When spoken of psychologically, “the feminine” is often correlated with “care.” Historically, people have tended to think of women as inherently more caring and more likely to parent with tenderness so then equate this with the feminine aspect of self. The feminine is also often viewed as “the receptive.” This correlation is partially related to the tone of the yin as seen in the I Ching (Hexagram 2, for instance, with all yin lines) and Taoism. Receptivity comes up as a definition, finally, because of cis female genitalia and its role in heterosexual sex—never mind that such an interpretation is largely predicated on a male gaze of good sex or the very different function that the vagina serves in childbirth.
In any case, these are not my primary associations with the feminine.
I don’t mean to reject them completely, but they just don’t check out with my embodied self. They don’t strike me as quite right or entirely true. (Partially, I think, because both “care” and “receptivity” as related to the feminine feel most closely connected to an Anglo view of girls and women.)
This is all exceedingly complex, messy, and beautiful stuff to explore because we—I, anyway—want to walk a line between parroting verbatim what we’ve heard from other scholars and throwing the whole thing out completely.
Some of Jung’s earliest thinking on the feminine and masculine was connected with his exploration of typology. He viewed the feminine as Eros but then Eros became both the Anima and the Feeling Function. The feminine and feeling became deeply correlated to the point that they sometimes remain inseparable. The Thinking Function, meanwhile, has been correlated with the masculine.
There’s so much in all of this to parse out and digest. To be sure, these are the kinds of things we’ll be exploring in my upcoming seminar starting September 8th! But I want to tell you a bit here about where I land with all of these ideas and how my thinking rests on the foundations of classical Jungian psychology.
I view the feminine aspect of self primarily as relatedness in regards to friendship, connection, and intimacy, but also in regards to the Piscean waters of the Everything from whence we came. Without an aspect to balance it out, the feminine can be devouring, suffocating, and surprisingly lonely. Too much relatedness without separateness ends up not being relatedness at all because there is no self and no other, no potential for connection between two. There’s just the one.
(How is all this connected to what I wrote about the Mother and the Son recently, or what I wrote about the individual and community last week?)
The masculine, in this binary, serves the purpose of separateness. The goal is one of becoming and, as such, the masculine seeks difference and differentiation.
But this is the key point as regards the two poles: individuation is only achieved through a developmental and then a progressive, life-long dance between separateness and relatedness.
Jung’s concept of “individuation” is not about individualism. Individuation is about self-becoming on the way towards a deeper witnessing of and relatedness to other(s).
“I can see you because I exist as me.”
&
“I am outside of the whole in order that I can look back on the whole and bear witness to its beauty.”
What heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has forgotten, egregiously, is the whole bit about seeking relatedness after the attempt to separate. This means a lot of people (and the planet as a whole) is stuck in either separateness or (even worse) trying unsuccessfully to separate. The result is a lot of attempts to become without remembering the entire point of becoming.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies