Dissecting the feminine psychology

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com

The other day I won a bingo-like game during one of the summer courses at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. I was the first to call out four corners – which meant I got first pick of several books spread out on a table. For my prize, I chose a thin paperback titled She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, by the psychologist Robert A. Johnson.
After class, the instructor’s husband, a defense attorney from the Buffalo area, whispered that I had picked the best book there.
Interesting paradox, right off. First, a book written by a man about understanding women. (Are we not sufficiently unpredictable to remain a collective mystery?) And second, another man saying “right on.”
OK, enough of the jibjab. Johnson is a noted lecturer in the teachings of the late psychologist Carl Jung, and this Buffalo defense lawyer is married to an expert on Jung and he, along with his wife, studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. The book She examines the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche and what it says about the universal challenges that women face.
My revised edition, published in 1989 by HarperCollins, is only 80 pages, so it didn’t take long to read. For me, not every point was easy to understand. But it was well worth getting through the occasional difficult passages to discover the many precious nuggets of timeless wisdom.
Take this little tip as an example: “If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life.”
Or this: “For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity.”
The myth of Amor and Psyche is one of those stories you can spend a lifetime studying and still not uncover all the nuances. In the broadest sense, the story deals with the suffering that Psyche must endure to come into her own, be the authentic person she was meant to be, and reach her full potential in life. The process requires Psyche to meet challenge after challenge, until finally she must travel to the underworld. Yet as painful as her journey is, there is reward in the end. She ultimately marries Eros (or Amor, depending on your version of the story) and the two give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
And the mystery of women? Near the end of the book, when he describes Psyche emerging from Hades, Johnson addresses this point:
“The deepest interior mystery for a woman may not be named or given any label,” he writes. “It is the essence of that feminine quality which must remain a mystery, certainly to men, and hardly less so for women. It is not less than the element of healing itself.”
Also, you might be interested in a couple of companion titles by Johnson: He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
OK, explain life to me.

That’s what the life’s work of the late psychiatrist Carl Jung attempts to do. Sure, a lot of people try to explain life. But Jung’s work stands out, and is the subject of so much modern study and commentary, because he appeals to what many of us know intuitively. In other words, he validates concepts many of us feel and believe through our inner wisdom.

Each year, I look forward to classes on Jungian thought during the summer season of programs at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. Jung taught that myths and fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche. The Chautauqua classes most often focus on these myths and fairy tales, through the masterful teaching of Kaye Lindauer, now in her 21st season at Chautauqua, and recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University.

During one recent session, Lindauer told an Italian fable about The North Wind.
In the story, a poor farmer worries about how to feed his family after winds destroy his crops several years in a row. The farmer goes to see the North Wind, to plead for help. Depending on your beliefs, you can see the North Wind as a symbol for God, or a higher power, or even a positive force of energy.

Long story short: The North Wind helps the farmer, but the farmer keeps sabotaging his own interests and his family’s interests, by letting his landlord (who also happens to be a priest) take advantage of him.
Each time the farmer falls into despair, he goes back to The North Wind (a good move). The farmer ultimately prospers once he learns not just to take the gifts of the North Wind, but also – and this is critically important – to protect those gifts from people, such as the priest-landlord, who are greedy and try to push others around.

The moral of the story: Living a just life doesn’t mean you’re so goody-goody all the time that you let other people take advantage of you. Balance is required, and that means you need to be tough and aggressive at times for your own good and the good of those in your care.

The key is balance. If you’re too passive, expect to get snookered. But if you’re too aggressive, you’ll end up being a bully and you’ll pay consequences in the end.

Balance is central to Jungian thought, as it is to various religious beliefs. In Jewish mysticism, for example, the whole idea of the tree of life is about keeping life in balance. Each positive attribute must be kept in check against its negative counterpart. For instance: Too much generosity and you go broke. Yet on the other hand, too much stinginess and you end up poor in spirit.

Standing up for ourselves – with just the right dose of force – can be one of the most difficult balancing acts of all. In The North Wind story, the farmer takes his blows until he finally learns the hard way.
You probably don’t need to study Jung to know that’s the way life is.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
Ever heard of a fairy tale called The White Snake?
I hadn’t, until hearing a lecture on it recently during the 2008 summer programming at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York.
The classes on myths and fairy tales are among my favorites each year at Chautauqua. A lot has to do with the teacher, Kaye Lindauer, recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University. Lindauer, who is in her 21st summer season at Chautauqua, teaches from the late psychiatrist Carl Jung’s perspective that fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche.
Now to the story. The crux of it is this: A wise king has a servant bring him a covered dish every day after dinner, but no one, including the servant, knows what’s on the plate, because the king waits until the servant leaves before lifting the cover. Each day the king eats a piece of the white snake.
You can guess what happens next: The servant gets curious, and one day lifts the cover unbeknownst to the king. The servant, too, takes a bite of the white snake, and immediately gains the ability to understand the language of animals.
On the very same day, the queen loses her ring. The servant becomes a suspect and faces execution unless he can find the ring. Turns out a duck had swallowed the ring, and because the servant understands the language of animals, he overhears the ducks talking, learns what had happened and retrieves the ring – saving himself but not the duck.
The servant then asks the king for a horse and a little money to travel. The king agrees and the servant sets out. End of story.
For Kaye Lindauer, the symbolic meanings of even this short story took up two days of 75-minute lectures.
A couple points, to give you an idea:
• Fairy tales show how a new cycle of growth evolves in a person. Change is the goal, which is huge, because it means that a new dominant voice within you must replace the voice that has you locked in your comfort zone and trying to please others, even to your own detriment. If you opt for change, expect conflict in your life, because the price of growth is that you must fight resistance. In this story, the snake represents renewal, because a snake sheds its skin. As Lindauer pointed out: Jung believed that we are constantly pushed toward growth, and if we try to repress such growth, it comes out in the form of sickness or maybe an accident. Status quo is not an option. We either grow or we digress.
• Once the servant tasted the snake, he gained new insight, and once that happened, he couldn’t go back to being the person he was before. Lindauer: In real life, the process can take years. Once you know what you know today, you can’t go back to where you were before. Your own knowing keeps you from going back to the place of not knowing. It’s the Garden of Eden metaphor: Once Adam and Eve tasted the fruit, they couldn’t go back to their prior innocence. And the white snake? Given that we, too, are constantly shedding old skin, the challenge becomes that of saying yes to a life that over and over will never be the same.