Jung Aspects of the Masculine, Introduction
Introduction
To understand what C. G. Jung means by “the masculine” is to gain access to the ground of his entire approach to psychology, for his psychology, as he
liked to admit, was his “personal confession”—the confession of a man
seeking to understand human psychology in the patriarchal context of a
private practice in a western European country in the first half of the twentieth century.
Not even the demonstrable universality of the archetypal world that
he uncovered in this endeavor could eliminate the human standpoint of the
pioneer, who remained a man telling us what his experience had been.
Therefore the present collection of excerpts from his writings affords an
opportunity to discover what Jung himself understood of the contribution that gender made to his “personal equation,” a chance to look at the lens of the telescope through which he made his famous and far-reaching observations of the major psychological constellations.
Surprisingly, with the exception of the very early essay, “The Significance
of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,” written when he was still a
Freudian psychoanalyst, there is no single published work in which Jung
devotes himself exclusively to either the psychology of men or the broader
unconscious psychology of the masculine. There is neither a monograph
detailing a man’s process of psychological development nor an essay devoted to the animus, the masculine archetype that Jung interpreted for women as their soul-image.
One has to pick one’s way through many essays to uncover the thread of meaning that conveys Jung’s own masculine path through the labyrinth of the unconscious. The present selection, though far from the only one possible, is an attempt to reveal this thread to the reader who wants to
follow Jung’s track.
The path unfolds from Jung’s own childhood experiences in a vicarage as
the son of a pastor who was losing his faith and the confidence of his wife and son. Paul Jung was both blocked and incapable of the kind of self-reflection that could have unlocked his spirit; for the child Jung, with his enormous potential for psychological development, this father was an unsatisfactory figure with whom to identify.
In his extraordinary imaginal autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung gives us a glimpse of the degree to which he had to found his own identity upon a private vision of the numinous power of the masculine.
This vision of archetypal masculinity was of the kind that comes to a child who has at hand no human role model to incarnate the archetypal image and mediate its power and meaning: … I had the earliest dream I can remember, a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life … (when) I was … between three and four years old.
The vicarage stood quite alone near Laufen castle, and there was a big
meadow stretching back from the sexton’s farm. In the dream I was in this
meadow. Suddenly I discovered a dark, rectangular, stone-lined hole in the
ground. I had never seen it before. I ran forward curiously and peered
down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down.
Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended. At the bottom was a doorway with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big, heavy curtain of worked stuff like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous. Curious to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside. I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty feet long. The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone.
The floor was laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform. On this platform stood a wonderfully rich golden throne. I am not certain, but perhaps a red cushion lay on the seat. It was a magnificent throne, a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of a curious composition:
it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward.
It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no
apparent source of light. Above the head, however, was an aura of
brightness.
The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep toward me. I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment I heard from outside and above my mother’s voice. She called out, “Yes, just look at him. That is the maneater!”
That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death. For many nights afterward I was afraid to go to sleep, because I feared I might have another dream like that.
This dream haunted me for years. Only much later did I realize that
what I had seen was a phallus, and it was decades before I understood that
it was a ritual phallus …
The abstract significance of the phallus is shown by the fact that it was enthroned by itself, “ithyphallically” (ΊΦυς, upright). The hole in the
meadow probably represented a grave. The grave itself was an
underground temple whose green curtain symbolized the meadow,
in other words the mystery of earth with her covering of green vegetation. The carpet was blood-red. What about the vault? Perhaps I had already been to the Munot, the citadel of Schaffhausen? This is not likely, since no one
would take a three-year-old child up there. So it cannot be a memory
trace.
Equally, I do not know where the anatomically correct phallus can
have come from. The interpretation of the orificium urethrae as an eye,
with the source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the
word phallus (Φαλος, shining, bright).
At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean God
“not to be named,” and such it remained throughout my youth,
reappearing when anyone spoke too loudly about Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus
never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite
lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart,
a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it.1
How the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Swiss parsonage emerges
from Jung’s recounting of this dream and his much later associations to it!
We are returned to a now-vanished late Reformation world in which the bodies of the parents were never seen, and the anatomical fact of the erect penis with its urethral orifice was a religious secret, a delicate matter to be broached only in the church languages of Greek and Latin, with their mythological overtones.
Growing up in this repressive atmosphere, Jung was destined to meet his
masculinity archetypally, and the energy with which the archetype presented itself led him to a healing understanding of what it means to be a man that is unparalleled in the psychological literature.
But because Jung’s approach to the masculine was so archetypal (so underground, in the language of this dream), it is easy for its relevance to the psychology of everyday men and women to remain buried.
Therefore some introduction is needed to the contents of this volume to make Jung’s important insights more accessible.
The most important of these insights is the association of masculinity with
the process of becoming conscious, in the Socratic sense of seeing one’s
existence for what it is.
The equation of masculinity with consciousness is implied in the etymological linkage of phallus to brightness, and the creative child’s association of the phallic opening with an eye. This early intuition was
one-sided in that it left out the feminine contribution to consciousness; but its peculiarly monocular insight into the phallic nature of the psyche was
essential for the development of Jung’s thought.
It became the basis of Jung’s first attempt to find a different metaphor for the psyche’s drama than the Oedipus mythologem that Freud offered. Oedipus implied the doctrine of repression, an eventual self-blinding of the human in the face of the intolerable imposed upon him by the gods.
From Oedipus’s story had come notions of the dream as a necessarily disguised revelation and of the psyche as something to be unmasked by a technically skilled analyst against formidable resistances.
This mythologem left out the pressure from within to become
conscious, which for Jung was the strongest drive of the psyche, stronger than sex or the will to power.
Jung’s image of the developing ego in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was not of a guiltridden executive bent on repressing his knowledge of shameful libidinal experience, but rather of a determined solar hero whose quest through the night sea was to maintain and increase his light against the deep instinctual forces threatening to extinguish his consciousness. (Ironically, Jung found this masculine image in the unconscious material of a woman on the brink of a psychosis.)
That his hero was, like Oedipus, inflated, with a dangerous masculine arrogance in the face of the dark and lunar feminine, was anything but apparent to the thirty-sixyear-old Jung who had dared to challenge Freud with his own more optimistic view of the evolutionary possibilities of ego-consciousness.
Freud’s rejection of these ideas (and of the self-important way in which
Jung chose to present them to the psychoanalytic world) and the concurrent
uncertainty of a marital crisis brought Jung out of his youthful identification with the archetype of the heroic deliverer.
The problem of his marriage was resolved (at cost to all concerned) only after a difficult decision had been reached to submit concretely and literally to the power of the feminine by accepting an open liaison with Toni Wolff.
Jung’s involvement with his former patient, now his colleague, occurred with the full knowledge of his wife, whom he continued to love and honor.
This still-controversial solution was never touted by the mature Jung as an example to others; rather it represented the best he could do against, and finally with, the power of the anima archetype, which he discovered by having to live it out.
Toni Wolff helped Jung to see theoretically as well as personally that in the deep psyche the hero delivers himself from the mother archetype (and from the infantile unconsciousness that the hero’s bondage to her authority represents for the conscious personality) only to encounter the demands of the anima.
Like all mythic images, the anima is a root metaphor for an unconscious style of thought and behavior that underlies conscious choices.
This archetype, usually symbolized by a woman closer in age to the man than his mother, but not invariably depicted as one figure, or even always as a woman, will become in her many guises his lifelong partner in the struggle for perspective
an indispensable source of the psychological complexities and ethical
quandaries that will shape his consciousness and in no small measure his fate.
The anima was Jung’s central discovery in the field of masculine
psychology, for, as he learned, only the anima can deliver a man into a
consciousness that is based, not on heroic self-mastery, but rather on empathic participation in life.
Understanding the part of the psyche Jung called the anima is less an insight of the mind than an initiatory experience, a mystery to be lived until its core of meaningfulness for personality development is at last
revealed.
Jung solved the psychologist’s problem of formulating what can
only be experienced by resurrecting the ancient lore of initiation, with its rich symbolic descriptions of processes through which individuals get from one stage in life to another along a journey that begins with separation from the mother.
The idea of initiation was the base from which Jung interpreted
dreams and the progress of the psychological pilgrims with whom he worked analytically.
It was this discovery of initiation—the painful submission of the hero to the
greater authority of archetypal forces with the power to mediate the
development of consciousness—that marks Jung’s mature understanding of masculine process and his radical departure from other depth psychologists of the modern era.
As Jung’s pupil (and analysand) Joseph Henderson was able to make clear in Thresholds of Initiation,2 the hero role is an archetypal stage in the unconscious, denoting the formation of a strong ego-identity, which
precedes the stage of the true initiate.
This is a subtle point that Erik Erikson and other Freudian authors who have followed Jung’s idea of “the stages of life” with their own models of ego development throughout the life-cycle seem to have missed.
For Jung, as for no other psychological writer, the essence of genuine psychological development involves a giving up of the hero. When heroic consciousness dominates, one thinks one knows better than the unconscious who one is and feels one should therefore be in control
of one’s life.
The hero is the mythologem of ego psychology and of the countless self-help books that keep appearing in this age of those who would “develop” the unconscious.
Obviously, the hero stage is a step forward for people at risk of drowning in
the unconscious. The appearance of a hero in the unconscious of a young man who is not grounded enough to master such real-life heroic tasks as the completion of a college education or the overcoming of an addiction is a
momentous event.
Too often the archetypal basis of consciousness in youth is an unreal fantasy of greatness supplied by the puer aeternus, the god whose
name means eternal boy. The shadow side of this archetype is the trickster,
who seems to exist only to test psychosocial limits. These precursors of the
hero archetype, as Henderson demonstrates in his book, are hard to disidentify with, and for many men in our culture their mastery is the work of the first half of life. It usually requires educational experiences of the right kind to achieve the firm ego-grounding that the stage of the hero represents.
Among these educational experiences are the early love relationships
described by Jung in “The Love Problem of a Student.”
Jung was ahead of his time in realizing that homosexual relationships, if the erotic expression is bounded by the faithfulness of the more mature person, can sometimes offer the right initiatory grounding at the preheroic stage. It is not clear, however, from his published writings whether he could see any value for individuation in love relationships between members of the same sex beyond this stage. A concretism in his understanding of the importance of the anima took hold here.
Jung knew that the full psychological potential of being a man is
possible only when the hero finally bows his own head and submits to
initiation, not at the hands of an outer man or woman but according to the
dictates of his own anima.
Then a certain development of his eros from within (and not infrequently of his feeling for his place in the lives of others) will take place; so that he is at once better related to himself and to his fellow human beings. In Jung’s own life, the development of the anima was intimately associated with events in his own heterosexual life.
I have found, in the experience of my own practice, that while the stage of anima acceptance in men is almost always accompanied by an improvement in the quality and depth of relationships with women, the more or less permanent sexual orientation that appears at this time may be either homosexual or heterosexual, determined solely by the essential nature of the individual as mediated by the anima.
Acceptance of the anima is almost invariably difficult. The anima, as Jung
points out, is the root word in animosity, and the anima (as moods) can be
another name for resentment. Initiation by the anima means submitting to
painful experiences of betrayal and disappointment when the projections she creates with her capacity for illusion fail to produce happiness.
Accepting the pain of one’s affects toward those experiences is a critical part of integrating the anima.
Jung sometimes called the anima the “archetype of life,” and he saw the individual as forced to suffer at the hands of life until life’s power is
sufficiently impressed upon him: the resultant conscious attitude, truly “a
pearl of great price,” is a sense of soul, which is also a respect for life’s
autonomy, the sort of wisdom personified by the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, whose name means “the old one.”
The wise old man stands behind the anima as an archetype of meaning, the masculine purpose and masculine result of this initiatory acceptance and integration of the feminine. Many contemporary analysts have questioned whether the anima may not also be an archetype that
can mediate a woman’s experience of herself. If so, the deep inner self
revealed will be a feminine figure of wisdom, a personification of the
goddess.
Jung was not ready to emphasize the anima for women. He felt that the
women of his time had a special duty to realize their unconscious masculinity, which in his day was particularly in danger of being projected onto men. He understood the animus, only in some ways an analogue of the anima, to have its own particular character, as an archetype neither of life nor of meaning, but of spirit.
Spirit was for Jung characteristically masculine, in contrast to soul, which he conceived as feminine. Even when he spoke of the animus as the women’s soul-image, he meant that a woman has an unconscious
masculine spirit where a man has an unconscious soul.
Jung recognized that spirit and soul can figure in the development of both men and women, and he did speak of their syzygy or conjunction in the psyche of individuals.
Nevertheless, with his women patients he concentrated on the recognition and integration of the spirit as their urgent psychological work.
This therapeutic focus on the animus comes through clearly in what he says in the second selection from Two Essays on Analytical Psychology about the woman with a father transference to him and in his comments to his analysand and colleague Esther Harding as recorded in her personal notebook. When the spirit was an unconscious animus, projected onto men, he had to be freed up enough to function as an inner figure with whose help the woman could approach her own nature.
Only then could she discriminate accurately who she was.
A
man, by contrast, needed to learn with the help of a freed-up anima to
relate to his nature with the right emotional attitude.
Jung observed that among the men he saw, eros—defined as relatedness—tended to be more unconscious than in women. Logos—defined as discrimination—tended to be more unconscious in women. At times he went so far as to assert that eros was the woman’s principle and logos the man’s, which often sounds in our present cultural context like a sexist rigidity.
Yet the unconscious vulnerability to eros in men and to logos in women seems to me to be a human fact, illustrating the everyday usefulness of Jung’s gender psychology when applied to the area of his real expertise, the unconscious behavior of men and women.
My own practice has taught me that, although neither women nor
men have a monopoly on good judgment or good capacity for relationship,
the unconscious of a woman reacts far more violently to opinions that
threaten her world-concept while the unconscious of a man is more easily
upset by feelings that violate his emotional equilibrium.
Women seem, that is, to have a greater tolerance than men for feelings that challenge their prevailing patterns of relationship and men for ideas they disagree with. This notable difference seems to imply a more differentiated eros in women and a more differentiated logos in men.
On the other hand, Jung’s idea of logos as the masculine principle and eros
as the feminine principle has led to premature dogmatizing by some Jungian analysts as to the essential psychological character of men and of women and a storm of protest by other analysts, who have argued rightly for the complexity of individual experience.
It is important to recognize that logos and eros are styles of consciousness available ultimately to both sexes, and that they represented opposites within Jung’s own masculine nature. For (as the excerpts from the Dream Analysis seminar and Esther Harding’s notebooks illustrate) it is precisely a masculine eros that anima development brings to consciousness in a man, and a feminine logos that animus development brings to a woman.
In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung devoted far more space to his descriptions of the character of Sol and of Luna as personifications of these paradoxical opposites than to his earlier intuitive concepts of logos and eros. It is to this late masterwork that the reader should turn for a sense of Jung’s mature thinking as to the nature of the psychological
difference between men and women and between the masculine and feminine in both natures.
A careful reading of that late work will enable one to dispense with the notion that Jung thought of the feminine as simply relatedness and the masculine as simply conscious discrimination. Indeed, there is a certain
unrelatedness to the deep feminine spirit symbolized by Luna, with her dark cold moistness, that gives her a reflective depth; and there is an indiscriminate relatedness to Sol, with his bright warmth, that gives him a penetrating force.
In reading Jung’s alchemical writings, one discovers the tradition into
which his self-contradictory style of psychological explication falls.
As others have observed, his is a hermetic style, one that conceals as much as it reveals, and expresses home truths in alchemical parables that seem to cancel out one another. Such a style is loyal only to nature. Jung’s work on Western alchemy began to appear in print after he was sixty years old, and it is deeply grounded in the experience of masculine individuation after mid-life.
The process of incubating wisdom that the alchemical essays reflect and obliquely describe is one whose specific character and contents will be known only to those who are privy to the reflections of psychologically maturing individuals.
As he was putting his alchemical opus together, Jung gradually understood
that even the masculine and feminine principles are not given; they are built up through experience, although the conditions for their creation follow archetypal laws
. I have often observed that the building up of the feminine principle in a man during mid-life obeys the following alchemical recipe, one
that is only implied in Jung but is mentioned by other writers: salt conjoined with mercury produces Luna. Luna, the developed feminine principle, corresponds to an anima who is no longer naive; who has suffered enough (salt: bitterness, tears) and is capable of tricky ruthlessness in her own defense (mercury: trickster, the capacity to turn the tables on an aggressor).
Men have the special task in mid-life of making sure that Luna is well-enough integrated. (The brief excerpt from the difficult essay on salt speaks
specifically to this inner work.)
Luna is an initiated unconscious that is ready to interact with the initiated heroic consciousness that is Sol to produce an integration of personality.
This is Jung’s ultimate image of personality development, and it is obtained through his own masculine perspective.
“The Spirit Mercurius,” source of the final selections in this volume,
deserves special mention because it gives us our best glimpse into the
archetypal ground of that perspective.
This is probably the most personal of Jung’s great essays on archetypes in that it is a description of Jung’s own characteristic spirit and of the consciousness that governed the writing of his psychology.
That Mercurius was for Jung the archetype of the unconscious tells us finally how masculine Jung’s approach to the unconscious was.
Despite his androgyny, Mercurius is a quintessentially masculine god,
although not every masculinity will be grounded in this mythologem. So, not even this penetrating essay can be the last word on the masculine.
Mercurius is, however, the archetype through which Jung came to understand his own psychological style. This piece stands among Jung’s other writings like an ancient herm, an erect phallus placed by the Greeks at the gateways to new territories in honor of Hermes, who became the Roman Mercurius and the patron saint of alchemy.
The phallic energy that was underground in Jung’s childhood dream finds its way fully into the open with this essay. In the attributes of this god one can find Jung’s own seminal ideas—the unconscious as an autonomous, creative being continually in motion between sets of opposites; the shifting shapes of the unconscious spirit as signals of its arrival at the gates of different gods; the trend of the unconscious toward stable wholeness within a contained intrapsychic life.
Mercurius was the patron of Jung’s alchemical effort at self-unification, Jung’s ultimate father-figure and masculine way through the psyche. His is the restless masculine spirit that informs the contents of this volume.
The editor would like to acknowledge the help of Cathie Brettschneider,
Adam Frey, Joseph Henderson, Loren Hoekzema, John Levy, Daniel C. Noel,
William McGuire, and Mary Webster. ~John Beebe, Jung Aspects of the Masculine, Introduction, Page 7-15
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/
Carl Jung Depth Psychology on Instagram
masculine masculine masculine masculine masculine
