Irene Claremont de Castillejo, Knowing Women: A Feminine Psychology (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1997) ("We are only exhausted when talking to other people if we do not meet them, when one or both of us are hiding behind screens." Id. at 11. "How is it then that we fail to meet so often?" "There seem to be three main reasons. The first is that we are often living on a different level of awareness from the other person. [For example, "focused consciousness" versus a "diffuse awareness of the wholeness of nature."] "The second is that one of us at least is often playing a role, or is somehow possessed. And the third is that we fail to listen to each other." Id. at 14. "The modern emphasis on relationships between only two people can sometimes degenerate into mere exclusiveness and a self-conscious sharing which, valuable through it is, may become an infringement of privacy, or an abuse of intimacy. Deliberate sharing is sometimes as dangerous as sympathy. New ideas which are forming in the depths of the mind can actually be destroyed or crippled by being shred too soon.... Respect for another person's privacy is as important as sharing thoughts. The deepest communication will in any case take place in moments of silence." Id. at 13. "The shadow is that part of the psyche which could and should become conscious, yet of which we are unaware. It consists of those characteristics we do not recognize in ourselves. Unfortunately people tend to believe that 'the shadow' means our bad qualities. But the shadow can be bright and good as well as dark and bad. A real virtue is often hidden away in the unconscious." Id. at 29. "A good way of learning to detect one's shadow is to notice what qualities in others make us angry or irritated." Id. at 30. "Now the three shadows which we should perhaps take special note of today are the national shadow, our own personal shadow, and, darkest of all, woman's shadow." Id. at 31, emphasis added. "I will write at greater length of woman's bright shadow in another chapter, but I cannot close this one without speaking of woman's direst and most destructive shadow. The witch is chiefly woman's responsibility. All women who have not totally lost contact with the unconscious are in touch with power. Power is not necessarily bad. Its direction is what makes it good or bad." "The life force which surges up through women is a tremendous power, whether employed biologically or in some other way. We have heard a great deal about woman's suffocating quality. She pours our energy on those for whom she cares and does not know she suffocates. Giving feels like love, but giving without measure and without discrimination stifles." "It is when a woman actually uses the power with which the feminine is in contact for her own personal ends that she becomes truly a witch. This is real evil which needs all our resourcefulness to fight. I suspect there are few woman who will not find a witch lurking somewhere within themselves if only they dig deeply enough." Id. at 41-42. "To accept one's own personal shadow means to accept responsibility for its behaviour, not necessarily the licence to live and put in practice all we find within--this is a common fallacy. It demands not only self-knowledge but the utmost vigilance to see it does not break out unawares. And if it should, to call it back and make amends and admit very humbly that this unruly shadow is a bit of me." "What one does, one is. Not what one says nor thinks one is, but what one does. Doing may be a concern of an inner invisible process which we call being, but it is still what in fact one does; though, of course, the quality of our being will depend on the value of our actions or our influence." Id. at 40. "The consciousness of woman is a very recent acquisition...." "Today woman is sleeping no longer, with the uneasy results we see all around us. gender seems to be confused. One is no longer quite sure whether women are feminine, nor how far men are male." "But the emancipation of women came through their finding a hero within themselves. It was this which overcame all obstacles in their path: the law, tradition, the obscurantism of their own as well as of the other sex." Id. at 49. "None the less, although woman no longer projects her own latent hero on to her men folk, which of course in the past did actually help men to be heroes, she does not appear to have outgrown her old expectation that a hero is what he ought to be." "So the poor man suffers doubly. No longer boosted by the woman on the one hand, and actually competed with by them on the other, he feels depotentiated and unable to rise to the heights expected of him. All this at the same time as he is rightfully developing his own more sensitive feminine side." Id. at 50. Woe is me! "Today the world's problems are too technical and too vast for ordinary individuals to feel they have the power to influence them. Our educational institutions still pay lip service to the importance of training our children to think and take responsibility. But once outside school or college we plunge them into a society where independent thought ceases to be an asset. The government employee . . . knows that he can never take final responsibility. The last word rest with the bureaucracy." Id. at 27. Or, for those working in the so-called 'private sector' with management. ).
M. Esther Harding, The Way of All Women, with an introduction by C. G. Jung (Boston & Shaftesbury, 1990) ("We live in an age of executives and scientists, and our leaders are chosen from those ranks. Little attention is paid to the achievement of an inner development in the emotional realm. Indeed it is generally taken for granted that an individual's emotions are what they are and that they are not subject to development--certainly not to education." "But to be childishly immature in one's relationships implies that one has only an undeveloped personality with which to meet all the intricacies which make up the problems of the world. Our modern difficulties, whether social, political, or economic, are in the final analysis human problems. Any fundamental discussion of these matters always reveals the same basic difficulty: 'If only human beings were different'--more honest, more conscious of the effects of what they do, if they would trust each other more, if only they were convinced of the trustworthiness of others and incidentally of themselves, if only no one was trying to get ahead by undercutting another--then we could deal readily enough with material supplies and their distribution, which form the chief question of social, economic, and international controversy. But human beings are selfish and egoistic. Their love and consideration are shallow and unreliable, and pitifully narrow in their range." Id. at xiii. "The ancient religions of the moon goddess represent the education of the emotional life as taking place, not through a course of study, not even as the result of a system of discipline, though both of these things doubtless entered in, but through an initiation. The interpretation of the moon mysteries suggested in the following chapters link our modern life problems to those of the ancient peoples who recognized that in their day, as in ours, the world at times became sterile and was laid waste, not by war or pestilence, but because some essential fertilizing spirit had been withdrawn. Everything became dry and dusty and infertile. . . . [T]he ancients said, in symbolic language, that the moon goddess, goddess of love and fertility, was absent in the land of No-Return, and our modern poets dimly voice the same idea." Id. at xiv-xv. "According to the beliefs of the most primitive peoples, the moon is a kind of beneficent presence whose light is considered, not only favorable, but even indispensable for growth. The moon is a fertilizing force of quite general efficacy. It causes the seeds to germinate and the plants to grow, but its power does not end here, for without its aid animals could not bear young, and women could not have children. In a temperate climate the sun's power is thought of as causing things to grow, but in hot countries the sun seems hostile to life, scorching the young green things and destroying them To those primitive peoples who live in southern climates the sun appears as a force hostile to vegetation and reproduction. To them the moon is the fertilizing power, But strangely enough the belief that the power of growth resides in the moon is not confined to hot climates. [T[he people of Greenland, for instance, hold the same views. To these peoples it is not that the moon represents, or is an emblem of, the power of fertility; that is an altogether modern concept. We know, for instance, that the germ of life is in the seed and the warmth of the sun does but foster the germ. But to the primitive, the seed is an inert mass, like a stone, entirely lacking in any power to grow. To him, that power has to be bestowed on the seed by a fertilizing force, or, perhaps, by a deity of fertility. When he speaks of the moon as possessing and bestowing the power of fertility he means exactly that. It is no facon de parler for him. Plants and seeds would not grow without the influence of the moon. Animals and women cannot bear young without the energizing of the moon. Id. at 21-22. I wonder how many individuals at my yoga class or aware of, and then think about, the significance the the Sun and Moon salutations. "To the ancient and primitive man, the moon was the visible representative of womanhood. The ancients naturally did not understand the nature of the power which they revered in the moon, but we realize that to them it stood as a symbol of the very essence of woman in its contrast to the essence of man." "In the myths and customs outlined in the following chapters, are set forth in shadowy form the feeling, the reaction, which men and women had, not towards a particular woman, not even towards women in general, but to feminineness itself, to the feminine principle which was and is, in spite of the feminist movement and the masculinization of modern woman, the mainspring of woman, controlling both her physical life and her inner psychological being." Id. at 29.).
M. Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, with an introduction by C. G. Jung (Boston & Shaftesbury, 1990) (From Jung's "Introduction": "It is a foregone conclusion among the initiated that men understand nothing of woman's psychology as it actually is, but it is astonishing to find that women do not know themselves. However we are only surprised as long as we naively and optimistically imagine that mankind understands anything fundamental about the soul. Such knowledge and understanding belong to the most difficult tasks an investigating mind can set for itself." Id. at xv. "Soul is here used in a psychological, not a theological, sense. When Jung speaks of the soul he is concerned 'with the psychological recognition of the existence of a semiconscious psychic complex, having a partial autonomy of function." Id. at 8, fn. 1, citations omitted.).
