make a nicely resonant ending. But I probably haven't kept his true identity as well-hidden as he did. Eros obviously also represents love. Of course he does, he is the literal god of love. Psyche's union with Eros, then, speaks to the power of what's often referred to as the "unifying force of love," which I like to think of as the true agent of change and growth. Connection, in one form or another, is vital to the process of integration, and it is also what awaits us at the end of our respective Tenderfoot tales.

We only get to experience true, wholehearted interpersonal love if we dare to be our true selves. After all, no one can love someone who is hidden from them. Equally, we don't get love if we wait for the Disney prince or princess to come along and rescue us. If we do that, we get codependency.

And finally, we don't get to awaken new versions of self, or to heal from past pain effectively, unless we make steps towards self-love – the ability to accept and welcome the parts of our personalities that have been previously rejected.

The unifying force of love

In the end, this story, with its fairytale ending, is about union. But it's also about personal growth, empowerment and awakening.

Is Psyche awoken by Eros, or Eros awoken by Psyche? Maybe it's both, but I tend to read it as the latter. And, however we look at it, it's love that saves the day. But not a passive, easy love that shows up on a silver platter. This is one we really have to work for. And that's a good thing.

Please stay tuned for more posts in this five-part series, where I'll be covering Psyche's four trials in more detail, along with how to use them as a map for our own integrative journeys.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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