March 19, 2021

There’s a provocative and potentially disastrous line in Jung’s Red Book that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week.

“Become a woman yourself, and you will be saved from slavery to women. …Through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny,” Jung wrote.

There’s a fire and brimstone quality to those lines when taken out of context and I think there’s meant to be. It’s the conservative, misogynistic Christian teachings (not Gnostic & not all of Christianity) flipped on their head. Women are the problem, for you, men, Jung is saying, because every woman you’re attracted to is your own anima staring back at you. Integrate her. Become her.

Women are “tyrannical,” in your experience, because when you are talking with women you are engaging with your own unconscious anima and cannot escape her. You feel chained. But the embodied woman in front of you is not your problem.

You may know where I’m going with this.

I’ve been thinking about this section of the Red Book over and over since learning of the supposed “reason” for the horrific murders of six Asian women and two others in Atlanta this week. The murderer is a 21-year-old devout Christian conservative white man who apparently targeted the massage parlors where he was a frequent customer because, essentially, he wanted them but he didn’t want to want them.

“It’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” the police captain explained. So rather than eliminate the temptation internally, he tried to eliminate the temptation externally. But, he’ll find, even murder won’t work. The dead will be dead, and their families will grieve for the rest of their lives and more. But his anima is inescapable. He’ll now be sitting in a jail cell for the rest of his life with her instead. They’ll both be miserable.

I have too much to say on this and too much grief and rage around it to properly do so here. These murders are horrifying and senseless, but they are nothing new. Entire countries across most of the planet control women’s lives and bodies because of the same inability to identify the source of the issue.

Hint: It’s the projector, not the screen.

Asian women, in particular, have been the screen for Western men’s unintegrated needs and desires for the feminine and “the Other” for hundreds of years.

Author Nancy Wang Yuen’s recent article on these shootings offers critical historical context. For instance:

In 1875, Chinese women were targeted by a federal immigration law called the Page Act. This law effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States based on a morals clause that considered all of them prostitutes at the time. There were apparently specific racist and sexist concerns that Chinese "prostitutes" would bring in "especially virulent strains of venereal diseases ... and entice young white boys to a life of sin." Sound familiar?

The particulars of racialized misogyny are critical to understand. Black women, for instance, experience a different version, leading to the adultification of Black girls—they’re consistently perceived as older than they are—and the widespread mistreatment of Black women in medicine because of the belief that they don’t feel pain. Scholar Moya Bailey named this intersection of race and gender misogynoir.

Suffice it to say, these issues are broad and overwhelming. They are also the foundation for the “Socially Relevant Psychology” of The Salome Institute. Salome, in Jung’s Red Book, was his Jewish anima figure whom he associated with Kali and initially viewed as a lascivious temptress. But he had work to do.

You can read more on this in an essay I wrote a few years back called “Salome, the Antidote.”

We’ll be talking about it plenty this coming Sunday in the Black Books seminar too. And we might even speak to it tonight, with David Naimon, on the incredibly transformative understanding of gender and androgyny in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. Thank the gods for visionary work.

For now, in solidarity with the Asian-American community, with sex workers, and with women worldwide, love to all of you. And happy Equinox too.

xo,

Satya

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