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The ‘Patriarchal Neglect of the Feminine Principle’: A Psychological Fallacy of Jung’s Wolfgang Giegerich
Nemo contra Jungium nisi Jungius Jungius ips Thinking the Jungian Myth Onw
Psychoanalysis at large presently goes through a period of societal disregard, if not downright rej (‘Freud-bashing’). Jungian psychoanalysis in particular suffers an even worse fate. It is simply ig by the scientific community, by the people in power, and by the major part of the general public. might think that this is more than compensated for by the enthusiastic attention it receives recei ves from th Age movement movement and a segment of pop culture. But the embrace by the popular mind from without, a as the undermining of the substance of Jungian thought by the popular mind working from w through many Jungians themselves, is rather a badge of infamy.) It may well be that the disrespe Jungian psychology is not only due to the narrow-mindedness of an uninitiated public, but that i part deserved. Deserved, because beca use its basic insights and tenets have not been convincingly worke not stringently thought through. Jun g sometimes referred to his psychology as ‘mycritical ‘my critical psychol psychol but there also seems see ms to t o be some conceptual confusion in certain crucial areas of his hi s psycholog cannot withstand criticism. One of the oft-repeated ideas going around in many circles of popular thought is that it is the p chal neglect of the feminine principle that is to blame for much of what is thought to be wrong i culture: one-sided rationalism, the ecological crisis, ruthless capitalism, the loss of meaning, the co of our modern world at large, the alienation from our emotions, our senses, our drives, and our This modern ideology is in my opinion unpsychological . But the trouble with it is that it is roo Jung’s thought, indeed an element el ement of his thought very dear to him. This is the problem that will h be explored in the following reflections as an example for the intelle ctual confusion mentioned. In his Memories, his Memories, Dreams, Dreams, Reflections, Reflections, in the beginning part of the chapter entitled ‘The Work’, is a passage in which Jung tries to establish a connection between Gnosticism and Freud (with re to ‘the classical Gnostic motifs of sexuality and the wicked paternal authority’). Jung continues,
But the development towards materialism which had already been prefigured in the alchemists’ preoccupation with th mystery of matter had had the effect of blocking for Freud the outlook upon another essential aspect of Gnosticism: th primordial image of the spirit as another, another, higher higher god. According to Gnostic tradition tradition it was this higher god who had sen the krater (mixing (mixing vessel), the vessel of spiritual transformation, to mankind’s aid. The krater is is a feminine princip which did not find a place in Freud’s patriarchal world. Of course, Freud is by no means alone in this bias. In the realm chambe of Catholic thought the Mother of God and Bride of Christ has been received into the divine thalamus (bridal Sign up to vote on this title only recently, after centuries of hesitancy, hesitancy, and thus at least been accorded approximative recognition. In the Protestan Useful useful of alchemy, b In Not and Jewish spheres the father continues to dominate as much as ever. the hermetic philosophy contrast, the feminine principle played an eminent role, and one equal to that of the masculine. One of the mos important feminine symbols symbols in alchemy was the vessel in which the transformation of the substances was to take plac
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‘the Father’, how can one call his frame of mind informed by materialism, which, after all, refe ‘mater’ (if taken symbolically) and focusses on matter, body, substances (mythologically assign Mother Earth in contrast to Father Heaven)? And how can one accuse Freud of having no place f feminine principle if one claims that he stands in the tradition of materialism? The problem Jung with Freud’s frame of mind would have to be called more accurately his positivism. It is this posit (a logical category referring to the denial that the universal could be inherent in the particular, than a mythological category) that leaves no room for ‘the spirit as another, higher god’. 3. How alchemy have prefigured the modern mind’s inability to take ‘spirit’ seri ously, if, as we know, alc was spiritual through and through?—These contradictions are not central to this paper. I mention only to show that from the outset they tend to create an atmosphere of conceptual fuzziness that exactly conducive to making the reader approach the substance of Jung’s actual specific argumen a certain amount of confidence. What is central to this paper is what Jung has to say about the fem principle as krater or vessel, as the Mother of God and Bride of Christ; and about the exclusive nance of the Father in the Protestant and J ewish mind. I will state my case bluntly in the form of a of theses. 1. Up th e Down Stair case. When Jung gives highest praise to Mary’s reception into the d thalamus as Mother of God and Bride of Christ in Catholic thought—in Answer to Job he goes as to designate the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as ‘the most important religious since the Reformation’ (CW 11 § 752)—this move of his counteracts the very move on the part soul that Jung himself started out from in our passage and described as the Gnosti c higher god’s se the feminine principle (the krater ) down from heaven to mankind’s aid. By approving of this r (1950) Catholic dogma as a religious peak far beyond the Protestant, as well as Freudian, positi unwittingly refuses, as it were, to accept this Gnostic god’s gift to us humans, sort of writing ‘retu sender’ on it, sending it back up into the heavenly, transcendental, or metaphysical sphere. Jung c dicts himself. He does not ‘stick’ to You're the original image he himself introduced. This image ha Reading a Preview aspects: the first is that of a content, the feminine principle in the form of a vessel, the other i Unlock full access with a free trial. vessel’s downwards movement. In his desire to give full appreciation to the content , he elevate feminine principle again (Assumption!), insisting, e.g., that ‘the equality of women’ (a this-w social development) ‘requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a “divine” woman, the Download With Free Trial of Christ’ (§ 753)—not realizing that thereby he undoes (a psychoanalytic defence mechanism down-movement of his own Gnostic image again and thus malgré lui even hurts the feminine prin as the content that he wants to give highest honour to: because according to the image in questio feminine principle is not supposed to be up there, but down here. 2. Psychologi cal M ater ial ism. But Jung also directly acts against the first (content) aspect image. He ignores the specific form in which the feminine principle is int roduced: thekrater , the v Even though he points out that in medieval alchemy ‘one of the most important femininesymbols up the to vote on this title the (alchemical) vessel, thereby acknowledging a continuitySign from particular Gnostic image Useful Not useful and Bride of Christ alchemical one, he indiscriminately treats the image of the Mother of God modern dogma as an expression of the same feminine principle, totally ignoring the opposition o two types of images. The Gnostic krater and the alchemical vas are empty, hollow containers,
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contents it may contain. Ultimately, it is in itself the image of absence or a self-sublating, self-neg image, a non-image. This negativity does not mean that the vessel should notexist as a container. I means that it should not do its containing in a material, natural way. While the Gnostic krater as a of baptismal vessel was merely filled with spirit, the alchemical vessel, at least in the last analy supposed to be, in itself, a spiritual container, a vas that, contra naturam, contains in a nonphy nonliteral, that is in a ‘spiritual’ way. The Mother of God, by contrast, is a person, an imaginal figure, a ‘substantial’ content and logically positive. By saying (§ 753), ‘The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally pe representation’, Jung demonstrates to what ext ent he thinks here in terms of positivity. He substanti again what the soul had already dematerialized and spiritualized centuries ago. According to him feminine principle is supposed to be fully present, present as an imaginal person and body. In ou from MDR Jung states that through the new dogma the feminine principle was accorded on ‘approximative recognition’. As we learn from § 754, in his view the recognition would have been only if Mary had been given ‘the status of a goddess’ (which the dogma did not quite grant Psychologically, any god or goddess is the image of a highest and most intensive, most real, (logically) positive soul substance, and the particular image of the Magna Mater emerging behind as Mother of God is the primordial image of matter, nature, body—in short: positivity. By s deserting the obvious negativity of the krater and the vas in favour of the positivity and (psycholo materiality of the idea of a goddess as imaginal bodily sha pe, Jung is guilty of(psychological) mat ism. 3. The I ncomplete Ar r ival of th e Krater. It is not arbitrary and indifferent in what form the fem principle appears. In the account Jung gives of the prehistory of his psychology, it primordially ap as a mixing vessel sent by the higher god. The Gnostic krater found its continuation in the med alchemical vas. For many centuries the psyche of Western man, through the eyes of all the indiv alchemists, stared at the alchemical vessel what ita contained. You'reand Reading Preview What happens when you stare enough and soulfully at an object before your eyes? You become assimilated to it in your consciou Unlock full is access withare a free trial.to say in psychology) ‘integrated To put the same thing another way, the object (as we wont consciousness. Consciousness itself is, as it were, ‘infected’ by its own content: what as long as you at the thing in front of you exists as Download a content of , or image in, consciousness slowly turns into With Free Trial attitude, your mindset, into the very form or logical constitution of consciousness itself. The o comes home to you, comes home to the subject. It loses the form of object and takes on the form subjective style of thinking and experiencing, and thus the form of form. The original ‘objec consciousness is dematerialized, spiritualised—sublated. This alchemical process of disti sublimatio, evaporatio is what in the history of the Western soul happened with the alchemical itself. The alchemical vessel slowly ceased to be an object or content of consciousness and a instrument for its operations in the laborat ory and was ‘interiorized’ so as to become the logical fo Sign up to vote on this title consciousness. This transition has, as we have seen, two distinct aspects. First, it is the transition Notourselves’ useful toUseful ‘in ‘out there’ (in reality, in nature) or ‘in front of consciousness’ ‘in here’, as subjec in the sense of ‘inherent in the structure of human consciousness itself’; secondly, it is ipso fac transformation from ‘substance’ or ‘content’ to ‘form’, from imaginal shape to attitude, cate
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a consciousness of things, beings, events, qual ities (phenomena). At the time of myth, consciousnes totally given over to its contents. It was completely oblivious of itself, oblivious to such a degree seemed to be non-existent. It lived in or via its contents and in the natural world it experienced because it absolutely abandoned itself to the objects of experience, it was able to behold the absolutely: in its divine depth, as gods and daimones. In the world define d by myth there was exclu ‘objectivity’ of experience; what from our modern perspective was subjectively experienced wa like it was, absolute unquestionable truth, simply by virtue of its having indeed been experienc And the mythic gods were the mark by which both the nonexistence of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objec in our modern sense and the nonexistence of a fundamental division between them can be seen. F the gods subjectivity as such is itself absolutely obj ectified and ontologized, appearing to consciou as objects quasi from outside, as consciousness’ contents: as i maginal beings. (This is why my spe of an .exclusive ‘objectivity’ of experience is an inaccurate, modernistic façon de parler; s speaking, the mythological mode of experiencing the world was neither subjecti ve nor objective: absolute —absolved of the opposition of subject and object). ‘Man’s intervention’ and the ‘collabo of the psyche—an indispensable factor’ (CW 10 § 498) in what was experienced or observed rem invisible. So now we can understand what the Gnostic higher god’s gift to mankind was all about: its inh telos was to offer to human consciousness the chance of becoming aware of consciousness as such is, the opportunity to become aware of itself and for the first time to acquire a sense and noti subjectivity. The image of the krater as object or content is the first immediacy, the first inklin explicit symbol, of the idea of consciousness, but, because as krater (the image of a literal vessel still no more than the first immediacy of this idea; it is consciousness stil l imagined, still reified a we put it psychologistically) projected out (although in reality this idea had of course never bee consciousness before and thus could not possibly be projected out). The nature of the higher god was not that of a thing, but of a task, a prima worked . It was not a static vessel. As lo You're materia to Reading abe Preview the god’s gift stays the krater as which it was originally given, in other words, stays an imaginal Unlock full access with a free trial. this gift meant to comprehend of consciousness, it has not really arrived yet. To really accept unfinished, as having an inherent teleology. It has fully a rrived only when the telos of the hollow as absolutely self-renouncing receptivity has been completed; Download With Free Trialwhen the hollowness of the vess hollowed out even the very substantiality of the vessel’s containing walls so that nothing positiv materiality remains. Then and only then has the femininity of the feminine princ iple been accompl fulfilled, redeemed, sublimated. This is the case when, as absolute negativity, it has come home soul from its original alienation as an object imagined ‘out there’; when the vessel has been abs negatively interiorized into consciousness and the soul has thus reached the point of a self-refle awareness of itself as ‘inner’, ‘subjective’, ‘psychological’. in the 4. The M etamorphosis of th e F emi ni ne Pr in ciple. It is, of course, significant that Sign up to vote on this title tradition the higher god did not send a goddess or a (be it semi-divine or human) heroine to the res Useful useful Not us humans, in other words, not a personified figure, but the krater , a krater filled with spirit. Und edly, Jung was aware of the, in part, paral lel Christian motif of the Holy Spirit being sent down by as the Paraclete, a helper and consoler. Often, the Holy Spirit is symbolized by a dove, the bird
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This interiorization or sublation amounts to what Jung called the death of a symbol. The mome previously imagined symbol of the krater or vas can be seen through as human consciousnes subjectivity, the symbol of the vessel is no longer ‘pregnant with meaning’; ‘its meaning has bee out of it’, the ‘expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even than the hitherto accepted symbol’, and this is why ‘the symbol is dead , i.e., it possesses on historical significance’ (CW 6 § 816). By focussing on the vessel with all its soul passion for so alchemy inevitably interiorized the symbol of the vessel into consciousness and ipso facto rendered (alchemy) superfluous, obsolete—and eodem actu it provided the condition for the possibility a pri the emergence of psychology. The moment of the birth of psychology is the moment of consciou having become conscious of itself. That this change has the world-shattering consequence of rem the ‘place where the [not political or technical, but “metaphysical”] action is’ away from nature, the kosmos (in which we humans used to live) and into human subjectivity, and that it thus inev amounts to an irretrievable loss of myth, of symbols, of gods, and of an ultimately divine nature without saying. Gods or God are positive contents of the imagination, and even negative theology c really undo their ultimate positivity, as much as it may try. Once the absolute has to appear und conditions of a conscious awareness of consciousness, it cannot be imagined any more. It just doe work. Psychology is the Fall from the innocence of a belief i n God/gods and from ‘imagining thin ‘present’ at all, the absolute today must be thought . Just as it was the telos or fate of the krater to disappear as the imagined vessel (symbol) that been and to turn into the notion (as well as experience) of consciousness, we may suspect that earlier it had been the telos or fate of the various images of the ‘personified’ and uncurtailedly po form of the feminine principle as goddess (as Mother, Bride, Consort in diverse constellations) sublated into the image of the Gnostic krater and the alchemical vas as the first emergence of the ex negativity of the feminine principle. Jung in 1912 wrote a book entitled,Transformations and Sym of the Libido. Today it may be time to writeReading an essay,a Transformations and Symbols of the Fem You're Preview Principle. Or perhaps not ‘... and symbols’, inasmuch as within this transformation process it is th Unlock full access a free trial. fate of ‘symbols’ to render themselves obsolete andwith give way to the absolute negativity of the sponding logical form. The metamorphosis of the feminineDownload principle has fundamentally With Free Trial three historical stages: Mother-Goddess
!
vessel
!
consciousness.
The same sequence could also be expressed in the following ways: substance, embodiment simple positivity
! !
empty receptacle for a substance ! logical form (positive) negation ! absolute negativity. Sign up to vote on this title
Useful Not useful ‘Metamorphosis’ implies that it is always ‘the same’ that takes on a different guise or logical The goddess is already ‘vessel’ inasmuch as she is also conceiving womb; the vessel is alre prefiguration of consciousness, and consciousness is still a (however sublated) vessel, and (as w
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especially so precisely in the personalistic bias of Freudian analysis and in the humanism of Prote religious attitude. Although I admit that psychological personalism and humanism are seriously w as to the truly appropriate forms of the feminine principle today (wanting since they are still positi forms of logical negativity), they nevertheless are both an (imperfect) version of the feminine prin and a mode (somehow) expressive of the ‘consciousness’ or ‘logical form’ stage of the fem principle. Above I said that the krater is an image of absence. With ‘consciousness’ or the ‘logical form’ ab is no longer merely the special content of the symbol in which the f eminine principle manifests, bu the form of the former image or symbol. ‘Consciousness’ is not a thing like the literalkrater , not a v as an imaginable symbol ( Dingsymbol ) either. It is a notion, a concept and thus does not hav positive existence; it is an intangible event in the mind. Once the logical level (psychology) is rea there is, in all central and absolute (transpersonal, ‘metaphysical’) regards, no room for symbols, im archetypal figures, gods any more. As a matter of course they now are all ‘absent’, have to be ‘ab inasmuch as they have been totally fermented, corrupted, distilled, evaporated, so that nothing po remains. Now, in the age of psychology, logical negativity rules. 5. The F alse Br ide. In § 743 of Answer to Job Jung summarizes the message of the Assumptio dogma saying, ‘Mary as the bride is united with the son in the heavenly bridal-chamber, and, as S with the Godhead’. A few sentences before we read, ‘Therefore the Apocalypse closes, like the cla individuation process, with the symbol of the hieros gamos, the marriage of the son with the mo bride. But the marriage takes place in heaven, where “nothing unclean” enters, high above the deva world. Light consorts with light. That is the programme for the Christian aeon which must be fu before God can incarnate in the creaturely man.’ No doubt, Jung’s line of thinking is backed up by religious documents, notably the Apocalypse and the dogma of 1950. But it absolutely contradic dominant dynamics and inherent telos of religious experience in the Judaeo-Christian world. The major idea in this sphere of religious hasabeen tha t the bride is to be seen somewhe You'rethought Reading Preview than where Jung looks for her. The feminine principle is by no means absent, it is not repressed Unlock with a free trial.Godhead with the bride, have no exclusive Father-dominance; the bride, and full theaccess coniunctio of the altogether abolished. But there has been a truly revolutionary change with respect to the questio the Godhead’s bride has to be: no longer (a s it was during times of myth) an equally divine go Download With Freethe Trial with a bridal-chamber in heaven, i.e., in the archetypal sphere, in the realm of transcendence. Go Old Testament tells us, initiated a covenant between Himself and His chosen people. From then o ‘light consorts with light’, not a god with a goddess, both of equal standing and both equa lly perso figures, the perfect symmetrical couple up the re in the beyond, but God unambiguously wants to beneath Him. God crosses the fundamental boundary separating the divine, archetypal, or ‘metaphy realm from the empirical and human, all-too-human one, which is inalienably located in this ‘devastated world’. God’s longing, a violent longing characterized by express jealousy, has long cr Sign up to vote on this title over from ‘where “nothing unclean” enters’ to t he side where there is certainly enough that is ‘unc Useful useful the new ‘m for Not Christianity developed these ideas further. St. Augustine, example, described situation’ expressly as: ‘Verbum enim sponsus, et sponsa caro humana’ (In Joh. Ev. viii, 4). And well known, the imagery of bride and bridegroom is central in Christian thought. Christ is the
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standing is a real bride and that only a coniunctio between two archetypal or divine personages the heavenly thalamus is a real coniunctio. He totally ignores the fact that God or the son already real bride here in this real world: the congregation, the church. Of course when we hear ‘the church’ we tend to think mindlessly of the rather pitiful emp institutions that carry that name. But the ekklesia as the bride is obviously not the church as an in tion or organization. Psychologically speaking, ekklesia is the traditional Christian word for wh Jungians might call the depth of the ‘collective’ psyche. Not the indi vidual as ego, as empirical per ity, but also not the empirical mass of believing individual ego’s organized in a church as institutio gathered in a church as a building, can be the son’s bride, but ‘the congregation’ understood (transpersonal, universal) human mind, as what Kant called ‘die Menschheit in der Person archetypal anthropos, as alchemy’s homo totus, as Heidegger’s Menschentum, as the Jungian Se long as the latter is not reduced to a personalistic understanding [my self], as it often is). 6. Regression, Procr astin ation, E xtr ajection. By construing things the way he does, in these m Jung shows himself to be a psychological reactionary. He obstinately wants to hold on to the ‘mate tic’ (substantializing, personifying) psychological mode of being-in-the-world as it was const during archaic times, the times of myth and ritual. He wants to push what is already in the sta ‘Aquarius, the water bearer, the alchemist able to pour the waters instead of the fish swimming a in them’ (Monika Wikman) back into the stage of those fish (Pisces). He wants a female figure w least as ‘mistress of heaven’ is ‘functionally on a par with Christ’ (§ 754), if she cannot be wh would actually prefer, a full-fledged goddess. He is not satisfied with a God that ‘humbled hims unite with a ‘bride’ residing, not in heaven, but in St. Augustine’s ‘human flesh’, on this earth, a human consciousness. This regression is compensated for by what one might call procrasti nation. Jung ‘procrastinates’ i he pushes the event of God’s ‘continuing incarnat ion’ ‘in the creaturely man’ (§ 746) off into the f although it has already happened long You're ago andReading is continuing to happen. It may not have been comp a Preview but it is already a reality. The appearance of a psychological consciousness, the rise of an awaren Unlock full access with a freelife, trial.on the one hand, and the immens human subjectivity, the absolute ‘secularization’ of modern continuously increasing power of creation and destruction given into human hands, on the other are the tell-tale signs that, as Jung himself put it (without, however, Download With Free Trial drawing the inevitable psycholo conclusions), ‘Everything now depends on man’ (§ 745). It remains incomprehensible that despit insight of his, he thought that we could and do still depend on a semi-divinization of the Virgin and that the ‘Incarnation in creaturely man’ (§ 744) depends on the prior acc omplishment of a coni of the son with the mother-bride and of the Godhead, with Sophia up in heaven (thishieros gamos according to him, only the ‘ first step towards incarnation’. In reality, I claim, the ongoing incarn happens as an ongoing coniunctio with human subjectivity. Our psychological problem is certain that the intended and imminent incarnation in creaturely man cannot happen because the fem Sign up to vote on this title principle has not found a ‘personal’ ‘metaphysical representation’ and is not ‘metaphysically anc Useful NotItuseful in the figure of a “divine” woman’ (§ 753). Our problem is very different. is that we, as subjectivity having psychologically become approximately equal to the Godhead and ha ving unwit been subject to the influx of the Holy Spirit, are psychologically (and probably also literally) not
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about 19th and 20th century conditions and not about classical metaphysics at all). Thereby, even expressing it, the dogma nevertheless obscured the implicit insight and rendered it harmless. The in is harmless if it is appears to be about mythological figures or a theological dogma, because we that in our modern psychological status mythology and theology are no more than i nteresting pas and that the real place ‘where the action is’ is the consciousness of creaturely man. No div heavenly thalamus any more. The thalamus today is here in this world, on this earth; it is h subjectivity, it is ‘we’. ‘We’, our consciousness, the mind of mortal man have to be the ‘thalamus krater , the alchemical vessel. (‘We’, that is, of course, not we as empirical, private, only-subjectiv personalities, but as our innermost Other, the universalanthropos in us, the Menschheit in der P The extrajection of the thalamus away from us and into heaven and the positivizing of the fem principle as a—posthumously—archetypalized feminine figure serve the purpose of distracti lulling us into sleep: of relieving us of our frightening psychological burden. What needs to h appears as something out there, on the level of the objects or contents of consciousness, on the le our dreams or unconscious visions, namely with the objectified ‘feminine principle’, the Mother of It does not have to happen in, nay, as our subjectivity, as its logical constitution. We now can pret if nothing had happened and we were still living in the status quo ante. We can stay unconsc innocent. Now ‘we’ do not have to be the feminine principle, to be the bride of the son, to approximation to the Godhead, to be God’s real incarnation in the creat urely man. No, now it seem just as in olden times we can have again a semi-divine ‘mediatrix’ (§ 754) who will carry our ‘metaphysical’ (psychological) burden in our stead and thus allow us to feel and imagine oursel mere ego-personalities. The coniunctio happens safely in the beyond, ‘light’ (psycho-politicall y co coequally ‘consorting with light’ up there, far away from us, and so we are spared. No indec transgression from the transcendental, archetypal or imaginal to the human, from the ideal to the The coming of the Holy Spirit, God’s incarnation in crea turely man, can now comfortably beawai events in the future. We can sit back and merely imagine or dream about the future individuatio You're Reading a Preview incarnation. We become mere observers of, and perhaps believers in, a transcendental coniunctio d Unlockthe fullstage access and with the a freeco-actor trial. whereas in reality we are psychologically and antagonist in this very d a drama that is already on and has been going on for some time. 7. Derealization. One of Jung’s petDownload ideas was With that the Trinity Free Trial had to be expanded into a quate whereby the quaternity had the structure of 3 + 1. The Fourth was a distinct element, set off fro other three in its nature. But it was the Fourth that had to give reality to the Three, which were e tially of a merely ideal nature. ‘Becoming real’ was one of Jung’s main concerns, and it went theory (keyword individuation) above all under the titles ‘wholeness’ or ‘completeness’, which i implied the realization of the quaternity for him.—If the Fourth is needed for the ideal to becom what or who is the Fourth? For Jung it was above all either The Feminine or Evil, as opposed t exclusively male, light, and good Trinity. And he passionately sought to give to the Feminine and t Sign up to vote on this title a metaphysical status, an archetypal rank. As we have seen with respect to his ideas about the As useful Useful Not principle tion dogma, he saw it as psychologically indispensable to have the feminine elevated rank of a (semi-) goddess. Mary had to be raised into heaven and be granted equal status wi Godhead, in order to be the proper bride for the Son of God and in order for the coniunctio to h
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syntactic and structural, but merely semantic: male versus female, light versus dark, good versus But if, e.g., the quaternity manifests phenomenologically as the image of three animals and one figure, this obviously is a structural difference. There is no equality of status, the three and their belonging to different classes or orders of the real. Jung’s whole effort expressly goes into levelli structural difference; the feminine principle must have its ‘metaphysical representation’, the bride be of equal standing. The difference between the Three and the One as Fourth is by Jung reduced imaginal one, one with regard to content or shape. Considering the image of the quaternity in the of three animals plus a human form, what is more obvious than that the quaternity has to be under as the (otherworldly, divine, archetypal, ideal) trinity plus creaturely man? The Fourth is us. It is our consciousness, our coming onto the scene of the archetypal drama, our entering it wi intensive realness of our presence that alone provides the missing reality to the transcendental T Through and in us humans can what formerly was merely theidea of the trinitarian Godhead come to this earth, into empirical reality. (b) By sending the Fourth into heaven, Jung renders it just as ideal and unreal as the other three just as much only an idea, a fantasy image, as they are. Obviously, the fantasy or idea of some whose function it is to provide reality does not itself possess the power to actually provide realit apotheosizing the feminine principle, Jung, as it were, does to the principle of reality what in Germ called wegloben (to rid ourselves of someone by promoting him to a higher, but only honorific where he can no longer do any harm). The reality principle is immunized, checkmated, frustrate realizing function can never do its job. It can not really cross over into reality, but has to run idle yo on the other side of reality, because it has be en systematically separated from the real. The Virg is safely shelved in the heavenly thalamus. The quaternity and wholeness as completely heavenl only ‘semantic’ are themselves derealized, only ideal or imaginal, although t hey admittedly still a idea or image of full reality. In this context, what an idea is semantically about is of lesser impo than what its status is. Only a quaternity withina itself, within its own structure or syntax You'rethat Reading Preview logically, crosses the line between the ideal and the real, the metaphysical and the physical, the im Unlock full access withisa areal free trial. and the literal and ‘unclean’ and that encompasses both quaternity, real wholeness—in co to imagined or dreamed-about wholeness. In those times when myth and ritualDownload were the real and sufficient With Free Trial expression of the whole man ( totus) and of the total reality of his lived life, the ideal, or archetypal, quate rnity was also truly suff because it was all-comprehensive. But as Jung himself stated, modern man exists extra eccle divorced from myth, he now has a more or less inde pendent consciousness somehow ‘outside’ and vis the so-called ‘unconscious’. It is obvious that under these circumstances the archetype, the ide a symbol , of wholeness does not suffice any more. It does not overarch that dimension of modern h existence that has emancipated from myth, from the church, from ‘the unconscious’, from the ima And thus it simply has no handle on it. Today, the archetype of wholeness is itself only a partial re Sign up to vote on this title and the idea of a partial reality. It does not expre ss the very wholeness that it is supposed to represe Useful useful least Not is least one whole half of our psychological reality, and not the important, simply left out o version of supposed wholeness; this quaternity has absolutely no relevance for, no bearing on, extremely important areas of modern existence as industry, technology, capitali sm, globalization,
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become conscious of a contradiction (a contradiction not due to faulty thinking but inherent structure of an idea), the imagining and pictorially thinking mind comes to the end of its wits. It moment where thought , dialectical thinking, has to take over. The moment when the soul has m from semantics to syntax, from the fish swimming in the waters to the waters themselves, from co to logical form, there is no way around thought. Jung’s insistence that the feminine principle ne personal and metaphysical representation can now be seen as an attempt to rescue the innocence imagining , dreaming, or pictorially ‘thinking’, mind. By shoving the Virgin Mary into the hea sphere, the image of the feminine principle, the anima, and thus the image as such, the mode of im ing, is eternalized as well as ‘divinized’: it is established asthe principle, the non plus ultra. Thoug the animus) cannot threaten the imagination (or the anima) any more, it is expelled from the sph what is psychologically significant, being reduced to a mere ego-function that has its only legitima in pragmatic ‘outer’-reality coping. It is the imaginal that now, by having the real-making factor in is declared to be the ultimate reality. The moment the feminine enters the ranks of the three perso the Godhead, the feminine, the body, the earth, reality are psychologically swallowed up by the world. Rather than bringing the ideal into reality, real ity and matter are idealized. This is what acc for the blown up and hollowed-out talk about wholeness and gods in much of analytical psychology Jung. Mystifications. The opposite of what was explicitly intended. But Jung himself sowed the seed for this inflation (in the monetary sense of the word). It was h refused to enter thought. He wanted to be the ‘empiricist’, the innocent observer of images, the ‘visionary’ (voyeur) with respect to ‘the unconscious’. The essential psychological developmen supposed to happen in the unconscious, on the (semantic or ‘fish’) level of the symbols it produc our dreams, so that, I claim, our reality (we as subjectivity and consciousness) might continue t untouched. We were of course supposed to interpret and feel the dream messages, and apply them reality, but this was only our own ego-activity. Our reality was not supposed to be immediatel integrally involved in the divine drama. To think such aanPreview immediate involvement would have req You're Reading the loss of innocence and a Fall into dialectical thought. No, the ego as neutral observer was sup Unlock fullthe access with a free trial.ple, the principle of realization, to remain intact, untouched. For this purpose, feminine princi be projected into the heavenly sphere and shelved there. 9. Fr atern izing With Popular Demand. The psychological authority on which Jung, as the em Download With Free Trial he wanted to be, felt he could base his theory about the Assumption dogma, was ‘the popular m ment’, it was the ‘visions of Mary which have been increasing in number’, the ‘fact, especially, was largely children who had the visions’, the ‘deep longing in the masses for an intercesso mediatrix who would at last take her place al ongside the Holy Trinity...’, ‘the longing for the exal of the Mother of God’ that ‘passes through the people’ (§ 748). This is the same authority that Jun in part at least also behind the Pope’s move: ‘The papal declaration has given comforting express this yearning’ (§ 754); ‘... the popular movement which contributed to the Pope’s decision solem Sign up to vote on this title declare the new dogma’ (§ 749). Incredible. Jung fraternizes with the nostalgic longing o Not useful Useful masses—much like Aaron in the story of the Golden Calf sympathized with the longing of the pe who, during the times of hard-to-bear revolutionary religious changes, just as we are experiencing days, said to him, ‘Up, make us gods...’ (Exod. 32:1). Jung applauds the Pope for his complying wi
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external, formalistic regard, of archetypal content suffices Jung to take them as psychologically exp ing the state of the art level of the (as he terms it) ‘collective’ psyche and as being of truly arche depth. Jung is blind to the psychological or logical status in which such seemingly archetypal co stands and which is by no means one of archetypal significance (just as the Nazi movement, that credited with an archetypal depth, namely as an expression of the Wotan arc hetype, was psycholog phony from the beginning, being merely the result ofcomplexes on the personalistic, subjective le the mass psyche, the result of ressentiments, defences, ideologies, emotionalism, etc., and did not have the dignity of a manifestation of what Jung meant by ‘the objective psyche’). Jung here does psychological level, exactly the same thing that the consumer goods industry, the advertizin entertainment industries, and drug dealers do on a literal level: he appeals to, satisfies, and awake base regressive (nostalgic) cravings of the personal psyches of the masses. Jung does not stay faith the objective dynamics and inherent telos of the Christi an substance. He falls prey to the a mbiguity own misnomer: ‘the collective unconscious’, whose literal meaning can just as well refer to the u scious personal psychology of the masses (that is, the personal psychology not of the members masses each individually and personally, but that of ‘the collective’ as a whole) as its intended me is supposed to refer to the depth of the transpersonal objective psyche. 10. The Signs of th e Tim es. In Answer to Job Jung declares concerning the Assumptio Maria ‘This dogma is in every respect timely’ (§ 744). By contrast, ‘the Protestant standpoint has lost gr by not understanding the signs of the times...’ (§ 749). In particular, ‘Protestantism has obvious given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equality of women’ (§ 753 theme here is not Protestantism, but the ‘signs of the times’. I flatly deny that Jung’s position as t is ‘timely’ or not is tenable. I think it is unpsychological. At first glance, Jung seems to have an unbeatable point when he refe rs to the development point the equality of women. One of the predominant features of this century has been this development is an all too obvious and undeniable fact. So Jung seems be right when he considers this movem You're Reading a to Preview be one of the significant signs of the times. But the question we have to raise is: what is this sign Unlockstandpoints full access withcomes a free trial. for ? Here the difference between various into play. Only from a social-histo natural-consciousness point of view does this change imply a greater importance of woman. Psych cally, however, it has the opposite meaning. It is With a signFree that psychologically woman has become u Download Trial portant, that the whole question of the sexes, of gender, of sexuality has become absolutely indiff These are no psychological issues any more. The whole women’s and the sexual liberation move are movements towards emancipation, emancipation, that is, from the soul , from a higher meaning, obliging archetypal images and roles. The soul has released the entire area of sex from its ‘sphe interests’ or ‘jurisdiction’, as it were, and released it int o our personal freedom, our ego arbitrarin is a similar change as with agriculture centuries ago. In the beginning of agriculture, pl oughing, so harvesting were in themselves religiously significant acts (rituals). In modern times they have be Sign up to vote on this title totally secularized, devoid of any meaning other than what they mean pragmatically. The sou Useful Not useful today one ca of Likewise, withdrawn from this area of life and left it at the free disposal the ego. in sexual regards just as one likes. One can live faithfully in a marriage, promiscuously, gay or le bisexually, in celibacy, without any sex-life at all—it is up to the individual. The clear border be
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collective fads and trends are or how we have been biologically or sociologically conditioned under these circumstances, absurd to want to supply any metaphysical anchorage (§ 753) to woman is precisely what is against ‘the signs of the times’. Woman cannot be patterned any more by an a typal role model, such as the Virgin-Mother-Bride. We are not in the age of psychological childhoo more. We do not have a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. Today we have to live Ma Himself (Erich Fromm) and woman for herself. We are archetypally naked, extra ecclesiam also respect to sex and gender. Here, too, we each have to ‘sew our garment ourselves’ (CW § 9/i § 27 to invent our sexual identity individually all on our own, with no divine prototype to lean on. It is psychologically absurd to consider the dogmatisation of the assumption of the Virgin-M Bride ‘timely’ at the very time when the words ‘virgin’ and ‘bride’ have become meaningless s (especially so ‘virgin’). Apart from hearsay knowledge, we do not have an inkling any more of ‘virgin’ psychologically, i.e. archetypally, means (to be precise: once meant ). It is absurd today to put one’s hopes on a hieros gamos of the Son and his Bride in a hea thalamus at a time when the very concept of marriage in an archetypal sense is factually deconstr by millions and millions of people in re al life. Many men and women live together these days w marriage, showing that marriage is felt to be superfluous, and where marriages still do occur the empirical , pragmatic connections of a strictly private nature. The frequency and regularity with w divorces happen underlines the loss of conviction inherent in the idea of a coniunctio today. obviously, human marriage is no longer a re-enactment of an archetype. It is unworthy of a psychologist to say, ‘The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally pe representation’ (§753) with explicit reference to the women’s movement when (a) the psycholo reality of our age is that even the masculine does not have any metaphysical personal representatio more ever since ‘God is dead’, but above al l (b) since men and women are no subject of psycholo begin with. Psychology is about the soul, about the soul’s logical life. It does not know about ‘me ‘women’, much as chemistry does notYou're know about the aSon of God and Virgin Mary, or theology Reading Preview H2O, Jupiter’s moon, and viruses. Men and women are possible subjects of sociology, biology access with a free anthropology, but not of psychology.Unlock ‘The full feminine’ and ‘thetrial. masculine’ are, in psychology, po symbols or metaphors for the psychic opposites which in themselves are totally unanscha (irrepresentable, invisible, unimaginable). They do notFree referTrial to men and women and to what in a Download With sense might be considered masculine and feminine. To talk about gender issues in psycholo psychological baby talk. Jung full well knew that psychology presupposes the obsolescence of mythology (cf. CW 9/i § They are mutually exclusive. It is the special character of the mythological mode of being-in-thethat natural phenomena, and thus also real men and women, just like that can represent what w archetypal aspects. Thus for millennia, woman was a priori cloaked in archetypal garments; she h play out archetypal roles. Young, unmarried womenhad to be virgins. On her wedding day the brid Sign up to vote on this title the Goddess. After her wedding day she had to be Wife and Mother. This is the sphere in which w useful feminine fi inUseful Not needs (but also has) a metaphysical personal representation the guise of divine Today these archetypal garments have fallen off from woman and from sexuality (as the y had lon from most other realities), now leaving woman, too, metaphysically naked. Psychology is only po
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‘the feminine’. What Jung does here, in trying to provide a metaphysical anchor and personal repre tion in heaven for literal women, is unpsychological, even antipsychological: it is his opus c animam. Where psychology has to be an opus contra naturam, what Jung is trying to do is—o surface—a restitution of long obsolete ( psychological ) Nature (= mythological mode of being-in world): a restitution both of mythical representation as such (the mode of having representations pleroma) and of the representation of the particular idea of the natural (the Mother archetype). B bottom it is something else. It is a last desperate attempt to archetypally legitimize, and thus natural consciousness even for psychology! To rescue the old status of consciousness, our m everyday consciousness, the status of ‘semantics’, of the sole awareness of the ‘fish’, t he ‘contents to rescue it from the threatening fall into psychological, or thinking , consciousness in the spirit o alchemist as water-bearer. This ordinary or natural consciousness, not modern woman, is what a metaphysical representation in the form of a mother goddess. But the fact that J ung feels, and res to, a need (to something that is felt to be lacking, something that is not) betrays his thoughts abo Assumption of Mary as ideological, as a mystification and ego stuff. All t his is hisdoing , his corre attempt, and not a simple perception of, and attending to, the self-display of phenomena. Mu Heidegger’s talk of a ‘coming God’ (to mention only one of many examples), Jung’s ideas abo Deipara find their place within what has been called the ‘conservative revolution’ of the first ha century so rich in ideologies.
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