Jung and Gender: Feminine ReVisions

Susan Rowland (PhD)

Author of Jung: A
Feminist ReVision
(2002)

Summary of paper
While on the one hand, Jung was an essentialist on gender,
believing that male and female bodies bestowed
unproblematic masculinity and femininity respectively, his
conservatism was undermined by his radical treatment of
the unconscious. Jung's unconscious is sublime; it is the
creative source, and the ultimate origin of meaning, feeling
and value. Therefore his anima, conceptual, other-totheory and banal, is supremely in image-inative terms,
Ju g s figure for the steries e a ot aster. Ge der
becomes a demand upon the embodied imagination. Such
a unique and experimental angle on gender is at once a
treatment and a gaping wound in the writing. Jung faces
two ways: as a powerful resource for feminist ideas, and as
sorely in need of them himself.

Introduction: what is the matter with

Jung?
The anima has an erotic, emotional character, the
animus a rationalizing one. Hence most of what men
sa a out fe i i e eroti is is deri ed fro their
own anima projections and distorted accordingly. On
the other hand, the astonishing assumptions and
fantasies that women make about men come from the
activity of the animus, who produces an inexhaustible
supply of illogical arguments and false explanations.1

C.G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 17

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), para.
338.

3 sentences/3 locations
For each of the three sentences takes a different point of view. The
first perspective the quotation offers is a transcendent treatment of
knowledge common to modernity, which begins to unpack the
rational concepts of anima and animus. Sentence two dives into the
immanent. Here, knowledge is deeply embedded in its own
birthing. Fascinatingly, the subject of sentence two is the actual
impossibility of rational evaluation between the sexes. Objectivity is
an impossible dream of an over-rationalized intellect. Yet, of course
Jung does not say 'we' here, but 'men', his own gender, the only
one he can truly speak from. So the third and final sentence on 'the
astonishing assumptions and fantasies' begs the question: who is
speaking? Who is speaking? 'The anima, Jung's anima is speaking'.
In fact, the writing tells us this is so.

Jung on gender
Lucid oppositional concepts
e.g. anima/us, Eros/Logos
Banal stereotypes
Embodied indeterminacy
showing unconscious and
gender.
Many voices in the writing:
needs gender criticism.
Many voices in the writing:
potential for powerful
revision of gender and
modernity.

Intolerable writing!
No matter how friendly or
obliging a woman's Eros
may be, no logic of earth
can shake her if she is
ridden by the animus. Often
the man has the feeling and he is not altogether
wrong - that only seduction
or a beating or rape would
have the necessary power
of persuasion.
C.G. Jung, Collected Works,
9ii: para. 29

Unlikely Feminist (1): La a s phallic

Symbolic Order
After Freud, it was Jacques Lacan who extended the 'forming' quality of
the father into the generation of culture. Lacan argued that the body was
being over literalized. The phallus was to be the defining artifact, the sign
of masculinity. Lacan shifted the simultaneous founding of ego and
unconscious into the realm of words. Here, it was in the early acquisition
of language that the split in the child's psyche occurred. Once a child
perceives that words substitute for absent things, then he or she takes up
a position in society's codes. Lacan named these the Symbolic Order.
Like Freud, Lacan regards the child's new position as gendered, because
boys are gifted by a patriarchal society with a privileged relation to the
phallus as indicator of social and sexual power. Yet neither boys nor girls
actually wholly possess the phallus since it becomes the ultimate sign of
potency and completeness; a completely forever lost in that tragic split
from the primal (m)other. The splitting of the subject into ego and
unconscious means that not even males can completely master the
phallus for themselves.

Feminine in phallic symbolic order

Ju g s o -phallic Symbolic Order

While no feminist, in the straightforward sense of wanting to
revolutionize the position of women in society, Jung does transform
the ontology of a patriarchal symbolic.
This Jungian unconscious actively gives birth to the child's conscious
ego. It means that the Jungian symbolic is primarily rooted in the
struggles of the unconscious to create meaning through becoming
embodied in an ego in the world. Those meaning-making principles
that dwell in the unconscious, Jung called archetypes. Anima and
animus are examples of their numinous and mysterious creativity.
Most importantly, the Jungian unconscious is as capable of
generating powerful feminine images and meaning as it is of
producing masculine signifying. A society may inherit patriarchal
motifs, but the individual possesses archetypal androgyny.
Individuation inevitably challenges patriarchy.

But Ju g s a i a is phalli
Unsurprisingly, the comparison with Lacan
goes two ways. While Jung's conceptual side
offers a strong creative psyche capable of
imagining other worlds and feminist
paradises, the other two aspects of his gender
writing, unknown sublime and banal slippage,
are harder to digest. Here the notion of the
Lacanian phallus is helpful in importing a
feminist perspective to Jung's embedded
writing on/as anima.

Jung writing the anima distorts

For the anima proliferates beyond its assigned place as the concept
of a male's feminine unconscious. We have seen how it spills over
from object to subject; how it moves from concept Jung is writing
'about' to voice assuming control of the writing. Additionally, the
anima is Jung's frequent image for his most seminal idea, the
generative unconscious. At times, anima is the unconscious, not just
one aspect of it.
The banal inferiority that tends to color this image for Jung,
becomes even more problematic when unconscious slippage in the
writing slides from anima to opinions about women. Too often Jung
will comment on women using the lineaments of his own (inferior)
anima. For example, in what Jung admits is an ungrounded linking
of Eros and Logos to the genders, Eros becomes the 'true nature' of
women with their Logos a 'regrettable accident'.

Phallic Anima
Like Lacan o the phallus, to Ju g, a i a is
hat the as uli e a i ale tl has a d hat
the fe i i e ust e for the as uli e.
This anima-inspired feminine is too present in
Jungian psychology. As signifier of the
unconscious 'she' is the generative core of
signifying, particularly of the gendered erotic,
unconscious, sublime positioning of the 'other'.

Phallic anima images

Unlikely Feminist (2): showing how to

re-make the world
Consequently, we have in Jung a framework for
understanding the human psyche in culture that
feminism might welcome, for it provides the
opportunity and gendered creative energy to remake the world. The fact that we need to apply
that gendered creative energy to Jung's own
textuality should be regarded as a chance to
participate in the very creativity that these
writings inspire, in-spirit in us. Jung's works are
an invitation to co-create meaning by means of
an evaluative, gender-aware and nurturing
participation in these tricky sublime writings.

Feminist Research on Jung: anima and

the occult
The anima has occult origins in Jung's early
writing about spiritualism. F.X. Charet first
demonstrated the importance of Jung's doctoral
thesis, 'On the Psychology and Pathology of SoCalled Occult Phenomena' (1902),19 by showing
that in the portrayal of a female medium could be
discerned the qualities of Jung's later anima
(Charet 1993).20 Named Miss S.W. in the thesis,
the young woman was actually Jung's cousin,
Helene Preiswerk. Also suppressed in the thesis
was how far the doctoral researcher was active in
initiating the sances.

Spiritualism
founding
Psychology

S.W. produced a number of

spirit voices before two
prominent personalities
dominated the dramatic
occasions: Ulrich, a male
gossip and Ivenes, an
astonishing lady who had
lived many lives, sometimes
as mother or lover of Jung.
Unsurprisingly, Jung's thesis
is fascinated by her. He
concentrates on the problem
of defining the 'reality' of
these beings and stories.

3 characterizations of S.W. (and a 4th)

Ju g sides ith Freud i thesis o .W. s
ro a es as origi ati g i uddi g se ualit .
Ju g s later ultiple attitude to th a d
o tolog isi le i reati e po er of self like
Ivenes.
Woman medium subordinated to anima, Jung
takes medium position for male psyche in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
But is S.W. the true anima (banal, sublimely destabilizing)of the Collective Works?

Jung, the unlikely feminist (3):

restoring the feminine through myth
Jung is unlikely feminist in
deconstructing the (Lacanian)
phallus.
e o dl i his o
phalli
anima demonstrating the
flaws and cultural specificities
of writing: his writing is
performed textuality; open to
re-vision.
Thirdl Ju g s e ra e of
origi s i .W. ho re-writes
Darwin and the bible, opens
his work to gendered creation
myths.

Before monotheism
In the beginning the earth was
feminine and divine. The earth
mother goddess is living
sacred matter. She creates
humans from her divine body
and nurtures us throughout
life in her Eros connectedness
and feeling. Giving birth to a
divine son, she later unites
with him as lover. To her
sexuality and body are sacred.
When the son-lover is later
dismembered, she will seek
his body out and restore him.

Earth Mother persists in our myths

Such an ur-myth of a mother goddess is believed
to have founded many early religions and to
persist in myths of Isis and Osiris, Attis, etc.
Crucially, she also finds a home, if in disguise, in
Christianity, in images such as the sacred Garden
of Eden, the wicked serpent who was once a
goddess image of wisdom and rebirth, in Mary
the Virgin cradling the dying Jesus just as the
goddess once mourned her son-lover. Such
moments allow a glimpse of the goddess,
otherwise occluded in a culture dominated by another myth.24

Earth mother in modernity

Monotheism dominated by sky father

What ended goddess culture was the rise of male gods who
were not identified with earth or nature. Instead, these
were sky fathers who wrested the notion of origins from
earth to the hea e s. Neither god or a
as to e
grou ded . The ale god reated earth fro a o e a d
remained transcendent of it. No longer bodying nature as
sacred, the god prided himself on separating from matter
as something inferior and feminine. Where the immanent
mother goddess could be approached as animism in the
infinite plurality of meaningful in-spirited nature,
transcendent father god is monotheistic, a sponsor of truth
as one-ness, rationality, separation and discrimination.

Creation myths are gendered

structures of consciousness
Of course, as well as being fundamental structures of
religion, the two gendered creation myths are stories
about different types of consciousness, as Baring and
Cashford have shown in The Myth of the Goddess
(1991). As both Christian religious heritage and the arts
reveal, both types of consciousness are needed for
human well-being. Unfortunately, as our Christian
heritage also shows, Western modernity has privileged
father-god Logos consciousness to the near extinction
of the Eros qualities of connecting to the sacred other,
as unconsciousness and/or divine nature.

Ju g fe i ist i seeki g to rebalance gendered psyche

The work of C.G. Jung is a profound, flawed,
incomplete attempt to invite the feminine creation
myth into modernity. For example, an attempt to rebalance goddess and god consciousness is incarnated
in his importing Eros and Logos into the functioning
psyche. Moreover he invokes the autonomous
reati it of Mother Nature i his e ploratio s of
synchronicity, the way time and space sometimes seem
to pla i
ea i gful oi ide es Ju g CW8).
Indeed where synchronicity becomes defined as acts of
creation in time we have an evocation of the sacred as
immanent in living experience (Jung CW8, para. 965).

Anima challenges transcendence

nature

Most of all, it is the anima who bears

tra es of Ju g s i tuiti e seeki g of a
fe i i e soul to heal oder it s
deep wounds. The urge is not
negated by Jung's reluctance to
renounce a masculine bias.

The anima is the sublime other to the

rationalist hegemony that Christian
theologians made when their way of
interpreting the Bible, their exegesis,
secured a veneration of reason from
Holy Scripture. In constructing divine
reason as transcendent of textual
matter, scholars cemented the notion
of Logos as transcendent of nature.

A i a is other to a stra t s ie e
He e e turies later s ie e took o er the
Logos position as rational, transcendent, and
part of the apparatus of oder it s
disa o al of the fe i i e other. Ju g s riti g
tries to do what is impossible and necessary:
to bring the transcendent Logos of science
(inherited from patriarchal monotheism)
together with the immanent trampled matter
of body and relating which his anima signifies.

Anima brings dialogue of gendered

creation myths
What has been repressed in the
denial of the goddess in the
making of modernity, is the
consciousness of human
immanence in nature. Instead of
a dialogical psyche between
as uli e a d fe i i e ,
transcendence and rationality
with immanence and
embodiment, the severing of ego
consciousness from the
fe i i e has da gerousl
weakened modernity. So the
anima as the unconscious other
to rational ego consciousness, can
e see as the Eroti ature
other to psychology as rational
theory.

Anima is body and nature in the

writing
Ju g s a i a is also the hu a s i
ature he uts
from his psychology when he sticks to rational, abstract
o epts. Fortu atel , a d i alua l , Ju g s riti g is
dialogical in seeking to entice the goddess back in from
the darkness of her exclusion.

Returning to Ju g s displa of his a i a as his a al

inferiority, we should also regard this flaw as a useful
shadow, or bodying to his writing. It certainly adds to
the immanent quality of his writing within what
matters to him, as well as its transcendent conceptual
characteristics.

Monotheism and animism in the

writing.
Ju g s writing shows psychology as psycheLogos, discriminating theory with concepts
such as anima, and as Eros with a body,
sexuality, feeling, and unconscious irrationality
also erupting as voices: an animistic textuality.
Hence the anima mediates between Logos
father god driving towards one-ness, and Eros
mother goddess consciousness, between
o otheis s si gle truth a d a i is s
diversity in the writing.

Saving modernity is a work of gender

Jung tries to save modernity by
bringing back an earth mother
that symbolically mitigates the
pernicious dominance of the sky
father in Western culture. His
problem is an ingrained
conservatism about female and
male social roles.
So he does not imagine how his
revolutionary ideas of culture
might be realized in the lives of
actual men and women.
Fortunately, in the writing
succeeding generations have a
web of life; one capable of
connecting goddess and god.

Re-Visioning Jung on gender

The anima is divine desire; that is, our desire for the
divine, and the face of divine love turned towards us.
The anima, conceptual, other-to-theory and banal, is
supremely in image-inative ter s, Ju g s figure for the
steries e a ot aster. he tells us that e ust
not rely on Jung to make this image for us, for she is
caught in a textual web that includes some of the
darkness of human desire. Yet that textual web of
immanent and transcendent properties offers both
teachers and students a labyrinth by which to explore
ge der a d ps he as po erful dra as i our ature .

To conclude (1)
Ju g s oppositio al
concepts of gender such as
anima and animus valuable
combine unconscious
desire, archetypal
embodiment and cultural
influences.
Individuation deconstructs
fixed or stereotypical
gender identities.
Jung un-does the phallus as
a gendered marker of
consciousness.

To conclude (2)
Ju g s phalli a i a
invites critique. It forces
us to recognize matter
and body in the writing
as well as transcendent
logos concepts.
Jung re-orients the
gendered creation
myths of the modern
psyche to enhance the
symbolic feminine.

The goddess returns in

the writing as a partner
in the imagination:
anima as personal,
flawed, cultural,
historical, abject,
fantasy, sublime,
unknowable, the
potential for rebirth and
renewal.