Aphrodite (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Aphrodite is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of love and beauty. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) she stands alone in a third group, the alchemical goddess, between the virgin goddesses, who are self-contained, and the vulnerable goddesses, who are defined and hurt by relationship. Aphrodite, in Bolen’s reading, has many relationships, all of her own choosing, and is changed by them, but unlike the vulnerable goddesses she is never victimised. To the “focused consciousness” of the virgin goddesses and the “diffuse awareness” of the vulnerable ones Bolen adds a third mode, “Aphrodite consciousness”, focused yet receptive, which she likens to theatre lighting rather than a spotlight (1984, pp. 226–227). The woman in whom Aphrodite predominates, as Bolen describes her, lives intensely in the present, is drawn to beauty and sensual experience, attracts others and is moved by them, and brings the same absorbed attention to creative work as to a lover; Bolen’s chapter title joins the two, creative woman and lover. The word “alchemical” names what Bolen takes to be the pattern’s gift, transformation: love and creative work as processes that change both parties. The difficulties she attaches to it are the reverse of that intensity: the drawbacks, in her heading, of living in the present, and indifference to any work that does not engage her emotionally.

Two exclusions apply. This is not Aphrodite the goddess, whose cults at Cyprus and Cythera and whose myths are described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not the anima, Jung’s image of the feminine in a man, which classical Jungians often illustrated with Aphrodite and Helen. Bolen calls her goddesses archetypes; what she describes is a type of woman, recorded here as hers, one of seven goddess patterns for women (1984). Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus and her lover Ares are among the gods of the companion volume, Gods in Everyman (1989).

History

The pattern first appears in two chapters of Goddesses in Everywoman, “The Alchemical Goddess” and “Aphrodite: Goddess of Love and Beauty, Creative Woman and Lover”, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985, and reissued with a new introduction and the subtitle Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives in 2004 and again in 2014. The chapter that follows, “Which Goddess Gets the Golden Apple?”, takes the Judgement of Paris, in which Aphrodite wins the apple against Hera and Athena, as a figure for the choices a woman makes among the goddesses in her.

The mythic material is public domain and gives Aphrodite two births. Hesiod has her rise from the foam about the severed members of Ouranos, with Eros and Desire in attendance (Theogony 176–206); Homer makes her the daughter of Zeus and Dione, wounded by Diomedes on the battlefield (Iliad V). The Odyssey has the bard Demodocus sing of her caught with Ares in her husband Hephaestus’s net (Book VIII). The long Hymn to Aphrodite opens with her power over gods and men, names the three goddesses she cannot bend, and then turns her own weapon on her:

But upon Aphrodite herself Zeus cast sweet desire to be joined in love with a mortal man — Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 5), ll. 45–52, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Gutenberg #348

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Judgement of Paris is alluded to in the Iliad (XXIV) and was told in the lost epic Cypria. Before Bolen, Philip Zabriskie’s “typology of the feminine” (1974), as summarised by John Sanford (1980), had read Aphrodite as the feminine that continually seeks union with the masculine, and Sanford matched her with Toni Wolff’s Hetaira; Bolen lists Zabriskie’s article among her references. Bolen’s word “alchemical” echoes Jung’s late writings, in which alchemy is a metaphor for psychic transformation, but the goddess as a type of woman is her own construction.

The debate

The nearest classical figure is the anima. Jung’s scheme of the anima’s stages, as Sanford summarises it, runs from Eve through Helen, the anima as beauty, to Mary and Sophia, and Sanford glossed the Greek distinction between Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Ourania as the anima at instinctual and spiritual levels. That is the goddess as a man’s inner image. Bolen’s Aphrodite is a woman’s own erotic and creative life, which in classical theory had no name of its own. James Hillman’s Anima (1985) moved in a related direction by insisting that the anima belongs to women’s psychology too, but kept it an archetype rather than a type. The nearest earlier typology is Wolff’s Hetaira (1951), the companion of the individual man, and Bolen draws the comparison herself: in the chapter on the alchemical goddess she likens the “special woman” who inspires a man’s creative side to Wolff’s “hetaira woman” (pp. 229–230), citing Wolff’s essay on individuation in women (Spring, 1941) rather than the structural-forms essay. Bolen’s figure is broader, since its relationships include work.

The general objections apply. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) noted that Bolen tends to identify gods and goddesses with personality types, and replied that no human being, and no god or goddess, is an archetype. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) had warned against a rival search for female archetypes to support feminist conclusions, and Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular face of essentialism, a single female essence that obscures race, class and ethnicity (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016). Susan Rowland (2002) read goddess feminism as a grand narrative, while allowing that it can be recycled as speculative fiction and performance, a reading that suits Bolen’s Aphrodite better than any of the seven. Andrew Samuels (2001), without naming Bolen, asked why women should be required to be goddesses at all rather than allowed to improvise, play and break the rules. The book’s first scholarly reviewers were Mary Ann Mattoon (1986) and Kay Deaux (1986).

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Aphrodite as a psychological construct. Online quizzes in her vocabulary disclaim validity, and the scale attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis has no published psychometrics; we have not located the thesis. Research on sociosexuality and on creativity makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are mostly mythic: the foam-born goddess, the wife of Hephaestus and lover of Ares, the goddess who falls for Anchises and loves Adonis, the winner of the golden apple, and the giver of the three golden apples with which Hippomenes wins his race against Atalanta. Her modern instances include Lou Andreas-Salomé as the “special woman” (p. 230) and Isadora Duncan as an Aphrodite woman (p. 242). Sappho’s hymn calling her down in a chariot of doves is the oldest personal poem to her. In art, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) are the standard images. Ginette Paris’s Pagan Meditations (1986) gives her a cultural rather than typological study, and Jennifer and Roger Woolger’s The Goddess Within (1989) includes her in a parallel six-goddess scheme with its own questionnaire. Literary figures often offered as Aphrodite women run from Marlowe’s Hero to Bizet’s Carmen; a 2018 Personality Hacker podcast episode presented Bolen’s alchemical goddess to a personality-typing audience. All of these identifications are readings, not Bolen’s, including the guide’s own exemplars.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapters 11, “The Alchemical Goddess”, pp. 224–232 (pp. 226–227, 229–230 cited), 12, “Aphrodite: Goddess of Love and Beauty, Creative Woman and Lover”, pp. 233–262 (p. 242 cited), and 13, “Which Goddess Gets the Golden Apple?”, pp. 263–277; also p. 15. Pages from Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing, https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean (contents, index and running heads). Chapter titles also checked against the contents of the Harper Colophon paperback (1985), ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24226567M
• Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (twentieth-anniversary ed., new introduction). Quill. ISBN 978-0-06-057284-6.
• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4.
• Hesiod, Theogony 176–206; Homeric Hymns 5, 6 and 10 (to Aphrodite). In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Homer, Iliad V, XXIV (S. Butler, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #2199.
• Homer, Odyssey VIII (S. Butler, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #1727.
• Sappho, Hymn to Aphrodite. In H. T. Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation. Project Gutenberg #57390.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Summarising P. Zabriskie, “Goddesses in Our Midst”, Quadrant 17 (1974), and Jung’s stages of the anima (CW 16).
• Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-316-3.
• Paris, G. (1986). Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia (G. Moore, Trans.). Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-330-9.
• Woolger, J. B., & Woolger, R. J. (1989). The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives. Fawcett Columbine. ISBN 978-0-449-90287-5.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Rieker, P. P., & Jankowski, M. K. (1995). Sexism and women’s psychological status. In C. V. Willie et al. (Eds.), Mental Health, Racism, and Sexism (pp. 27–50). University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3869-9. Pp. 30–32, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 327.
• Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-2517-1. P. 150, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 40.
• ’Iolana, P. (2016). Jung and Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of the Western Goddess Movement (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
• Samuels, A. (2001). Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-219-4. Chapter “The secret politics of the internal family”.
• Mattoon, M. A. (1986). A new psychology of women? [Review of Bolen, 1984]. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 6(4), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1986.6.4.13
• Deaux, K. (1986). [Review of Goddesses in Everywoman]. Contemporary Psychology, 31(6), 468. https://doi.org/10.1037/024853
• Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
• Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0235, “Goddesses in Everywoman: The Alchemical Goddess Archetype”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0235-goddesses-in-everywoman-the-alchemical-goddess-archetype/
• Botticelli, S. (c. 1485). The Birth of Venus. Tempera on canvas. Uffizi, Florence. https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus