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.
Continue reading “The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects”
Tag: Jung
Apocalypticism and the next social revolution
History suggests that millenarian fears of social breakdown are a device which has often been generated and instrumentalized by the establishment in moments of existential threat. Even if such fears reach the extreme stage of collective psychosis, this does not mean there is a real prospect of such breakdown, and in fact the social conditions which have sometimes underpinned descents into authoritarianism in the past are fundamentally different at the present juncture and hardly seem prone to reconstitution. Insofar as such fears bring latent conflicts into the open, whilst they certainly raise concerns and have unpredictable consequences, they also offer an opportunity to unmask these conflicts and to reshape social institutions. Continue reading “Apocalypticism and the next social revolution”
Shamanic residues in medieval Europe: a review of Ginzburg’s Ecstasies
In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989, tr. Raymond Rosenthal 1991, University of Chicago Press), Carlo Ginzburg argues that the practices of medieval witches in Europe, as testified to in the documentary evidence compiled by their persecutors, can best be understood in the light of shamanistic belief systems inherited or borrowed in ancient times from the central Asian steppe.
The work is certainly a tour de force, with an extraordinary breadth of reference, and it brings many interesting elements to light which on the whole support the author’s thesis. Nevertheless, there seem to me to be a number of problems of methodology and certainly a great deal of material (some of it, admittedly, unavailable to him) which Ginzburg does not employ and which deserve further consideration in a more complete reconstruction of the historical links between the phenomena in question. In this review I will therefore try to summarize Ginsburg’s argument as I see it, whilst attempting at the same time to suggest further avenues of research or alternative understandings.
The principal difficulty Ginzburg encounters, it seems to me, is a failure properly to delimit what he sees as the “shamanic” elements from other pagan traditions. The book lacks a framework interpreting the place of properly shamanic elements in ancient religion, whether it be Greek or Celtic. That Celtic religion and certain Greek and Roman ecstatic cults may owe a lot to shamanic precursors is easy to acknowledge, but these cults and others then took on a life of their own which is certainly more directly relevant to the phenomena we encounter in medieval Europe. This layer is absent or assumed away in Ginzburg’s account, making to my mind for a considerable amount of speculation and confusion.
This is evident for example in his account of the reconstructed prototype of the shamanic journey to the “world of the dead”. This concept is indeed reminiscent of the somewhat sinister reinterpretation of the underworld in Greek religion and may represent an Indo-European type (borrowed into Christianity in medieval times only as the notion of purgatory); but it is certainly far removed from the understanding which would have characterized, and still characterizes to this day, nomadic shamanism in central Asia. The same is true of blood sacrifices, which cross-culturally characterize organized religion, but not shamanic practice. The same is true of sexual specialization in the ritual context. Many elements present in the strata uncovered by Ginzburg are therefore more suggestive of survivals of Indo-European religion (that is, of the religion of settled agricultural societies) than of shamanism as such. This would have benefited from clarification and greater rigor.
Ginzburg’s treatment of the role of psychoactive substances in medieval witchcraft appears as much of an afterthought, as a result of which he forgoes a number of interesting lines of enquiry. Drawing substantially on Eliade, he certainly sees the witches’ flight as a phenomenon experienced in a state of shamanic ecstasy, but there is little on how this state might have been induced and what there is draws heavily on Wasson’s identification of the soma with Amanita muscaria and on the disputed theory that the Eleusinian mysteries were fuelled by consumption of ergot. There is plenty else which may seem more persuasive, from the likely use of anticholinergic plants such as Atropa belladonna to the well-known affinity of witches for toads, snakes, serpents and spiders, all of which are known to have psychoactive components in their venoms and were gaily thrown into the cauldron as part of the witches’ brew. In Slovenia, it appears, live salamanders are used to this day in the process of fabricating a psychoactive eau de vie. This rather obvious connection is inexplicably neglected, even as Ginzburg himself furnishes important evidence in support such as the likely derivation of Italian rospo, toad, from Lat. haruspex, a type of sorcerer.
The picture Ginzburg paints implies a great deal of accommodation of traditional practices by the church up until the threshold of the Renaissance. These were of course, at times, given a superficial Christian dress; but it seems that they also often remained anchored within a pre-Christian (or para-Christian) worldview. The Celtic cult of Epona therefore persisted in various guises, as did Greco-Roman cults of Diana/Artemis and Hera, fused by the Inquisitors into the figure of “Herodias”. The cult of Isis, absorbed into that of the Madonna, might also be mentioned. The reasons for the apparent change in attitude on the part of the church at the time of the persecutions are not evoked; doubtless one should interpret these developments, however, as a reaction to the threat of loss of temporal power by the church due to the same encroachments of modernity – the Italian renaissance in particular – which later led to the protestant reformation. Ginzburg does not make the point, but the reasons why the traditional beliefs would have remained vibrant are not hard to identify: Christianity was unconcerned with worldly health and well-being, leaving many popular needs unsatisfied. Small wonder that mediums, soothsayers and healers occupied a fundamental spiritual niche in society (they have never ceased to do so to this day). The challenges of uncertain harvests and the ravages of the plague also necessitated intermediation with cosmic forces which the organized church could not offer. It is highly unlikely that this was ever even conceived of as a problem until the church sought to leverage its spiritual power behind the consolidation of its temporal influence and the enterprise of the crusades.
Ginzburg sets considerable store by the widespread mythological theme of lameness or loss of one shoe on the part of figures considered to occupy a shamanic vocation. This part of his reasoning is convincing, but surprisingly he has no interpretation of its actual meaning. It is, however, difficult to resist the hypothesis that the wearing of a single shoe symbolized the position of the shaman-priest as a walker or intercessor between worlds.
Certain elements which presumably survived into Greco-Roman, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic religion nevertheless do seem specifically to evoke themes found in central Asian and Siberian shamanism but which are not, according to current understanding, thought of as shamanic universals. The use of animal mounts or the metamorphosis into animal form in order to undertake the shamanic journey is the most persuasive of these, as it is distinct from the more auxiliary role of spirit animals in the New World traditions. A further interesting commonality is the widespread notion identified by Ginzburg in Eurasian traditions that the spirits can resurrect animals and people from their bones, which recalls Harner’s account of ecstatic dismemberment as characterizing the shamanic vocation (and may offer a bridge to animal or even human sacrifice). Other themes found in the European witch cults and in shamanism more generally are shamanic election with the concomitant inability to refuse the vocation and the ministry of depossession as well as intervention in climatic phenomena and psychopomp activity. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, practised a form of sweat lodge in which hemp seeds were thrown on the hot rocks; certain archeological discoveries seem to support this account. Lastly, the use of the drum to induce ecstasy seems to be attested in Ginzburg’s sources, though it is far from clear how material an element it was.
Ginzburg, then, has done enough to convince us that elements of nomadic shamanistic beliefs persisted into the folk traditions of medieval Europe, although it is not entirely clear how the thinks that this has happened (in the book, the notion that there may actually exist a parallel reality the substance of which explains structural convergences cross-culturally is not even entertained; at best he allows that this may be explained by the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious). That we may be less historically estranged from these traditions than we thought we were may be an abiding legacy of his work. It nevertheless is at best suggestive, leaving much unsaid. Despite his impressive scholarship, it seems certain that there is ample evidence yet to be considered in order to give a more complete account of medieval European folk religion and its immediate and more distant antecedents.
Alan Watts on the perils and pitfalls for Westerners of attempting to follow Eastern spiritual paths
In this talk, Alan Watts explains the cultural presuppositions underpinning Taoism, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, and consequently some of the problems and contradictions often linked to their adoption by Westerners. Essentially, his argument is that these systems are designed to achieve liberation from specific forms of cultural conditioning; for those who do not share those forms of cultural conditioning, they make considerably less sense, especially if not appropriately reinterpreted. It is particularly problematic when Westerners simultaneously attempt to adopt the cultural framework of reference as part of the practice, given that the practice is designed to liberate from that very cultural framework. Watts argues that esoteric forms of these religions were essentially conceived to protect them against social forces that otherwise would have repressed them, and that the esotericism is therefore epiphenomenal. He points out that any effort to supersede the ego which is driven by the ego, which is the case of any allegiance to a given doctrinal path, is doomed to failure. These are important insights.
I would disagree with him on two points: reincarnation is a widespread belief even in the West (surveys show upwards of 20% adherence). It also characterizes, in one form or another, many pre-agricultural societies. In my opinion, it has a phenomenological underpinning. I also don’t understand his claim that the thought of either Jung or Freud was shaped in any significant way by social Darwinism or Hegelianism. Nevertheless, I certainly do agree that there is a risk for those in the West who are attracted to Eastern religions to get caught up in exotic epiphenomena, mistaking these for essential features and essentially trading one set of religious rituals for another.
However, even within their own cultural context, we should be very careful not uncritically to suppose that these practices actually are efficacious. Mostly they are not even meant to be. Any religion has its mystical core simply because mysticism has been constrained to express itself in the language of the dominant surrounding religious culture. This core may inspire us and reward study, but it’s essentially the sedimentary residue of experience in other times and places; it is certainly no substitute for our own direct experience of the divine.
Grrl power
Their aims and methods can be discussed, but the activists of Ukrainian women’s rights organization Femen, which recently opened a “training camp” in Paris, have surely hit on a means of protest – female public nudity – which deserves, and will probably receive, more prominence in the future. This is one of those phenomena which, to me, captures a fundamental shift in the Zeitgeist and may prefigure important and long overdue social changes. For this to happen, however, there is a need for a further shift in feminist self-understanding. Due to recent advances in research into the ontogenesis of patriarchy and its social costs, such a shift, I believe, is at hand; all it needs are sufficiently eloquent advocates.
Femen got started as a means to alert young women in Ukraine to the dangers of the sex industry and to try to get attention from the authorities to this problem. With its move to Paris, a city which once had a global reputation as a cradle of progressive social movements, once wonders if this will change. The group (or incipient movement) has an enviable brand identity, but so far seems lacking in ideological focus.
Femen’s methods are hard to resist because they tap into some deep cultural veins. On the one hand, the patriarchy has, as part of its subversive strategy vis-a-vis female sexuality, offered women a trade-off whereby they have given up their rights to sexual self-expression in return for physical protection and, in recent years, increasing opportunities for personal (of course non-sexual) expression. This protection is far from having been universally effective, but it has entailed inculcating a moral code according to which it is widely considered unmanly to use force against women. Men accordingly, and society as a whole, therefore have difficulties in deflecting these women from their goals, and the more vulnerable they are and the more obvious it is that this is what is going on, the more encumbered is the response of the patriarchy to it, since repression generates greater and greater indignation, even on the part of those who normally tacitly acquiesce in the existing order.
In the past, public nudity might have been enough of a taboo that the fuss around it would have overwhelmed the reaction of solidarity; but it is likely that this is no longer the case. Female public nudity is, in the West, no longer a breach of social contract; violence against women is.
However, aside from this issue of social contract there is also, I believe, a much deeper and far more significant attitude to the naked female body on the part of men which renders this type of protest very powerful in the collective unconscious. This attitude is biologically rather than culturally determined or at least, if culturally determined, draws on archetypes which are much older than agrarian society.
The presence of such a pre-cultural representation of woman in the male imagination underlies Carl Jung’s theory of the anima. This representation portrays women as sexually empowered, strong, intuitive and wise; in many ways the polar opposite of the culturally constructed role – virgin, demure, weak, in need of protection etc – from which almost all seductive power has been eradicated.
Therefore men have created a role for women in which they no longer desire them. This may have seemed to matter little as long as part of the female population was reserved by men to stand outside this stereotype – prostitutes, courtesans, mistresses, priestesses, witches and so on. These women were permitted to don perfectly contrary attributes. And, as time has gone on, men, who have imagined themselves able to get by on images of women quite unlike the culturally manufactured real thing, have had no problem in going on doing so, in art, fiction and pornography. As the man often cares only about the congruence between the image and his anima, projecting this onto the screen of reality through the vehicle of erotic fantasy, this has given birth to a prodigious parallel oeuvre of imaginary social re-engineering.
The imaginary figures to which this oeuvre has given birth are, however, at least as potent a cultural force as their equally imaginary counterpoints. By donning the mantle of the superheroine, Femen rejects the “acceptable” role given to women by society and taps into a powerful erotic script over which the patriarchy is conflicted and to which it therefore has inadequate means to respond. Significantly, this seems almost inevitably to entail an attack on organized religion; consciously or not, the equation between religion, the patriarchy, and the repression of female sexual self-expression seems axiomatic to this new generation of feminist revolutionaries.
In hindsight it seems inevitable that real women would step up to the anima, since in substance it is not a mere projection of the male imagination but an actual, biological representation of innate feminine qualities, albeit (as I understand Jung’s thought) from a male perspective.
Femen make this clear, calling themselves “new Amazons” and adopting a militaristic discourse full of (what is taken to be) characteristically male imagery. But they are equally the symbolic heiresses of historical figures like Joan of Arc, constructed icons like Marianne, and the pantheon of female superheroes so beloved of pubescent boys, from Superwoman through an army of her ever more buxom and unclad avatars: often decried by feminists as sexualized stereotypes and screens for male projection and objectification of women, but in reality not only that: also a hommage to another, indubitably more empowered idea of woman.
The empowered, wild woman is erotically charged for men in a way her tamed sister can never be. This means one simple thing: the male erotic imagination is on the side of this force for social change. And, as women know, this is a very powerful ally.
That they are no longer afraid collectively to appeal to it in defense of their own interests (and of course in reality also of male interests, because humankind has only one set of real interests) represents a sea-change in the balance of power between the sexes. Ultimately, the more authentically we are ourselves, the closer we will come together; this process is naturally self-reinforcing.
What we see at this point of history are social institutions in the eye of a tornado, battered and starting to give way under the accumulated force of our repressed biological nature; they are so weakened that the moment is ripe for something quite new. Beyond their specific social agenda, whatever it may ultimately turn out to be or not to be, Femen points to the coming into being of a fundamentally new space in which conceptions of society will inevitably be reshaped.
Electra
Ich glaube, ich war schön: wenn ich die Lampe ausblies vor meinem Spiegel, fühlt ich es mit keuschem Schauer. Ich fühlt’ es, wie der dünne Strahl des Mondes in meines Körpers weisser Nacktheit badete so wie in einem Weiher, und mein Haar war solches Haar, vor dem die Männer zittern, dies Haar, versträhnt, beschmutzt, erniedrigt, verstehst du’s, Bruder? Ich habe alles, was ich war, hingeben müssen. Meine Scham hab’ ich geopfert, die Scham, die süsser als Alles ist, die Scham, die wie der Silberdunst, der milchige des Monds, um jedes Weib herum ist und das Grässliche von ihr und ihrer Seele weghält, Verstehst du’s, Bruder! diese süssen Schauder hab’ ich dem Vater opfern müssen. Meinst du, wenn ich an meinem Leib mich freute, drangen seine Seufzer, drang nicht sein Stöhnen an mein Bette? Eifersüchtig sind die Toten: und er schickte mir den Hass, den hohläugigen Hass als Bräutigam. So bin ich eine Prophetin immerfort gewesen und habe nichts hervorgebracht aus mir und meinem Leib als Flüche und Verzweiflung.
(Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra)
Let me share with you a painting.
This was done, unprompted of course, by my six-year-old daughter; the little bird on the left is her, the big one on the right, me; and the heart represents what hearts represent.
In sharing this with you, I want to make two points, which, in fact, are really only one point from two perspectives.
But first a brief discursus.
Carl Gustav Jung’s invention of the Electra complex earned him, as we know, Freud’s opprobrium. Freud was unwilling to contemplate a symmetric process on the part of the girl child to the male Oedipus complex which forms such a basic plank of his theory of male psychosexual development. The reason for this appears to have been that the initial infantile oral attachment is to the mother; in the male child, this attachment needs to be broken so that the object of sexual attraction is sought outside the family unit; for the female child the problem is not posed in these terms because the female/female bond to the mother remains. The female child thus would not form any infantile presexual bond and therefore not need to break this bond. As sexual development progresses, objects of attachment can only be sought in the outside world.
The Freudian account, I guess, is by now thoroughly unconvincing to any clinical psychoanalyst, who knows from repeated experience the importance of fixation on the father figure as a source of female neurosis.
In an earlier post, I reflected that Sex at Dawn, due to its deconstruction of the elemental nature of the nuclear family group, might anyway require a reevaluation of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. On reflection, Sex at Dawn does not really imply anything for Freud’s theory: the biological mother has an archetypal role and status in any society. However, I believe psychoanalysts have not awaited the findings of paleoanthropology to start to criticize both Freud’s and Jung’s accounts as reflecting contingent social circumstances rather than universal truths. As such, at the very least the intensity of the psychic conflict alluded to may be primarily a consequence of the poverty of adult social relations, whether male or female, to which children in industrial societies have access. If the mother or father fails or is absent, the available social tissue is insufficient to take up the slack. This would not have characterized pre-industrial, much less pre-agricultural societies, in which the absence of one or other parent is likely in any event to have been a common scenario and therefore one to which the human psyche presumably developed resilience.
Whatever its theoretical basis, however, descriptively the Electra complex seems to have been highly relevant in the environment in which psychoanalytic theory was born. Its clinical relevance probably explains why it is the only concept developed by Jung which made it into mainstream clinical practice. Post-structuralist, feminist and Marxist readings of fairy tales and dowry practices tell a similar story: whether or not the role of the father figure is to any degree biologically programmed, it is certainly to an extraordinary degree culturally reinforced. Jung was neither wrong to see in the neurosis with which Sabina Spielrein presented the shadow of her violent yet charming father, nor to identify a cultural pattern attested from the earliest literate societies (sex-negative patriarchy struck back when Stalin closed Spielrein’s experimental kindergarten in Moscow in 1926 on charges of sexual perversion and Hitler’s troops shot her for her Jewish origins in Rostov on Don in 1942)(1).
I would like, therefore, to bear witness in this way to the astonishing delicacy of the love between father and daughter. In our emotionally devastated world, each generation is still borne anew with all its potential for love. The emotional desert in which we all live certainly contributes in a major way to the semiotic charge of the relationship and its frequently unhappy course. And yet, we instinctively sense that we are in the presence of something deeply sacred – in many men’s experience perhaps uniquely and unbearably so.
In sharing the painting with you, I want to say something to women, and to fathers.
To women, I hope it shows you that, whatever has been your personal history, your love for your father has been a precious part of who you are as a human being. In all likelihood he was an inept, if not appalling guardian of the treasure entrusted to him. The treasure, however, is yours, and remains.
And to fathers of daughters (though frankly, it is really very similar with sons): please wake up and cherish this tender miracle which lights your days. In doing so, remember that we are the servants of our children, and not they of us.
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Notes:
(1) Jung’s proximate source seems not to have been Sophocles, however, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s librettist whose words are cited at the top of this article.