ABSTRACT
The story of Eros and Psyche, told as a short interlude in a longer novel The Golden Ass, by the ancient Roman writer Lucius Apuleius, has proven irresistible to Jungian theorists. Erich Neumann adapted the story (Neumann, 1956) and was the first to interpret it. He approached the story as a paradigm of female development. By contrast, both von Franz (1970) and Ulanov (1971) see it as a model for anima development in men. James Hillman (1972) sees it as an archetypal drama — a metaphorical portrayal of the longing of the Psyche for Eros and Eros for Psyche, and recently Lena Ross has interpreted the tale as the “struggle to separate from the collective while maintaining a relationship to the divine” (Ross, 1991: 65).
