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Jung's erotics are quite different. Jung builds his Psychological Types upon a basic dichotomy between extrovert and introvert.  The reification of these two postures towards the world into types leads to atemporal and hence antithetical formulations.  The play of opposites structures the psyche.  Their union signals health.  Consequently tension is resolved in the form of a symbol or mythic image.  In Jung, rational considerations (the consequences of desire) and bodily urges (desire) are placed in an antagonistic relation.  Their interaction threatens the psyche which itself is construed as a unifying symbol.  The resolution by union may be patterned on marriage as institution for channelling disruptive forces since Jung casts the narrative of coming into being of the balanced psyche as the withdrawal of libido from erotic wish and its direction to social task (282).

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Body and intellect are held in check.  The psyche becomes a container, a passive receptacle.  It is telling that Jung concludes a discussion of realism and nominalism as respective examples of extroverted and introverted attitudes with the image of a middle way that holds the balance:

To the "esse in intellectu" tangible reality is lacking; to the "esse in re" the mind.  Idea and thing come together, however, in the psyche of man which holds the balance between them.  What would the idea amount to if the psyche did not provide its living value?  What would the objective thing be worth if the psyche withheld from it the determining force of the sense impression?  What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an "esse in anima"?  Living reality is the exclusive product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things, nor of the formulated idea;  rather does it come through the gathering up of both in the living psychological process, through the "esse in anima."  Only through the specific vital activity of the psyche does the sense-perception attain that intensity, and the idea that effective force, which are the two indispensable constituents of living reality. (Psychological Types 68)

In his call to intensity, an animating interiority is to infuse life into objects be they ideal or material.  The mechanism of the middle way is placed "in ourselves". Out of the mingling of idea and thing in this place images come into being.

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Images for Jung are like containers.  He devotes much attention to vessel-symbols which are invariably associated with the feminine and edification:

This symbolization by means of a mysterious image must be interpreted as a spiritualization of the erotic motive evoked by the service of woman. (291)

Like a romance tale, Jung's imperative, the achievement of balance, reads unidirectionally:

Against the power and temptation of the temporal, therefore, he must set the joy of the eternal, and against the passion of the sexual, the ecstasy of the spiritual. (280)

The temptation of the temporal is also that of the relentless movement of thought, asking questions, refusing contemplation as mystical union.

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Faced with either an introverted movement towards ideas or an extroverted movement towards things, the structure of Jung's symbols or mythic images remains fragile:

An effective symbol, therefore, must have a nature that is unimpeachable.  It must be the best possible expression of the existing world-philosophy, a container of meaning which cannot be surpassed;  its form must also be sufficiently remote from comprehension as to frustrate every attempt of the critical intellect to give any satisfactory account of it; and, finally, its aesthetic appearance must have such a convincing appeal to feeling that no sort of argument can be raised against it on that score. (291)

The symbol's vulnerability results in a dual task.  It must resist intellectual scrutiny and exert physical fascination.

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Keeping the body in and the mind out, the image, the living symbol, is not only a seductive idol it also is inadequate to the symbolization of a psyche that gathers into itself, in the same psychological process, both esse in re and esse in intellectu.  If one is to be in and the other out, there is no gathering together.

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On similar grounds, Benjamin from his Trauerspiel study onwards challenged the transcendental claims of the symbol.  What further distinguishes Jung's anti- intellectual attitude to myth from Benjamin's "quasi-magical cognitive attitude to historical matter" is a temporal opposition, as Susan Buck- Morss expresses it, between allegorical expression (eternal passing) and symbolic expression (fleeting eternity) (Dialectics of Seeing 13;19).  The latter is mute.  Citing Creuzer's treatment of symbol and mythology, Benjamin explains that in the wake of the symbol "all that remains is speechless wonder" (Trauerspiel 164).

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The arrest of time.  The absence of language.  Death hovers here.  The vessel may be a tomb.  In a 1934 essay on Bachofen, Benjamin suggests that the structure of the symbol is related to matriarchal notions.  He stresses that Bachofen came to his study of mother-right through that of funerary symbols.  He says that "what led Bachofen onto the path from which he would not stray were neither his studies nor his acquaintances but a turning point in his life as a solitary traveller" ("Bachofen" 36).  He then cites Bachofen on the subject of the latter's first contacts with ancient tombs.  All the markers of mythic mystery are found: immutable stability, plenitude, the insufficiency of speech and total reliance on the symbol to express experience.

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Benjamin links such mystical aspects to fascism ("Bachofen" 38).  He credits Alfred Schuler with this appropriation.  Schuler introduced Ludwig Klages to the mother-right material.  Klages adopted the chthonic elements to a fascist ideology.

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This is how Benjamin in the Bachofen essay characterizes the work of Klages:

In reconstituting the mythic substance of life, the philosopher empowers "originary images" (Urbilder) by saving them from condemnation to oblivion.  These images while laying claim to the exterior world are however different from representations.  Representations are mixed with the utilitarian perspective and usurpatory claims of mind or feeling [esprit].  Whereas the image exclusively addresses the soul which embracing [the image] in a purely receptive fashion enriches itself through the image's symbolic content. ("Bachofen" 38-39)

Benjamin often pairs the names of Klages and Jung.  Unlike their predecessor Bachofen, Klages and Jung sever the chthonic realm of mystery, source of mythic images, from the order of culture.  True to the derivations of mystery, they seal lips.  Silence marks the hiatus between eternal nature and passing culture.  Language, particularly in its interrogative form, is a foe.  It is a non- receptive mode of apprehension.  It seizes.  Destroys.  Deactivates.

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In this destructive guise, language is the instrument of an awakening.  It is an instrument of allegory.  It expresses eternal passing.  In Benjamin's reading of Bachofen, death is the key to all knowledge.  Benjamin describes Bachofen as a prudent mediator between nature and history.  Death is the point where the natural crosses over into history and the historical into nature.

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