July 13, 2023
I very rarely post anything of note on Instagram but last November, in response to the mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado, I posted this quote from Jung’s Red Book as a graphic:
“I have thrown down my sword and dressed in women’s clothing.”
It’s a striking line and provocative in an era of growing fear of anyone who does not fit into a very narrow gender framework—to be clear, that’s most of us.
Below the quote, I wrote the following:
Jungian psychology has been weirdly co-opted by the alt-right in the last decade to support a reductive hetero-masculine storyline. It’s bizarre, because Jung’s work is literally about the integration of the feminine and the search for the sacred inner marriage in a patriarchal culture. Jung’s Red Book, written around the time of WWI, is about the reclamation of Jung’s soul, a Kali-like figure of whom he is initially terrified and calls “Salome.”
Jung worked hard to heal his own feminine and to stay in relationship with her, knowing that he was a product of a lopsided and sick culture, and that the absence of the feminine in Christianity (and all religion) was causing violence worldwide.
Drag queens are not the problem. Trans people are not the problem. Women seeking abortions are not the problem. The problem is the refusal of a hyper-masculine culture to ask itself deeply “what’s missing? Why am I depressed, lonely, scared, and constantly feeling the need to defend and protect myself?”
As if on cue, a man who is a total stranger to me commented: “Quote taken out of context but you're partly correct.”
Of course, all quotes shared in a graphic on social media are taken out of context. Our exchange was very brief, but he asserted his intellectual superiority with a great deal of security. In the final comment, to which I did not respond, he wrote: “I think I am quite likely more educated in relation to Jung.”
We know nothing about each other, but he’s pretty sure he knows more about Jung than me.
I’ve hesitated for years to challenge this kind of thing directly and to just do my own work, but experiences like this are piling up. (This was not the first or most recent encounter of its kind, nor the most significant.)
There are certain public intellectuals (some dead, some alive) who purport to provide heterosexual men with valuable psychological orientation based on Jung’s work (much needed!). The result for many, however, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, there is an ever-growing population that believes they have a deep understanding of Jung’s work because of the post-Jung, hyper-masculine interpretations that they’ve been fed. There’s a repetition of things like “the four masculine archetypes” (not a real thing) or the one-to-one association of the feminine with chaos and chaos with women and the need, therefore, for men to control the feminine within and without.
Barf.
All of this ultimately fuels hatred of the feminine and anything other than the “archetypal masculine” (again, not a thing) rather than support in the psychological integration of the opposites.
There is no “archetypal feminine” or “archetypal masculine,” which is why you need to really get deep into the original ideas to make sense of them and how they apply to your own life. Any so-called archetypes being used in this way are just stereotypes by another name.
Which is why this stuff gets complicated! So I hope you’ll join me in my upcoming seminar to study more. I won’t hand over a quick and easy cheat sheet on the “masculine” or the “feminine” because there isn’t one! But we will explore, discuss, study, and hopefully make sense of what it means to integrate the opposites and find wholeness in our lives—and by extension, in the world.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies