archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Lover (Moore & Gillette)

The pull of the world through the senses, and the man who cannot stop answering it.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s name, from 1990, for the energy of feeling, embodiment and connection in their four archetypes of the mature masculine, with the Oedipal Child as its boy form and the Addicted Lover and the Impotent Lover as its shadow poles.

The Lover, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of feeling and connection. It is what ties a man to his own body and senses, to other people and to the world: appetite, pleasure, empathy, intimacy, sexuality, the aesthetic sense, and the felt sense that everything is joined to everything else. In their summary of the four, the Lover carries the potentials for receptiveness, affiliation, healthy dependency, embodied sexuality, empathy and intimacy. It is the least bounded of the four. Left to itself it wants to dissolve limits, and in their model it needs the King’s order and the Warrior’s discipline to keep it from drowning the man who carries it. Women, they say, carry a Lover of their own.

Go deeper

At the threshold

The fountains mingle with the riverAnd the rivers with the Ocean,The winds of Heaven mix for everWith a sweet emotion;Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divineIn one spirit meet and mingle.Why not I with thine?—

Public domain · Shelley, Love’s Philosophy (1819)

Everything in the world runs into everything else, and desire takes that as its argument, the Lover’s sense that nothing is single.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Eros

    Moore & Gillette (1990), King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, c. 700 BCE

    Reported from the book as the Lover in full, sexual love widened into an appetite for life itself.

  2. Jung’s example

    Oedipus

    Moore & Gillette (1990), as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, c. 429 BCE

    The book uses his myth for the Mama’s Boy, the boy Lover’s shadow, bound too closely to the mother.

  3. Jung’s example

    Don Juan

    Moore & Gillette (1990), as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/ and https://www.antoinebuteau.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-book-summary/, 1630

    His name stands in the book for the man who chases the ideal woman through endless real ones and is satisfied by none.

  4. Jung’s example

    Wolff’s Hetaira

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The King Within. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09591-8, appendix C, 1951

    The authors recast Toni Wolff’s companion-woman as carrying both poles of the Lover’s shadow, the Addict and the Impotent Lover.

  5. Jung’s example

    Dante and Beatrice

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9. Ch. 3, 1320

    Used to mark the Lover’s border: Beatrice is a muse to the Magician, never a lover in the body.

  6. a later reading

    Jay Gatsby

    The Art of Manliness (2011), https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/self-improvement/the-four-archetypes-of-the-mature-masculine-the-lover/, 1925

    A later reading takes Gatsby’s ruinous longing for Daisy as the Addicted Lover.

The wider sky

Where the Lover (Moore & Gillette) has been seen

22 exemplars across 9 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Public domain · Dowson, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae (1891)

Madder music and stronger wine never fill the place of the one desire, the restless round of the Addicted Lover.

He feels the room before he understands it, and the world is never quite separate from him.

Without a boundary the feeling floods; without the feeling the man goes grey.

He wants the next taste, or he has forgotten what tasting was.

The deep layer · what was written

Lover (Moore & Gillette): the entry

Definition

The Lover, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of feeling and connection. It is what ties a man to his own body and senses, to other people and to the world: appetite, pleasure, empathy, intimacy, sexuality, the aesthetic sense, and the felt sense that everything is joined to everything else. In their summary of the four, the Lover carries the potentials for receptiveness, affiliation, healthy dependency, embodied sexuality, empathy and intimacy. It is the least bounded of the four. Left to itself it wants to dissolve limits, and in their model it needs the King’s order and the Warrior’s discipline to keep it from drowning the man who carries it. Women, they say, carry a Lover of their own.

The figure comes inside Moore and Gillette’s own structure. Its boyhood form is the Oedipal Child, whose longing for union they read as directed at the archetypal Great Mother rather than at the actual mother; its shadow splits into the Mama’s Boy and the Dreamer. The adult Lover’s shadow splits into two poles: the Addicted Lover, the active pole, restless, always seeking the next sensation and unable to stop, and the Impotent Lover, the passive pole, flat, cut off from feeling and from pleasure. The mature Lover is a third position that holds what is true in both.

History

The Lover is the last of the four set out in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990) by Moore, a Jungian analyst at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Gillette, a mythologist. Published notes on the chapter report that it contrasts traditions that celebrate the senses, Hinduism above all, with the moral religions that the authors say have persecuted the Lover, and that it treats artists as men who live close to it (Delaney).

The figure recurs in the sequels before getting its own. The Warrior Within (1992) makes addiction, “grounded in a flood of Lover energy”, the masochist’s final defence as his repressed aggression rises (p. 130). The Magician Within (1993) marks the boundary between two archetypes with Dante, whose Beatrice is a muse to the Magician but never a lover in the body (ch. 3). Appendix C of The King Within (1992) places the Lover in the contrasexual system: the anima, in their account, has the same fourfold structure as the masculine self, with a Queen in the King’s place. The same appendix reads Toni Wolff’s four feminine forms as fragments of their archetypes, and puts the Hetaira wholly in the Lover’s shadow:

In Wolff’s system the Hetaira displays both aspects of the Lover’s bipolar Shadow, the Addict and the Impotent Lover. — Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, The King Within (1992), appendix C

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Lover Within: Accessing the Lover in the Male Psyche (William Morrow, 1993) completed the four-volume series. Publishers Weekly’s reviewer (1993) described it as treating the Lover as the feeling side of men’s nature, the source of passion, creativity and pleasure, and arguing that men either suppress it for fear of being consumed or are possessed by it and fall into addiction; the book mixes Jungian theory, myth and anecdotes from the authors’ workshops.

The debate

Jung named no Lover archetype. The nearest of the classical ten is the anima, the figure through which, in Jung’s account, a man meets eros, feeling and relatedness, and Jung’s own pairing of Eros with Logos as feminine and masculine principles. Moore and Gillette keep the two apart. Their Lover is a structure of the masculine self, present in women too, and the anima is a separate inner system with all four archetypes in it. The overlap is in eros, not identity. Their Oedipal Child, meanwhile, rereads Freud’s complex through the Jungian Great Mother. The Lover shares its name with Pearson’s Lover (1991), a separate lineage concerned with passion and commitment on a life journey for anyone.

The gendering of feeling is where the critics pressed. Andrew Samuels singled out the language of the men’s movement that calls a man’s tender or wounded part feminine:

Reference to the sobbing little boy inside every powerful man as “feminine” (e.g., Moore & Gillette, 1990) is one highly sexist false parallel that is drawn. — Andrew Samuels, A New Therapy for Politics? (2015), ch. 9, p. 137

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The treatment of Wolff shows the same tendency from another side: a predecessor’s typology of women is absorbed into Moore and Gillette’s scheme and her Hetaira recast as pathology. Tracy Clark-Flory (2020) criticised the book’s reverence for the traditional family and its heteronormative frame. James Hollis (1994), more sympathetic, read the Lover as walking a line between eros, the force for connection, and narcissism (p. 95).

Empirical status

None. No instrument measures the Lover, and neither the Addicted nor the Impotent Lover has been tested as a construct; mainstream research on addiction and on anhedonia does not use the terms. Ben Laws and Elinor Lieber (2020) used the four archetypes as a typology of care in two English prisons, listing close physical bonds among the forms of care they found; the scheme is a lens there, not a hypothesis under test.

Appearances

Summaries of the 1990 book report its own examples: Eros for the mature Lover, Oedipus and the Don Juan who can never be satisfied for the boy’s shadow, and the film cowboy riding off alone into the sunset for the restless Addicted Lover. The Art of Manliness (2011) offered Dionysus and Zorba for the Lover and Gatsby for the Addicted Lover. Hollis gave Dante’s Commedia, War and Peace and men caring for brothers dying of AIDS as the work of eros in men. Beyond the authors’ own examples, every Lover named here is a reading.

Sources

Leaving

Let us roll all our Strength, and allOur sweetness, up into one Ball:And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,Thorough the Iron gates of Life.Thus, though we cannot make our SunStand still, yet we will make him run.

Public domain · Marvell, To his Coy Mistress (1681)

Strength and sweetness rolled into one against the slow death of time, the Lover’s refusal of the grey, impotent pole.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☽ AnimaThe inward face, met first in projection.Return to the void