AGAINST PERFECTION: BALANCING LOVE AND POWER, THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE, THE YIN AND THE YANG

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts) (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1982) ("This book is about taking the head off an evil witch. Lady Macbeth, glued to the sticking-place of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life, will serve as a symbol of the woman robbed of her femininity through her pursuit of masculine goals that are themselves a parody of what masculinity really is. And though in Shakespeare's tragedy it is Macbeth who is beheaded, the head he loses is fatally infected by the witches' evil curse. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are metaphors of the masculine and feminine principles functioning in one person or in a culture, and the deteriorating relationship between them clearly demonstrates the dynamics of evil when the masculine principle loses its standpoint in its own reality, and the feminine principle of love succumbs to calculating, intellectualized ambition. Shakespeare's beheading of his hero-villain is, in the total context of the play, the healing of the country." This book is about a beheading. It has been hewn out of the hard rock of an addiction to perfection." Id at 7. "The I Ching, The Chinese Book of Changes, recognizes the continual shifts that go on within the individual. The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break--and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces. With growing maturity the individual is able to avoid the extreme of either polarity, so that the pendulum does not gain too much momentum by swinging too far to the right only to come crashing back to the left in a relentless cycle of action and reaction, inflation and depression. Rather one recognizes that these poles are the domain of the gods, the extremes of black and white. To identify with one or the other can only lead to plunging into its opposite. The ratio is cruelly exact. The further I move in the white radiance on one side, the blacker the energy that is unconsciously constellating behind my back: the more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I'm going to have in my dreams." Id. at 14-15. "Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are. If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all 'must,' 'ought to,' 'have to.' And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there. Then the house of cards collapses. In trying to live out your principles and ideals, the part that matters the most was lost. The hideous irony then has to be faced. A one woman put it to me: 'I have everything and nothing. By the world's standards, I have everything. By my own heart's standards, I have nothing. I won the battle for my precious independence an lost what was most precious to me. I want to love and be loved but something in me is sending love away. I do not understand.' " "For the person who is living by ideals, the essential problem in relationships usually involves the difference between love and power." Id. at 61-62. I reread this book a few days after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. The following passage seems on point. "In the 20th century, the Christian idea of Hell has relocated itself in the public imagination. Now we fear the criminal underworld that operates as intricately organized hierarchical societies such as the Maia or international terrorist organizations. More and more, as terrorists' bombs explode in parked Volkswagons or as passengers of a 747 are held hostage, or as drugs are peddled in our own schoolyard or as we find ourselves requiring triple locks on our own front doors, we sense that our society is gradually being penetrated by an underground life. This experience, both real and imagined, is a kind of rape. The rape of consciousness by subterranean energies over which we have little control threatened almost everyone's dreams with sinister and infecting fear. Our apparent helplessness before the onslaught of this eruptive world both within and without turns human society and human psyche into a mine field." Id. at 131.).