September 1, 2023
Around this time next week, I’ll I’ll kick off an eight-week seminar off an eight-week seminar on Jung’s thinking around the Anima + Animus, and the feminine + masculine.
In the midst of what can easily become abstractions, we’ll explore how these ideas relate to us personally: to our memories of our first loves and our parents, to people that arise in our dreams, and to our perceptions of ourselves within a society that has very specific ideas about how we should be.
The authors we’ll read include Carl Jung (of course), Claire Douglas, Ann Ulanov, John Beebe, bell hooks, Angela Saini, Carol Gilligan, Frederick Joseph, and Sabi Tauber. And there are many other authors whose work I’ll add in throughout the seminar as juicy, delicious, or controversial optional-reads.
While putting together the weekly readings, I discovered anew how much extraordinary writing there is on these topics and also how much writing is frozen and calcified in an entirely different world. I’ve done my best to parse through things well before we gather, but there is oh-so-much to continue to parse through. Contradictions abound! So many updates are needed! Yet so much of the core of this material radiates with brilliance. I really can’t wait to get started.
Today, I’ll leave you with one beautiful nugget from Erich Neumann’s profound text, “The Fear of the Feminine.” I know I’ve shared quotes from this work in the past, but these lines (obtuse as they are) strike me every time.
“The one-sided patriarchally masculine value-canon of [Western] consciousness… has contributed in a major way to the crisis of our time. Hence understanding the Feminine is an urgent necessity not only in order to understand the single individual but also to heal the collective.”
-Erich Neumann
As much as updates are required (and they are) this field has been talking about the negative effects of patriarchy on all of us, far ahead of its time. (How anyone has found an alt-right agenda in the Jungian language is beyond me.)
And so, we’ll be talking about that too. Starting next week!
What does integration of the masculine and feminine look like for you?
XO, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies