Each gender learns how it perceives the other through lenses colored by personal, archetypal, and collective images. īy recognizing an inner image of female in men and an inner image of male in women, many of my clients are able to withdraw their projections onto the opposite sex, enabling them to see and accept members of the opposite gender more as they really are.The process also mirrors and furthers the breakdown of male-female polarization in our culture, and the cultural shift towards androgyny.
This process frees each gender from the straight-jacket of stereotyped sex roles and expands my clients' identities. Likewise, I frequently assist male clients to recognize traditionally feminine qualities in their psyche. In the course of Jungian analysis, I often assist female clients to discover traditionally masculine qualities in their psyche. Relevant Ideas on Genderįirst, I will briefly describe six well-known aspects of Jungian thought I find relevant and useful: So let me share with you a sort of balance sheet I've constructed. If I allow myself to generalize, however, I am able identify six areas I find relevant and six areas I feel are outdated in Jung's ideas about gender. It is important to me to respect my analysands' own process of awakening to gender issues in the language and images that make sense to them. Nevertheless, I have tried not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to weigh what is useful to each and every one of my clients.
My wife, an avowed feminist, has been most valuable in keeping me watchful of sexism in Jungian theory and practice. Women, in particular, have pointed to Jung's sexism, his turn-of-the-century Swiss-German patriarchal perspective on women and men. But to others, these ideas about gender are foreign and unacceptableespecially when it comes to the narrower definitions Jung gave to concepts such as the anima and animus.Ĭlearly, some of Jung's ideas are objectionable to modern ways of thinking. This Jungian construct seems to fit their experience and assists them in understanding their dreams. For example, the notion of an inner man or inner woman is helpful to many of them. Some of my clients find Jung's concepts regarding masculine and feminine extremely useful and enlightening. It is difficult to discuss this topic generally. After giving it some thought, I concluded that my experience over the past 20 years was that Jung's ideas were both relevant and out-dated. I was specifically asked to discuss how I saw Jung's ideas about masculine and feminine as relevant or out-dated in my analytic work. Last December I was invited by our local Jung Society to participate in a panel discussion on Jung and gender.
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