We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

by Robert A. Johnson

This is the great wound in the Western psyche. It is the primary psychological problem of our Western culture.

Carl Jung has shown us that when a great psychological phenomenon suddenly appears in the life of an individual, it represents a tremendous unconscious potential that is rising to the level of consciousness. The same is true for a culture. At a certain point in the history of a people, a new possibility bursts out of the collective unconscious; it is a new idea, a new belief, a new value, or a new way of looking at the universe. It represents a potential good if it can be integrated into consciousness, but at first it is overwhelming, even destructive.

All humankind is in the grip of this huge evolutional Power. When the collective unconscious begins a new stage in this process, it tolerates no obstacle. In order to force a new ideal or possibility into the conscious psyche of a people, it will turn a society upside down, launch crusades, beget new religions, or shake empires down into rubble.

It is the feminine qualities that bring meaning into life: relatedness to other human beings, the ability to soften power with love, awareness of our inner feelings and values, respect for our earthly environment, a delight in earth’s beauty, and the introspective quest for inner wisdom. With these qualities shortchanged, we don’t find much meaning. With our swords and lances we build our empires, but they don’t give us a sense of meaning or purpose.

The specter of Duke Morgan awakens us to a profound psychological reality: No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite. If the masculine mind tries to live without its “other half,” the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality.

We have to go to the parts of ourselves that we have barely touched, that we barely know. We must sail forth and steer for the deep waters, risking all, yet strangely safe upon those seas of God.

On the level of the mind, the sword is the discriminating intellect that divides and analyzes. It figuratively “cuts through” problems and ideas to understand them; it is the logical, critical faculty in the mind.

A great paradox is laid out before us at this point in our story. Before a masculine ego makes peace with the feminine, before it makes a marriage of the opposites, it first has to do battle with the Morholt. A man must first protect himself against the raw power plays of the inner feminine. He must develop enough masculine ego strength so that he can approach the powerful inner feminine on equal terms.

One of the great strengths of the inner feminine is the ability to let go, to give up ego control, to stop trying to control the people and the situation, to turn the situation over to fate and wait on the natural flow of the universe.

The sorceress Queen gathered flowers and herbs and roots; she steeped them in wine and over that potion cast a magic spell, and this was its power: They who drink of it together shall love each other with their every single sense and every thought, but its power will wane after a span of three years. Then she gave it secretly to Iseult’s maid Brangien and charged her to offer it only to King Mark and Iseult on the night of their wedding, after they were alone.

His wine-born rapture bespeaks a historical moment almost a thousand years ago when the cult of romance burst into our culture and started a slow evolution that spanned the centuries and formed our modern ideas about love.

The French love stories were called romans, which was anglicized into “romance.”

Yet these are the ideals that underlie our patterns of courtship and marriage to this day! Taken on the wrong level, these inherited ideals cause us to seek passion and intensity for their own sake; they plant a perpetual discontent that can never find the perfection it seeks.

Although this scene is familiar to us, although we have experienced it in our own lives, yet there is something strange in it. Tristan and Iseult are “in love,” yet we wonder if it is with each other. They are entranced, mesmerized, in love with a mystical vision—but of something separate and distinct from their human selves, something they see through the magic of the wine. Their “love” is not ordinary human love that comes by knowing each other as individuals. The symbol tells us that this is a love that is “magical,” “supernatural”—it is neither personal nor voluntary; it comes from outside the lovers and possesses them against their will.

Romantic love began as a path of spiritual aspiration; unconsciously, we seek that same path in romantic love today.

What we seek constantly in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone; we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness.

The reality that hides in romantic love is the fact of spiritual aspiration; the truth that the Western man unconsciously and involuntarily seeks in romantic love is the inner truth of his own soul.

The Western man, without realizing it, is caught in a quest for wholeness and, against his wish, is pulled inexorably by a vision of the universal and the eternal. But it is in the image of woman, seen through the lens of romantic love, that he invests his quest and his vision.

Symbols do not flow from the unconscious to tell us what we already know but to show us what we have yet to learn.

As we continue our mythical journey with Tristan and Iseult, we will live with them the story of all lovers who have ever drunk the magic wine. We will see with greater clarity how we have mixed our spiritual aspiration—our urge toward the divine—with our human relationships. This is the secret knowledge that is hidden behind the mystery of romantic love: how to live with and honor both of these powerful energies, which we have mixed together so deliciously and yet so dangerously in the wine of love.

Animus usually personifies himself as a masculine force and appears in women’s dreams as a masculine figure.

Romantic love always consists in the projection of the soul-image. When a woman falls in love it is animus that she sees projected onto the mortal man before her. When a man drinks of the love potion, it is anima, his soul, that he sees superimposed on a woman.

Each man must learn to relate to external people and situations. But it is equally important, and even more urgent, that he learn to relate to his own self. Until he learns to confront the motives, desires, and unlived possibilities of his own secret heart, he can never be complete within or genuinely fulfilled.

That power within, which constantly urges us to experience our unlived possibilities and values, is the most awesome force in human life.

He is usually so busy projecting his inner ideal out onto her that he rarely sees the value and the beauty of the woman who is actually there. And if his projection suddenly evaporates and he is no longer “in love” in the romantic sense, then he finds himself in a terrible conflict. He wants to follow his projection as it flies off and alights on another woman, like a butterfly that moves from flower to flower. Here is the terrible conflict of values, the terrible conflict of loyalties that we see in Tristan: Suddenly our human loyalties and our soul-projections are going in different directions, absolutely at war within the delicate, easily cracked vessel of human relationship.

The ideal of courtly love swept through the feudal courts of medieval Europe and began a revolution in our attitudes toward the feminine values of love, relationship, refined feeling, devotion, spiritual experience, and the pursuit of beauty. That revolution finally matured into what we call romanticism.

The main notion that has not changed over the centuries is this: our unconscious belief that “true love” must be a mutual religious adoration of such overwhelming intensity that we feel all of heaven and earth revealed in our love.

Catharism is the fantasy of finding one’s lost soul.

At the deepest level of the psyche the King and Queen symbolize to us the evolution of the whole self, and the newborn heir symbolizes the new consciousness and power that we hold within ourselves in potential.

turn, also had second thoughts: “Tristan should have

Here, under the pine-tree, we begin to sense that the love potion demands too much. It takes too much away. Unless we make it conscious, unless we put it on the correct level, it absolutely possesses us and dominates us from the depths; it dissolves our human lives, relationships, and commitments; it leaves nothing in their place. The world it opens to us is rare and wonderful; it is a part of ourselves we long have needed to rediscover and touch. But as with every powerful new truth emerging from the unconscious, the love potion finds its way into places it does not belong, destroys things that should be saved, claims more than is its due.

Since the ascendancy of romantic love, most Westerners are torn constantly between two opposing ideals: One is the ideal of romance; the other is the ideal of commitment in human relationships. We commonly think they are the same, but they are utterly opposed.

With courtly love a whole new set of values came into our culture. Without our being aware, a new morality was born within us and began to shape our attitudes. Romance, in its purest form, seeks only one thing—passion. It is willing to sacrifice everything else—every duty, obligation, relationship, or commitment—in order to have passion. With courtly love we began to believe that the most important thing in life is to search for one’s soul through romantic projection. We have not learned that there is any other way to find our soul.

Passion has become unconsciously defined as our highest good, our main goal in life; and all other values are commonly sacrificed to it. Typically, a modern man will begin a marriage with his soul-image projected on his wife; he only begins to know his wife as a woman after the projection begins to lift. He finds that he loves her as a woman, he values her and respects her, he feels the beauty of being committed to her and knowing that she is committed to him.

Here, then, are the two moralities that we find in conflict beneath the tall pine-tree: the morality of romance, and the morality of human commitment.

The truth hidden in the morality of romance is that of the soul, the inner world, the true “enchanted orchard”; it must be lived inwardly. The truth hidden in the morality of Ogrin is that of human loyalty and commitment; it is to be lived

Every psychologist has a steady stream of patients who repeat Tristan’s question: “Will I never find someone to heal me of my unhappiness?” It is the most often asked question in our society. Yet most men follow Tristan’s pattern. When a flesh-and-blood, mortal human appears in a man’s life who offers him love and relatedness, he ends in rejecting her because she can’t measure up to the idealized perfection—Iseult the Fair—who can only live in his inner mind.

Romantic love is an unholy muddle of two holy loves. One is “divine” love, of which we have spoken before: It is our natural urge toward the inner world, the soul’s love of God, or the gods. The other is “human” love, which is our love for people—flesh-and-blood human beings. Both of these loves are valid; both are necessary. But by some trick of psychological evolution our culture has muddled the two loves in the potion of romantic love and nearly lost them both.

It is this mistaken ideal, this oath, that underlies the whole tragedy of romantic love. Tristan swore to serve a single love. That single love is the divine love of which we have spoken: the love that draws us to the inner world. But when Tristan vows to serve only that divine love of anima, he vows also to give up human love and human relationship. There are two great loves, two worlds in which man must live, two Iseults whom he must serve. The great flaw in romantic love is that it seeks one love but forgets the other. This is the exact meaning of Tristan’s rejection of Iseult of the White Hands.

People make the marriage in form but refuse it in fact. They refuse to make a real commitment to a human being, because they will only commit themselves to their inner vision, their inner ideal, their search for the perfect manifestation of anima or animus, their search for the divine love. Since they have not learned that this is an inner task, they imagine that they must always keep their options open, they must always reserve the right to follow wherever the inner ideal is projected. In our romantic fog, we think this is very noble, very “liberated,” but in fact it is just a misunderstanding of reality. It is our way of obliterating the human side of the equation, our way of refusing to be committed

They do not actually love each other. They use each other as vehicles to have the intense, passionate experiences they long for.

Unconsciously, the divine love, and the whole paradox of divine love and human love, finds its way into the love potion. And there it rests today, bubbling in a cauldron of projection, mixed up in the soup of romantic love.

Our religion is romance: We locate the divine world in physical people—the people with whom we fall in love.

This, then, is why we suffer, and this is why, unconsciously, we even seek to suffer: “Because we long for the branding; because we long to grow aware of what is on fire inside us.”

Anima is not interested in the individual idiosyncrasies of my personal daily life—whether my bank account is balanced, whether my relationships with people are clear, whether the lawn is mowed. Her eyes are on the cosmic accounts, balanced in the scales of Libra, where the only issue is my inner wholeness. Her values are not human values but cosmic values; her only interest is whether I live and experience every great theme of human existence that is contained in potential within my being.

If a man would evolve out of illusion, and pull the illusion out of his loves, there is one direct act of the will required. Merely to decide to give up his projections as a heroic discipline won’t work; he can only pull anima out of his marriage, relationships, and personal lives when he has affirmatively provided a place for her on another level in his life.

The inner act required of a Western man is to affirm his own religious nature. It means to affirm seriously that the images and feelings that flow out of him in dream, fantasy, and imagination are the stuff of the divine realm, a separate order of reality distinct from his physical and personal life but equally real and equally important. He must be willing to take those images seriously, to spend time living with them, to see them as powers of great importance within himself, inhabitants of a spiritual realm that his soul transmits to him in symbol.

Here is a strange and wonderful fact, which shows why people have always believed that the evolution of the cosmos is a partnership between God and humankind: The sacred is always there, closer to us than any physical person could be, but it takes on the power to fill our lives with meaning and quality only when we open our eyes and bow down in awe. This is one of the great mysteries: It is our consciousness, our act of recognition, that has the power to make things into what they are, and to make the sacred, sacred. Most of us are more like the foolish scout: Our irreverent culture teaches us from childhood that nothing is holy, that nothing deserves our reverence, that everything in life can be reduced to either physical possession or a sex act.