Irene Pickard's life spanned the 91 years from 1891 to 1982, a period of great change in the lives of women, perhaps the greatest period of change for women there has been. She journeyed from the certainties of the Victorian age, where for many people “God's in his heaven – all's right with the world”1 to an age of radical and iconoclastic doubt; from an age where the role of women was very much proscribed and known, to one of far greater latitude that would encourage examination of what were the fundamental drives shaping a woman's life.
Her family background included a Baptist Minister, a Wesleyan Minister, and regular chapel attendance. She had even been inspired by a seaside preacher, to envision herself being a missionary somewhere in the Empire, taking the bible to the heathens to save their souls. It proved not to be the souls of heathens on which she would work, but her own. This was an inward journey which would mine the depth of her own being to reveal the stark bones of who she was, a journey on which she would encounter a far different vision of God than the one she had been provided with – a vision that questioned the very existence of any such being.
Irene trained in secretarial skills, so that by the age of twenty, she was taking in work to type up at home. One of the places she began doing this for was Woodbrooke College, especially work for its Director of Studies, Doctor J. Rendel Harris, a noted scholar and discoverer of many ancient manuscripts to do with the early years of Christianity. Rendel Harris was about forty years her senior and had a distinguished academic career behind him, including time at Cambridge and in America.
In 1914 Rendel Harris asked Irene to become part of his household as his full time secretary, a post she held until her marriage in 1923. A deep relationship developed between the two of them. Irene says of her employer:
The Doctor's academic many-sidedness is not half the tale. A wonderful personality, full of humour, delighting in the society of all sorts of persons, a saint and mystic, utterly approachable. A man of immovable principles and strong prejudices. Delighting in fighting for great moral causes, yet charitable to opponents, and a personal friend of some whose principles he detested. Filled to old age with the joy of living … To talk with him was stimulating, to enjoy his friendship was an education, to be his pupil for years was a privilege for which one can never be thankful enough.2
Ever the good secretary, she kept all of the letters he wrote her, starting from the very first contact they had in 1911 onwards. They must have had great significance for her, as she did not do the same for any the other correspondence she had. She preserved them through the almost sixty years that followed her leaving his employment, through moves between Britain, Switzerland and America, through two World Wars, and many moves of home. The letters now reside in the archives at Woodbrooke. What they reveal is a very affectionate and close relationship.
In 1926 Irene and her husband, Bertram Pickard, were given the opportunity to live and work in Geneva. He as Secretary to the new Quaker Centre and as a reporter for the Starmer group of newspapers, reporting on the proceedings of the League of Nations, and she as warden of the proposed Quaker Hostel for students studying International Relations at the University of Geneva - the first course of its kind in the world. They brought their two year old daughter with them, who was soon joined by another girl born later that year, and a third sister born in 1929.
Bertram soon became deeply engaged in peace work, becoming the secretary of FIIG3, the organisation that brought together all the NGOs in Geneva, of ICG4, the organisation that brought together all the peace focussed organisations, and of the grouping of the churches concerned with peace, as well as his work as Secretary of the Quaker Centre.
Irene became involved with the life of the growing Quaker Meeting in the city. Discussion groups were run each winter, one of which was on the theme of mysticism. It just happened that a members of the Meeting – Elined Kotschnig – was training to become an psychoanalyst under the guidance of one of Carl Jung's protégés, Tina Keller-Jenner. Elined introduced the notion that Jung's ideas were highly compatible with mysticism, especially the form practised by Quakers through the discipline of silent waiting. Quakers, she felt, were listening to their unconscious, listening for inspiration to arise that would steer them into words and action.
Elined persuaded her mentor to address one of the study sessions of the Quaker Meeting, which Tina did, introducing them to the Jungian notion of the importance of symbols that arise from the unconscious. She also arranged for members of the Meeting to travel to Geneva to meet Carl Jung in person, so that he could answer their questions. According to Irene:
A series on Mysticism, in the course of which Elined Kotschnig gave a paper on "Jung as a modern Mystic" laid hold of the group, and for three years in the 1930s some twenty people formed the most intensive and far-reaching study group I have known. At one point three car loads of Friends went to Zurich for a night to meet Dr. Carl Jung . The talk with him in his garden by the lake was a memorable occasion. We felt that Quaker experience was strengthened and enlightened by this exercise in Jungian psychology. The Martins, the Stacks, the Kotschnigs the Gerigs and others were partners in the group, also the Friises and these later made a living contribution to Quaker thought and practice. P.W. Martin's book "Experiment in Depth" published in England after the war crystallises his insights arising from this beginning.5
In 1936 Elined left for the United States, bringing to an end that most intensive and far-reaching study group, but leaving a deeply changed Irene. The joint Jungian analysis of their dreams and other content emerging from their unconscious, and study of Jung's still emerging ideas – Emma Jung had visited and addressed the study group, and when they could members had travelled to Zürich to attend the Psychology Club – had altered Irene's understanding of herself and her practice of Quakerism. We find Irene annotating a letter from Elined, received soon after Elined's departure to America, with the comment:
“On George Eliot & in especial her book Daniel Deronda. An excellent example of an animus figure.”
The concept of the animus was one of Jung's key ideas; in his terms it was the male archetype which is lodged deep in the unconscious of women, and is very significant in influencing behaviour. It could be thought of as a blue-print, or pattern, or template of what maleness is, and as such contained the power of massive sexual attraction for any heterosexual female, but also shaped her expectations as to how a man should act. The animus is potential father, lover, husband, and son all in one. The nearer any living man approaches the particular version in a woman's unconscious – the closer he fits the template – the more irresistibly attractive he will seem. For Jung, the root of much of the dissatisfaction with their husbands that he heard expressed by his female patients was due to the gap between how the men were and the images of the animus that the women possessed. Basically, the unfortunate man was failing to live up to expectations formed in her deep mind by her animus: he was not behaving as her animus would.
Irene had begun her psychological examination of what it was to be a woman, an examination that would lead her some years later to write a paper for the Friends Home Service Committee entitled The Position of Women in the Society of Friends.
In the paper Irene records that the Quakers have always given full recognition to the contribution of women, and have not limited the roles they can take, at least in part because of George Fox's perception of men and women being help-mates, “as they were before the Fall”6:
The outcome of which has been that women in the Society of Friends have been accustomed to share in every aspect of the conduct of the Society, and to fulfil any office for which their gifts and capacities fitted them.7
After a detailed survey of the contribution to the work of the Society that women have made, she turns to the current situation in the late 1940s, and, reflecting on the recent events in the world, comments:
It would be interesting to analyse the effects on the development of the Society of this co-partnership in the light of modern psychology, and our increasing consciousness that the modern world in general is desperately in need of qualities in which women should be specialised, i.e. the upbuilding and drawing together in the realm of relationships between peoples, the fostering of the values of life which in society which makes for sound and healthy life, rather than the power-complexes and ruthless ideological doctrines which are destroying civilisation. In the wider world we need the release of the feminine principle through – in Fox's phrase – “giving women their place, their right place, and stirring them up to take it.”8
Irene and Bertram left Geneva during the Fall of France in 1940, escaping on the last boat to leave Western France, under immense threat and even under bombardment. They had spent most of the war years in America, where Bertram eventually became part of the United Nations Secretariat, returning to Geneva in 1946 so that Bertram could take up a post there.
Once back in Geneva Irene renewed her interest in studying Jung's ideas. She formed a Friday Club for that purpose. She introduced the group to a number of Jungian works, including those by some of his female acolytes.
Amongst the earliest of Jung's protégés to take his methods to the English speaking world was Esther Harding, a Shropshire born doctor who had attended Jung's first seminar given in England. She and two other female doctors – Dr Constance Long and Dr Eleanor Bertine – had followed Jung back to Zurich and had studied under him. Maggy Anthony9 tells us that Jung suggested that Esther and Eleanor should work together as they would be able to support each other, which they did, setting up practice in New York, and living together for may years. In 1936 they, along with Kristine Mann, started the Analytical Psychology Club in New York, much in imitation of Jung's own club in Zurich. When those among Quaker circles in America who were interested in Jung began to come together to form the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology in the late 1930s and early 1940s, many of them were also members of the New York Club, or were aware of its proceedings. Among Irene's collection of Jungian related books are two collections of the proceedings of the New York Club: the one for Spring 1942 and the one for Spring 1946; interestingly, almost marking the starting and ending of her time in America.
Dr Harding is perhaps best known for two influential books written in the 1930s, both of which Irene read, perhaps avidly, as Dr Harding wrote specifically about the female psyche. In The Way of All Women, she advanced the notion of the importance of the Ghostly Lover to the development of a woman's understanding of herself. He is that projection on to a man of her deepest desires to be abducted and lifted out of her ordinary plane of life into something higher and more exulted, or as Harding puts it:
The Ghostly Lover, by the promise of untold bliss, entices the woman to seek his arms in the air.10
A woman is prone to project the Ghostly Lover on to some Prince Charming that will awake her to realms of greater bliss through his kiss. Her erotic love for him is the key that will open the doors of the kingdom for her; so much the better if he is nearly unobtainable; if her love for him is intensely felt, but never fully consummated. The more he is elevated relative to her – be it intellectually, creatively, politically, materially or whatever – the more the pull of the Ghostly Lover. It does not matter too much which gifts it is he has, only that they should be those she admires most. Whichever, he holds the keys: he will give her entrée into the kingdom. Through loving him she wins far more than is her rightful lot. It is half emotional “crush”, half erotic desire, with the spice of the unobtainably exotic mixed in.
Irene must have reflected on her relationship with Rendel Harris in the light of this, especially as Harding goes on to say how such intense love can open the deeper doors in the personality, particularly those that give access to spiritual matters, or to the discovery of the intellect. We know that Irene regarded herself as Rendel Harris's pupil, that she thought of him as her informal tutor, that he had opened up that world of learning for her. As Harding says:
Unconscious contents have a great tendency to be projected to the outer world, where they fasten on to any convenient carrier which presents a suitable hook. When this occurs the mantle of Prince Charming fall upon some man in the outer world and the woman falls violently under the spell of this current incarnation of the prince. The nature of the spell varies. She may project intellectual value and find a Great Teacher; she may project erotic value and find her Beau Ideal.11
There is something of the idealised about the Ghostly Lover which lends itself to opening the spiritual dimension, which is why it can be so powerful if the object of the love is just beyond reach; if the love cannot be erotically consummated. It may thus be the vehicle of discovery of spiritual longing: a love which is never going to be sullied by the raw earthiness of mating and conception.
The idea of the Ghostly, or Spiritual Lover, is not a new one. Religious mystics of all ages and creeds – the Sufis, the Shaktas, the Christian mystics – all have sought union with a Divine Lover. Rabia, the Islamic woman mystic, knew God as the Divine Lover; the Beloved of her Soul, as did St Bernard of Clairvaux, while many women saints of medieval Christianity tell us that their religious experience was of God as Lover. Even today when a nun takes the veil, she is dedicated to this Divine Lover. She wears the bridal veil and is given a ring, as the Bride of Christ.12
As Harding suggests, Eros is the mechanism of connection for a woman to the outer world, just as for a man it is Logos. In connecting, both need to discover what is sleeping within themselves, and do so through discovering the image within themselves which they project onto their objects of desire. For a man it is the anima – the female image of his erotic desire. For a woman it is her animus – the male image of her erotic desire. It is no accident that in mythology Diana is a huntress, but the Diana in real women hunts men, not animals. All women know this: she has grown to embody her anima. The predator in woman is her erotic drive. She seeks to control the world through love and attraction. Women know their anima directly by living it. That complex within men – the anima – is only recognised by projection on to some woman that he finds irresistible. He can unveil it if he reflects on what it is within him that so fuels his passionate attraction. His attempt to control the world is through Logos, through growing to be like his animus; it seeks to control the world through command and organisation, not through love and attraction. Coming to terms with that other dimension of emotional complexity – love and attraction – can only be achieved by beginning to recognise and give space to his own anima. Men naturally become softer and more attentive when in love, when under the spell of their own anima. As Harding explains in her Women's Mysteries Ancient and Modern:
For the anima is not a woman but a feminine nature-spirit, which reflects the characteristics of the demonic, nonhuman moon goddess, and gives man a direct experience of the nonhuman Eros in all its powers, both glorious and terrible. … The feminine principle, the moon goddess, act upon him directly from the unconscious, approaching him intimately, like a traitor from within. Small wonder if he dreads and distrusts it.13
As Harding explains, so much of the misunderstandings between men and women grow from this fundamental psychic difference:
This external conflict between men and women is, however, but a picture of a subjective conflict of even greater prevalence, which is pursued within each individual, although, perhaps, without his conscious awareness. For no individual is entirely male or entirely female. Each is made up of a composite of both elements, and these two constituents are not infrequently in constant conflict within the psyche. Until this personal aspect of the problem is resolved the individual man or woman will not be able to find a solution of the external difficulty in his relationships, for he will inevitably project the less conscious, less disciplined part of his own psyche upon his partner.14
His annoyance with her will be that she does not conform sufficiently to the pattern of what a woman should be that he holds within – his anima. Her annoyance with him is that he does not conform sufficiently to the pattern of what a man should be that she holds within – her animus – he falls short, has let her down, has failed her.
Developing her theme of revealing women's inner archetypes through exploring mythology – very much a happy hunting ground for Jungians – Harding turns to consideration of how religions are shaped by projections of these inner structures. Hieros gamos – holy prostitution – whereby virgins are given to the temple so that their first love is given for a holy cause – whether the love is symbolic or actual – is put forward as a recurrent theme to be found in many religions:
The love which is born from the initiation in the temple is maternal in character. The legend and myths are unanimous in stating that the goddess as virgin conceives by an immaculate conception. The outcome of the hieros gamos is that the virgin is with child. Her child is the hero, the saviour, the redeemer. He is the man-god, partaking of the nature of both man and god.15
The resultant child, whether real or symbolic, has the gift of opening the doors of resurrection, at least at a spiritual or emotional level, if not physically. It is the cycle of life where even after devastation, new life starts again; where hope springs from despair; rebuilding from destruction; recovery from disaster; renewed effort after failure:
Through the power of hieros gamos, the complete sacrifice of egotism and of the possessive attitude towards oneself and one's own emotions and instincts which that ritual involves, is born the Hero-child, the ability to start again, even after disaster and failure and to start on a different level with new values and a new understanding of life.16
These lines of thought of Harding's must have put Irene in mind of Tina Keller's exposition of Jung's ideas to the Quaker-Jungian group in 1934, in which Keller had talked of how:
… the sex act became a ritual and a symbolic act in the marriage to the priest or king. With some peoples, each maiden before her marriage, spent the night with a king or priest. This is called jus primae actis, the right of the first night.17
And too, put her in mind of how both Harding's & Keller's thoughts reflected on her relationship with Rendel Harris, and of her attachment to Carl Jung, and to the devotion she felt towards their ideas. She had somehow preserved all of the letters she had received from Rendel Harris right back to 1911, as she had also preserved so many documents to do with her study of Jung; somehow managing to preserve both collections through such turbulent times and through so many changes of address, and even, somehow, preserving them in spite of her escape from Geneva in 1940. Is their survival testament to the power of her Ghostly Lover complex, that mechanism of deep attachment that had drawn her to both men?
In 1956, Irene and Bertram were once more in the USA, with Bertram teaching at Pendle Hill. Irene reconnected with the Jungian circles within American Quakerism, presenting the keynote paper at that year's Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology. She gave it the title Sexual Difference in the Light of Wholeness.
Irene's paper starts with the myth of the Holy Grail, a myth considered by Emma Jung to be of especial importance to the female, which she had made her life's study. Carl Jung saw to it that his wife's unfinished book on the subject was published as a tribute to her after her death. It was completed by Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung's closest protégées. Emma Jung may have spoken of her understanding of the Grail myth when she visited the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group in the 1930s. Unfortunately, we do not know if she did, however, Irene gives it central importance to illuminating the understanding of sexual difference. Irene writes in the article:
The Lance and the Cup as they have appeared together in ancient myths and legends are old symbols of the male and female principles. The questioning (by Sir Gawaine18 in the myth) means confrontation of these basic principals of life on which human creativity and fruitful living depend.19
Irene then suggests the continuing relevance of Gawaine's question, and the error he made of addressing it to the Lance rather than to the Cup.
Our own age reveals a dangerously one-sided, dry and sterile condition. Side by side with much that is wonderful and new, we have brought into being so much that is destructive and terrifying. We have conquered the earth to its furthest boundaries, and the remotest islands are known to us. We ride the winds at our will and explore the depths of the earth. We are penetrating the stratosphere and interplanetary space, and investigating the energy which produces form and makes the world go round. Yet how many individual lives are disorientated and out of touch with the joyous rhythm of life!20
Gawaine's question about the origin of evil, the king’s wound, and about the Grail’s meaning – “To whom is the Grail brought?” and “Who does the Grail serve?” – Irene presented as the theme of the conference, or as she explains:
We turn towards the principles of life as we know them through our human bodies and relationships, the secrets of fertility, the creative living combinations in which men and women renew the race, reproduce their kind and discover the meaning of love. We hope through this confrontation to help release the living waters to fertilize our lives again.21
It is difficult not to reflect that Irene's choice of subject reflected her own life struggles – the problem of finding love and a relationship which allowed her to grow and flourish as a full and complex woman – emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically. With Rendel Harris she had known the hieros gamos so clearly described by Esther Harding, a relationship that she had then transferred to some extent to Jung – at least in terms of her fascination with his work. As Maggy Anthony commented:
I believe that the women around Jung used their relationship with him to act out the hieros gamos. They felt 'married' to him at a very deep level, and perhaps this is part of the reason why most of them remained unmarried. It would be difficult for a 'mere' man to compete with such a figure who reached women in such a meaningful way for them.22
With Bertram, Irene shared the dedication to the practical mysticism of Quakerism, and the joys and struggles of having children and raising them.
That facet of life – a woman's ability to create new life within her, to give birth and to suckle her offspring – Irene suggests are the most fundamental and ancient aspects of the female archetype, those symbolised as the Great Mother. She suggests that as symbol the Great Mother pre-dates the emergence of symbols of the male archetype. They proceed in stages by transferring devotion from her to the emerging male symbols. First they appear in conjunction with the Great Mother, as the Mother and Child; then successively as the Son of the Goddess, the Hero-son, and finally as the Sky-God. Only in that last form is the male archetype fully independent of the Great Mother. The Great Mother has over time given birth to the symbol of the Sky God. Irene traces this developmental path both historically, and psychologically. Referring to Bachofen23, she says:
Bachofen … waxed lyrical over the positive side of the Archetypal Feminine Principle – which he identified with motherhood. Functions of women in early societies include also the roles of priestess, prophetess and seeress, but these, like her motherhood, belong to the realm of instinct and intuition. The kind of wisdom belonging to the feminine principle is a wisdom of nature, and of the laws of growth and transformation. Its roots are in life itself, deep in the darkness, but its flower opens to the spiritual world at the top of the tree of life.24
That flowering she sees as expressed in in recognisable symbols in the “higher religions”:
In Judaism and Christianity, the figure of Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, crystallizes this aspect of the archetype, as does Tara “of the highest knowledge”, represented with the book and opening of lotus blossom, in Tibetan Buddhism.25
Irene realised too, that the female archetype had a dark side as expressed in the myth of the Gorgon26, or of Circe27, and had a chthonic, earthy, wild potential:
Feminine societies and mysteries, from which men were excluded, celebrated the secrets of birth and death; they evolved gradually into religious cults, and in their extreme form were orgiastic, leading to dissolution28. The Bacchantes' dismemberment of Dionysos was, like the medieval witches' sabbath, an expression of nature's sensuality unleashed on emerging consciousness, to overpower it.29
She was suggesting that suppression of the deeper female instincts led to them running amok when they are finally released. The danger was that they would overwhelm and become chaotic, fuelling rampant excess in overcompensation for their having been denied and repressed. It was better that they were acknowledged and properly integrated into women's lives, so that their vital energies could be harnessed to life enhancing ends.
Over time men came to be associated with power, with being rulers and lawmakers. These characteristics were expressed in the male archetype of the Sky God. As Irene explains:
The sky and light principles of clarity, form, knowledge, power and spirit were qualities assimilated into the masculine archetype. While earth wisdom, the magic of the senses, the secrets of nature and birth, and arts of human relationship were associated with the feminine archetype.30
However, this polarisation of characteristics as either being masculine or feminine engendered a problem, that of believing that the each sex was bereft of those features more fully associated with the other: such beliefs as only men being truly capable of being logical, and only women being truly capable of being natural carers.
The tragedy of this essential evolution lay however in the identification of the masculine and feminine principles with human sex, so men believed themselves to be the sole bearers of the masculine archetype with its differentiating functions leading to light and knowledge and upwards to spirit: while upon women was projected in the main the negative side of the feminine principle, the subterranean powers of nature, chaos, darkness, containment, destructive feelings, orgiastic tendencies to which the extreme cults led, …31
Thus positive features are projected on to the male and the negative features on to the female, whilst ignoring that each contained within themselves the potentials of both positive and negative features, not only of their dominant archetype, but of their contra type as well. Within every man is the woman he might have been. Within every woman is the man she might have been. He is capable of being emotionally sensitive and caring, she of being ruthlessly logical and dispassionate. The males and female archetypes exist in both. The one identified with and lived out more fully, the other subsumed and often projected on to potential bearers. This often means projecting not only those desired features, but also those scorned features as well. The desired features are projected on to those one feels attracted to. The scorned features are projected on to those one feels repelled or intimidated by. The distortions caused by the anima-animus complexes inflate the image of one's own sex, and denigrate the image of the opposite sex, and so reinforce the belief in the polarity that men are thus, and women are otherwise.
Historically this polarisation is to be found embedded in the emergence of the monotheistic religions focussed on versions of the male Sky God – Judaism and its offshoots – and in the rejection of female-embracing nature religions, especially Paganism in its various forms. Irene notes that in Judaism daily prayers are said in which a man gives thanks that he is not a woman, and how in Christianity the belief evolved that only men could rise to the life of the spirit. She quotes Clement of Alexandria32 as saying “Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman” and Tertullian33 exclaiming “Woman thou are the gate of Hell – thou ought always to be dressed in mourning and in rags – thine eyes filled with tears of repentance to make men forget that thou are the destroyer of the race.”
Partial redemption of the female began in the Middle Ages, with the growth of the cult of the Virgin and with the myth of the Grail. The Grail is conceived as the font of life, capable of healing the sickness of the King by putting him in right relationship – that of worshipful devotion to the giver of life. But the giver of life herself must be pure, and a relationship with her chivalrous. Only in monogamous matrimony can she earn her status as a embodiment of the Great Mother.
Marianism, or the cult of the Virgin, was a fuller embodiment of the pure side of the archetype of the female. She could be venerated as virgin even though she had borne a child, because no chthonic act of fertilisation had occurred, thus keeping her unpolluted by the dark side of the female, and of earthy connection with nature. Her union was purely celestial, as was her child. As Irene says:
The feminine principle becomes divided into spiritual and earthly (and devilish) components. Mary takes her place with the representatives of the positive feminine archetype, idealised with Sophia, with Tara. But Mary is a Virgin, she brought forth the Divine Son without the aid of mortal man, and therefore spirit and nature are still separated, and nature is unredeemed. 34
In short, it was the acceptance of only one side of the archetype of the female, those aspects that men were prepared to project upon her symbol: woman as virgin, as vessel of propagation and as mother. It was a long journey of redemption for a fuller, more balanced femininity to emerge. As Irene says:
This is not the place for details of the long road upwards for women to the achievement of a place in society where she need be neither materiality incarnate and gateway to the devil, nor mere vessel though whom man procures his pleasure and reproduces himself; neither the nursemaid for his children and mother substitute for himself, nor the property of the male with no rights of her own; nor yet at the opposite extreme the impossibly idealized lady to be served and worshipped, the passive reflection of man's highest ideals, barer of his soul. Though all these roles are embodied in our civilisation and still confuse our thinking and govern our attitudes, the last century has seen women claim her right to equality in what is still largely a man's society, and her right to exist as an independent and equal individual. 35
Irene stresses that in modern relationships the opportunities for the complementariness of the two archetypes may come into fruitful play, but only if women can reach down into themselves and find and value their own special contribution that stems from a fuller expression of the archetype:
The balance of opposites in tension is a law which leads to the release of new energy and creativity. Complementariness means a relation of opposites one to another whereby the tension generated does not destroy one side or the other, but includes both in a new flood of creative energy.36
She says the ability for this is hampered by the repressive dominance of the male archetype in the minds of women as a way to lead life outside the home, so that she does not give rein to what is potential within herself, because she does not value it:
Sex equality has no meaning in public life unless women, instead of duplicating male views, bring a complementary opposite attitude to the common stock. Women have been conditioned by the centuries of one-sided living in a patriarchal society and a masculine-dominated world. … Women have won equality in the outside world, but have they won equality and recognition of their own inner psychic value, viz, the wisdom of the nature process, the laws of growth, the secrets of transformation and ripeness, and particularly the eros principle of relatedness, of human commitment and love, which is the opposite pole to the logos quality of abstract and often inhuman truth? How far are women related to these qualities within themselves, and do they understand and have faith in their own value?37
She goes on to say:
The encounter of man with woman is not simply that of two people, but rather of a whole complex of life forces, and this fact brings spice and difficulty to the meeting.38
That complexity is in part due to the existence of both the anima and animus within the psyche of both parties:
If only we could be entirely masculine or entirely feminine, and have one straight biological and psychological role to play, life would seem simpler. But this dual dosage brings with it formidable complications, the more so because we only come to understand the nature of our own anima and animus through other human beings in whom we see it mirrored.39
Reflecting on the consequences of this, Irene says:
Sexually, men and women are like two halves with different roles to play in the achievement of a union which is creative, and which leaves each partner fulfilled and at peace. Sexuality per se however, without human involvement, relationship and aspiration, can be a destructive force in personality. This human involvement comes about psychologically through the involuntary projection of the man's anima onto the woman and the woman's animus onto the man, for the specific purpose in the development of their respective personalities; this is true both inside and outside of marriage. So long as the man and woman remain in the involvement, experiencing life without reflecting on what they are experiencing, they do not grow, for each is allowing the other to carry a life-quality which he or she should be labouring to incorporate in themselves. Each is also seeing his or her own unknown self in the other person, rather than that person in his or her own right.40
She notes, such a relationship is hazardous, because in the end the other person will never match up perfectly with the projected anima or animus image of what they should be. Only when this is realised, and the role of the anima and animus recognised can a real relationship develop:
A real relationship between two people can only begin when the projection has to some extent been withdrawn and assimilated – in fact when a “spiritual marriage” within the personality replaces dependence on the qualities experienced in another. Relationships then mean respect and understanding and love of the other person as she or he is – not as one imagines or would like them to be – so that give and take in terms of equality and reality can proceed. This is something quite different from blind self-seeking dependence one on another.41
Irene then concludes:
The act of differentiation between the masculine and feminine within each of us must be undertaken as part of the process of emerging consciousness: it is indeed a beginning on the inward journey of living spiritual experience. We are still very largely at the mercy of collective life, and the ideas and ideals by which we try to live are often far less our own than we think. We have to understand what we have unthinkingly “taken over”, and what is really individual, something of our own experience has built in us. We have to understand that we are in the rhythm of the great impersonal experience of our sex, and on the other hand how the opposite sex-principle is at work in us personally: where our relations with the other sex can help to bring the undeveloped side of ourselves to maturity.42
Irene then closes the paper by bringing it back to the beginning – the Grail myth – and how our lives answer that question: WHOM DO THEY SERVE?
We answer that question when we reverently dedicate both our relationship and the opposing but complimentary qualities of our inward life to the Creative Principle of all life who we call God.43
However, this was very much an informed use of the word “God” – the God-image of Jung's later works – which is why she equates it with the Creative Principle within. It is something which relates to those rhythms which are the “great impersonal experience of our sex”, which form part of our ground-of-being. We float on an ocean of whose currents we are too often unaware, especially those of our sexual identity. Realising them is part of the process of spiritual development that allow us to grow beyond the confines of our ascribed roles. Becoming more fully ourselves, is, in Jungian terms, a spiritual path as well as a path towards psychological maturity. Understanding something of the complexity of the psychological mechanisms of being a man or woman is very much part of that process, and was something of very real concern to Irene.
1Robert Browning, Pippa Passes.
2p.15 Pickard, Irene:Memories of J Rendel Harris: privately published: no date. Printed by Express Lithographic Supples, Sutton.
3Fèdèration Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies, Genëve
4International Consultative Group
5Pickard, Irene: The Geneva Meeting 1920-40: mss in the private collection of Alison Bush.
6See George Fox's Epistles: “… But in the restoration of Christ into the image of God and His righteousness and holiness again, in that they are help-mates, man and woman, as they were before the fall.” quoted in full by Irene on p5-6, of her paper
7p.4: Pickard, Irene: ibid
8p.9: ibid
9Anthony, Maggy: The Valkyries: The Women Around Jung: Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1990
10p.36: Harding, Esther: The Way of All Women: Rider, London,1971 [of 1932 in German]: Introduction, Jung, C G
11p.45-6: ibid
12p.39: ibid
13p.35: Harding, Esther: Women's Mysteries Ancient and Modern: Shambhala, Shaftesbury, 1990
14p.37: ibid
15p.153: Harding, ibid
16p.154: ibid
17op cit: Keller, Tina: Synbolism: item #75 in Irene Pickard's archive
18Gawaine is also known as Gawain, Gwalchmei, Gualguanus, Gauvain, Walwein and Walwyn.
19p.8: Pickard, Irene: Sexual Difference in the Light of Wholeness: Inward Light numbers 51 & 52, Double Number Fall 1956, Sex and Wholeness,
20ibid
21p.9: ibid
22p.110: Anthony, Maggy: The Valkyries. The Women around Jung: Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1990.
23Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, and anthropologist and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel. He evolved the theory of the matriarchal character of prehistoric societies.
24p.13: Irene Pickard ibid
25ibid
26A figure from Greek mythology who hair was made from living snakes and whose look could turn a man to stone.
27A Greek goddess of magic who appears on earth as a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress who had the power to turn men into animals.
28Dissolution in the sense of debauched living and dissipation, the overindulgence in sensual pleasures.
29p.13: ibid
30p.14: ibid
31p.15: ibid
32Titus Flavius Clemens (c.150 – c.215) Greek speaking Christian theologian who lived in Alexandria.
33Tertullian (c.155 – c.240) Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus who lived in Carthage in Roman North Africa. He is credited with being the father of Latin Christianity because of his being the first extensive Christian writer in that language.
34p.17-18: Irene Pickard, ibid
35p.18: ibid
36p.19: ibid
37ibid
38p.21: ibid
39p.21-22: ibid
40p.22-23: ibid
41p.23: ibid
42p.23-24: ibid
43p.24: ibid
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