The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects

In this article, I suggest that the tendency on the part of men to endow female romantic partners with redemptive force, reflected in Jung’s notion of Anima, derives from a failure of socialization in puberty. Although culturally sanctioned, this misconstrues the potency of erotic relationships to reshape the psyche, substituting the confined ego project of redemption for the more open-ended one of spiritual emancipation; it also undermines erotic polarity and as such is largely self-defeating.
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The prison of fear

Recent developments in my life have brought me into relation with the theme of fear in relationships, which is often the deepest level of our conditioning, underneath pride, anger, resignation, sadness and all those other various emotions with which we mask our ultimate feeling of vulnerability and abandonment. Continue reading “The prison of fear”