The Masculine & The Feminine in Jung’s Psychology: A Modern Update
with Satya Doyle Byock
author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood
Recording of Live Session Available
Salon is free to register and hosted online — Register to receive Login information.
“What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you possess it from the beginning.”
Join Salome Institute Director, Satya Doyle Byock, in this donation-based salon to explore Jung’s radical ideas about sex and gender, and how to update those complex ideas for today’s transformed gender landscape.
Core to Jung’s psychology is his discovery that men have feminine souls, a contra-sexual inner organ that he termed “the anima.” In Jungian psychology, the individual retraction of projection of the anima onto women in media or in one’s life is core to healing and maturation. The goal is wholeness and psychological androgyny—an integration of the opposites.
Jung postulated too that women have masculine souls, “the animus,” and that the same structure applied: the masculine soul needed to be integrated for women in order for them to experience wholeness and mature. However, Jung struggled more with the definition of the animus, and it never elevated to the same place of importance and clarity in his psychology.
“Humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman as a masculine soul. The most manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous. ”
Today, as feminism, gay rights, and trans rights, have transformed the gender landscape from the bottom-up, many wrestle with how to understand this rather strict binary in which men have feminine souls, and women have masculine souls.
What if one doesn’t identify as male or female? What of transgender children? Or of women who were never mothers and never felt “feminine”?
Does anything change? Does everything change?
In this 90min salon, Satya will cover a wide range of these ideas within classical Jungian psychology and explore how to update them for today’s world, an Aquarian Age, in which gender expression looks quite different than 100 years ago. There will then be ample space for discussion and Q&A.
About Satya Doyle Byock, MA, LPC
Satya Doyle Byock is the founder and Director of The Salome Institute. She is a psychotherapist in private practice and the owner of Quarterlife, a depth psychological resource for people in the first half of adulthood. Satya was previously on staff at the Philemon Foundation, which publishes Jung's unpublished archives, including The Red Book and The Black Books. She has twenty years of practice with The I Ching and dreamwork. Her writing has been published in The Utne Reader, goop, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and the Jungian journal Psychological Perspectives. Her article “Salome: the Antidote” was awarded the Cambridge Jung Circle Essay prize in 2019. She has been interviewed for her work on the goop podcast and elsewhere, and has “mini-therapy” recordings available through the Simple Habit meditation app. Her book on Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood is forthcoming from Random House.
Register:
Online Attendance: Link for Zoom session will be sent to all registrants via email.
Recordings: Recording of the event will be shared online.
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This is a recording of the salon that was held on February 21, 2021
In this Salon Satya Doyle Byock founder and director of The Salome Institute tackles the goal of androgyny in Jungian Psychology and discusses how to define the masculine and the feminine, the unification of opposites, and the pursuit of wholeness in our own psychology.
Your donations support the hosting of this kind of spur-of-the-moment, relevant conversation for the future. At The Salome Institute, we hope to remain agile in our programming so that when collective events challenge all of our understanding, we can process them together as soon as possible. Our goal is to provide an understanding of current events with the unconscious in mind.