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”
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.
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 FIIG,
the organisation that brought together all the NGOs in Geneva, of
ICG,
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.
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”:
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.
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.”
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 Anthony
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Gawaine
in the myth) means confrontation of these basic
principals of life on which human creativity and fruitful living
depend.
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!
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.
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.
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 Bachofen,
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.
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.
Irene realised too, that
the female archetype had a dark side as expressed in the myth of the
Gorgon,
or of Circe,
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
dissolution.
The Bacchantes' dismemberment of Dionysos was, like the medieval
witches' sabbath, an expression of nature's sensuality unleashed on
emerging consciousness, to overpower it.
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.
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, …
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 Alexandria
as saying “Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought
that she is a woman” and Tertullian
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
