The Lover
- First attested
- 1990Formalized as the fourth foundational archetype of the mature masculine by Moore and Gillette (1990).
Moore and Gillette's Lover is the mature archetype of aliveness, passion and sensual connection to the world.
The Lover is the fourth of four archetypes of the mature masculine in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990), a book of the mythopoetic men's movement. The authors say it grows out of the boyhood Oedipal Child and is paired with the Warrior in one of two dialectical oppositions. They note that Jungians often call it Eros or libido, a general appetite for life, and link it to the sensation function. They see it in artists and psychics, and treat how the ethical religions have received it. They say the scheme builds on Jung's archetypal Self and goes beyond it; the Jungian scholar Darrell Dobson says Moore advanced archetypal theory with its two-poled shadow.
Light
Moore and Gillette say the Lover in his fullness is sensual and at ease in the body without shame, sensitive and empathic toward everything around him, passionate, and aesthetic in his whole way of seeing. He feels others' pain as well as their joy, and he keeps the other three archetypes humane.
Shadow
Moore and Gillette give the Lover two shadow poles: the Addicted Lover, who is lost in the senses, has no boundaries and restlessly hunts the next high, and the Impotent Lover, who is flat, bored and depressed, cut off from feeling and from other people. A man in the Impotent pole may be swung into the Addicted one.