While most view unrequited love as hopeless and indefensible, in imaginal terms it proves a hierophany, one that describes soul as a function of entanglement between Lover and Beloved. Hence, the intentional proliferation of desire – creatively imagining the Beloved and refusing to renounce him – not only reveals all that is immanent to desire, it also foments becoming-Beloved. What is becoming-Beloved? It is a continuous rendering bent upon communicating the irreducible, sublime specificity of the Beloved in assemblage with the self's own specificity, which in turn we discover by way of daimonic images. When we ask repeatedly Who is the Beloved?" we discover the self as both a threshold and a becoming. We discover a life that is ours by virtue of the erotic.

This alchemical hermeneutic dissertation ranges beyond the usual depth oeuvre, and considers not only the work of Jung, but also post-modern theorists who contribute to an imaginal perspective on unrequited love. Deleuze and Guattari provide many useful terms, of which the rhizome is particularly salient. The rhizome promotes radical amalgams of the erotic. A subterranean stem/passage lying beneath the surface of appearances, the rhizome is rife with images, and induces proliferation, multiplicity, and becoming. It describes burgeoning ardor as a line of flight, as heterogeneity, multiplicity, and endless possible erotic generativity. The rhizome between Lover and Beloved engenders processions of daimonic images, which, when joined using 'and' suggest haecceity; the season, clime, and hour of the self.

These images, encountered in dreams, reveries, and synchronicities, suggest an accumulated image profile, one the individual has lost track of, submerged, and/or repudiated in response to early traumatic experience. A corollary of work with unrequited love is re-assembly of daimonic images fundamental to the child's early enchantment. It is axiomatic that initiation by the erotic sets a thousand things in motion, which ultimately brings about remediation by the scarification of images to the psyche. Ultimately, the daimonic intent is inducement that the self act as threshold to the imaginal thereby unleashing all manner of becomings of which 'Beloved' is one among many.