Daimon Publishers
by Monique Salzmann (Paris, France), Société Française de Psychologie Analytique
The women who consult us are searching primarily for their identity, whatever they overtly ask for. They come to us to find out what it is to be a woman.
Until relatively recently, society decreed what was womanly and what was not. And, no matter how much this definition differed from one cultural group to another, or from one period to the next, there was only one way to be a woman at any given time and in any given society.
Consequently, women did not have to worry about what was womanly. The universe was divided clearly into what was masculine and what was feminine. This dichotomy was reflected in every field of human activity. Daily tasks, social, religious and family roles, behavior, even character traits were assigned according to sex, down to the most minute details. Initiation rites separated the young girl from the world of the mother and did away with the sexual ambivalence of childhood. The most concrete form of initiation rite was the ablation of the clitoris. More generally, these rites permitted a girl to enter the world of women, where she was taught the language, the sexuality, the gestures. From the beginning of her life she knew that her world was different from the world of men.
The fact that such customs have existed, in one form or another, in every society, indicates that they are archetypal. That is, they belong to those primordial patterns which, like instincts, organize the human aspects of life.
The problems we encounter today come from the fact that the collectivity no longer offers the means by which to make these separations and differentiations. Initiation rites, even those that have evolved in our societies, have grown obsolete. Sexual differentiation no longer takes place on a collective level. Most activities, even typically virile ones such as driving a truck, can be entrusted now to either sex.
That which was really important in the traditional division of roles according to sex, was not so much the fact that men tilled the fields and women prepared the dance ornaments; in another group it could have been the other way around. What was important was that the masculine was differentiated clearly from the feminine, one being defined by opposition to the other.
The individual psyche develops, distinct from the collective, but the archetypal structure does not change. The same separations and differentiations which, previously, were assigned by the group now must take place in the individual psyche, in order to activate the dynamics that push a young girl to become a woman.
It is hard today for the individual to find her bearings. Society no longer provides structures that are suitable for furthering the life urge. The only way is that of the individual; all of us are obliged to become aware of the archetypal processes within our psyches.
The old dichotomy between masculine and feminine is still at work, however, in the social, religious and family world. In our culture the encounter with patriarchal values is one of the major difficulties that face contemporary woman in her attempt to become a complete feminine human being.
This difficulty seems to be the common denominator of two types of avoidance of the feminine: the woman who has not found her place as a woman cannot deal with the world of men and, consequently, she may deny the difference between the sexes.
In one instance a woman avoids a genuine encounter with the man, whose "otherness" she denies. Instead, she repeats with him the uroboric symbiosis of the primal relationship in which each partner plays alternately the role of the mother or of the child.
The instance that I am considering here is the opposite; she denies the woman and takes the place of the man. She is the daughter who refuses to be like her mother. Through fear of men, or because she refuses to occupy what she considers to be a position of humiliation and impotence reserved to women in our society or - more generally - in compensation for a feeling of inferiority, she refuses the form of femininity that our society has to offer. Such a woman is likely to lack any relationship with her father because he was too violent, larger than life, or absent.
The adult female who refuses to be a woman identifies with the masculine pole of the archetype. For her the function of this pole, as animus, is to render possible the relationship of the feminine ego to the unconscious. In such a situation it seems not proper to speak of a negative animus.
One can understand the feeling of omnipotence in such an analysand. It results from the experience she has of the androgynous totality that characterizes the archetype in its original, pre-differentiated state. This archetype seems to be the origin of her formidable energy. But we know that this totality has to be sacrificed for us to be human, endowed with a masculine or feminine identity.
One can imagine how intolerable will be the sacrifice of a position that places these women above others, above everyday life which they consider banal and contemptible, above their own instincts, feelings and sensations. In these lives, driven by a superhuman will, psychotic episodes are quite common. To defend herself against such episodes a woman may develop a rigid personality. The real losers in this kind of situation are the young girl and the animus.
The rejection of her mother by such a woman - or the feeling of being rejected - has not allowed the separation from the mother to take place. But it has also excluded the woman from the world of the mother and prevented any sort of triangulation; both experiences are necessary to enter into the world of the feminine.
By trying to force her way into the non-maternal feminine by means of the heroic masculine short-cut, she expresses an immense attraction to the woman she perceives but cannot attain. This attraction manifests itself in an idealization of the woman she would like to be or, possibly, by homosexual behavior which aims at being reunited to both the lost mother and the abandoned girl. Her refusal of her humanity has been so violent that it is moving to see her slowly become more gentle, cry without violence, abandon her megalomania, dream that her parents are tender with her, take pleasure in daily routine and, very slowly, begin to re-evaluate herself.
But for any of these developments to be possible, the woman must come down from her position of power, experience the humiliation she feared and perhaps even come to the bottom of the pit. Thus, castration is imposed from the outside. Finally, she must let go of the desired penis and accept the sacrifice without which there is no access to the animus. There comes a time when the analyst also must accept a loss of power, in one form or another.
It is only then that in these women's dreams there appear normally-sexed men toward whom they experience both desire and tenderness. (Until then, any relationships to men were of a masculine homosexual character.) Now they become less demanding and dream analysis is no longer immediately re-appropriated by the ego for its own purposes.
I insist on this particular type of process because I do not see the problem as a negative animus. On the contrary, I rather think that there is no animus at all. It has been squeezed out of the picture, deprived of its otherness by the ego's usurpation of masculinity. This is a pseudo-masculinity, not related to the woman's inner being, but imprisoned in the unconscious. The identification with the masculine, however, may be the woman's attempt to possess a father to whom there was no other way of access.
This manner of approach to the feminine, this aborted attempt at obtaining the ingredients of the coniunctio, is becoming more and more frequent. What is its deeper meaning? We do not know yet the type of woman that is in preparation and with what type of partner she will be able to relate. Is she going to recreate the symbiotic couple? And if, alternatively, a woman should become more of an autonomous being, will her lot be solitude? As we know, the archetype does not provide the contents, but attracts and organizes them. Therefore, there is an infinite variety of ways to be a woman now that there is no longer a single model available. All that we analysts can do, probably, is to keep out of the way of our analysands' living aspects of the feminine that have been outside the collective field of consciousness. Then, perhaps, they can enter that world and, perhaps, transform it.
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