September 29, 2022

After I wrote about biological age in Jung’s concept of individuation three weeks ago, I told you that I’d write “next week” about sex & gender in individuation. I’m late, but it could not feel more relevant to me today.

Last night, I joined an incredibly inspiring fundraising call for a winnable race in Montana (donate!) that would help to protect abortion access for Montana and the entire region. Surrounded by some very red states, Montana’s right to abortion is protected in the state constitution. But because Montana has taken a dark swing from solidly purple for decades to MAGA red recently, those abortion protections are in serious danger. (Donate! This is not a sexy national race, but it’s winnable and will save lives.)

Meanwhile, in entirely related news from Iran on the results of misogynistic fundamentalism: 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was murdered by the nation’s morality police because she was not wearing her hijab the way they wanted her to wear her hijab. In response, women-led protests have taken over the streets, day and night. Women are removing their legally required hijabs and facing harassment, imprisonment, physical attacks, and the threat of death as a result. They’re also changing the direction of their country and inspiring people all over the world. (I’m grateful to say that one of our Iranian community members is writing a piece about this for the newsletter that we’ll share soon.)

There are two core ways in which to understand and unpack these events in the States and Iran through Jung’s psychology.

First: without women’s rights and trans rights and LGBTQ rights, there is no right to individuation. As long as gender, gender expression, and reproductive rights are being policed, the fundamental right to live one’s own life is also being policed.

The field of psychoanalysis is familiar with what happens when a person’s parents seek to repress their self-expression and choices about their future. When it is an entire nation and the government that seeks to control choices on one’s basic self-expression or life choices, there is nowhere to go. When it is the state acting out this kind of repression, we have a mass-minded cult masquerading as religion or culture. Mass-mindedness is the opposite of a society filled with individuated people. Cults seek unconscious participation in a pre-defined direction, not evolution, transformation, or individuation.

The second way we can begin to unpack these events is this: as long as the fear of the feminine is legitimized as an “out there” issue and not owned as a projection from one’s own neglected and miserable feminine, the issue will never, ever go away.

This second point may be the most fundamental issue in all of Jung’s psychology.

When Jung encountered the disheveled, discarded, lonely, and terrifying (to him) image of Salome in his own unconscious, he initially reacted in horror: “I dread you, you beast.” But as we see throughout The Red Book, the inner work that Jung then pursued was, at its root, about acknowledging Salome and her female counterpoints as fully human. The inner images transformed as a result.

Jung’s inner work with the feminine was a linchpin—arguably the linchpin—of his journey of individuation, a lesson he went on to speak about far and wide.

I’ll quote here from the introduction to Erich Neumann’s book, The Fear of the Feminine, heavily influenced by Jung’s work:

“Understanding the Feminine is an urgent necessity not only in order to understand the single individual but also to heal the collective…if the patriarchally masculine world that has fallen ill, thanks to its extreme one-sidedness, is again to return to health.”

There was no question in Jung’s psychology that society was ill. He observed the violent, patriarchal mass-mindedness of WWI and WWII sweep across Europe. And there is no question that we are up against similar threats today.

Until these fundamentalist cults recognize that what they actually fear is the misery of their own souls, we’re stuck trying to survive their projections: their obsessions over women’s clothing, trans children playing soccer, and fetuses, with no regard for the human in which those fetuses reside.

In talking about sex & gender in Jung’s concept of individuation, there’s really another whole area left to explore. I’ll try to tackle that soon in an upcoming newsletter.

Individuation is also the topic of my upcoming seminar—which starts Friday! Together, we’ll explore our own journeys in family and society to individuate. I’ve drawn most of the assigned reading this time around from fairy tales to allow us to sink into the timeless pursuit of ourselves through symbolic thinking, storytelling, and self-exploration. I’d love to see you in there.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies