Jungian Masculine and Feminine Psyches
I'm in the process of finishing "Amor and Psyche," a book by the great Jungian writer Erich Neumann. It struck me that Jung's concept of the masculine and feminine is resonant with evolutionary theory. I decided to lay out some thoughts.
The idea that both a masculine and feminine psyche exist — and that they're distinct — echoes evolutionary biology, of course. For evolutionary biologists, contemporary differences between men in women in terms of their behaviors stretches way back to ancient differences in mating strategies between the sexes. That is, men and woman today do act differently. They do so because over millennia the sexes have employed different sets of strategies for propagating their genes into the future. For biologists, therefore, the notion of a "masculine" and "feminine" approach to life makes intuitive sense.
To give a crude example, the male sex of our human species has often engaged in trial-by-combat in order to earn a mate. Females have not. They do not fight for men; men fight for women, and some men win.
And to the victors go the spoils, right?
Well not exactly. It turns out females are not so passive in this process, but rather, because they benefit from these sorts of male strategies, they have permitted it. It is beneficial to females that men earn their status. Simply put, the male practice of combat weeds out low-status men, allowing females to identify the "worthy" ones. You might say the masculine system of trial by combat serves female genetic interests. By allowing masculine aggression to develop and play itself out, woman have positioned themselves to sit back and simply "select" from among the winners.
To reiterate: under this system, men engage in a unique behavior for securing mates (i.e., combat), and women engage in a different behavior for securing mates (e.g., settling for the winners of trial-by-combat). Notice that for men, a process of "rising to the top" is important. In this process, knowledge of personal strengths and weaknesses is absolutely crucial, as is being able to (almost subconsciously) identify strengths and weaknesses in other males who may pose a threat at some future point.
Physically weak men are eliminated immediately in this system of combat. Stronger men, however, may test their mettle against each other, with the victor decided based on chance and the ability to draw upon unique individual strengths. Or, one man may gain an edge by exploiting the weaknesses of others. Another may do so by wisely timing his combat against a stronger opponent. Whatever the case, the important thing here is the recognition of individual traits. Males must recognize their own weaknesses while simultaneously utilizing their strengths. This is a self-conscious, individually-oriented psyche.
But for women, things are different. Women as a group select from among the victors. They do not engage in person-to-person combat. Rather, women allow the winners of sexual games to mate with them — the strongest knight, the best poet, the most successful farmer, etc. Theirs is a collective action of observation and non-interference in masculine games. Not merely spectators, their role in reproduction is expensive and must be guarded. This is a necessary strategy that is balanced by male-male competition.
Put differently, men put themselves in harm's way (combat), potentially dying in the process, while women pick up the winners from the heap (an oversimplification, but you get the point). This is why femininity is often conceptualized as "passive" or "receptive."
Women do not have to "rise to the top" here. While there is female-female competition, women are more attuned to social games and social relationships. Their existence is more collective than it is for men. As Dr. Roy F. Baumeister notes, "For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe." This is more difficult than it sounds. It means being keenly aware of social dynamics, and of the politics of social relationships.
So it might be said that for men, a process of individual development and testing is paramount. A mind attuned to the individual has therefore been cultivated in men by evolution. Moreover, a different sort of psyche has been cultivated in women, one based around social relationships. This is why men tend to be the exploratory sex, and why it is "so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions" (Baumeister, 2007). It would be stupid for the sex that selects to do this, because it would put their genes in unnecessary jeopardy. Men, however, are those hoping to be selected. They are "disposable." Evolutionarily, the name of the game for men is Get Your Genes Into the Future, at whatever cost to yourself. It makes more sense then for them to to try new things, to experiment, even to jeopardize their lives.
This all goes back to "Amor and Psyche," in which Erich Neumann makes a claim that echoes everything stated above. According to him, the feminine psyche is far more collective than individual (p. 113), just as our sexual evolutionary history might suggest. For Neumann, this collective feminine psyche is deeply concerned with relatedness. For females, the question "who is related to whom" is paramount. This might be generalized to say that maintaining and developing knowledge about social positions and relationships is important. In either case, it is not individual achievement that matters for women.
Conversely, for men, kin and social relationships might be important only insofar as they bulwark against personal failure. For them, it would be personal achievement that matters, not relationships per se. However, that would be a somewhat unrelated argument.
What is relevant is that what it means to be a woman has an evolutionary history. Womanhood may be an ideal that varies from culture to culture, but it is not arbitrary. It has emerged out of sexual mating strategies that stretch into the darkness of pre-prehistory, back to the development of anisogamy (i.e., the emergence of two distinct sexes).
However, at some point, purely mechanistic reproductive processes transformed, and became more complex. This occurred because humans attained consciousness. At that point, sexual selection and pair bonding began to become distinctly "human." The story of Amor and Psyche tracks this development (if we take Neumann's analysis of it). It is a story about the emergence of the human feminine psyche via the phenomenon of love. In fact, it equates feminine consciousness with love itself, and appears to argue that one could not have occurred without the other.
In this myth, the goddess Aphrodite plays the antagonist to the Psyche, a beautiful mortal woman. The goddess here represents love in its most primitive form. Her "beauty, seductiveness, and pleasure" should be seen as instincts that merely "[serve] the primordial-maternal purpose of the species" (pp. 87-88). Therefore, Aphrodite symbolizes the undifferentiated sexual drive. The force that impels creatures — plant and animal alike — to procreate (p. 88).
As the story progresses, Psyche comes to be visited nightly by Amor, the young god of love, and Aphrodite's son. One night, while he sleeps, Psyche "illuminates" the dark room in which she and her lover lie. She discovers that she has been sleeping with a god, and at the same time unwittingly pricks herself with one of his arrows. Instantly, she falls in love with Amor. (It is interesting to note that the archetype of The Lovers is represented as having been "born" in the darkness of the unconscious).
Here, the important thing is that Psyche's enlightenment coincides with the dawning of her own capacity to experience human love. In this sense, human consciousness emerges from "the dark room" of the unconscious, thus ending "the mythical age" of the archetype in which all unconscious creatures reside (p. 86). But most salient is that this consciousness is suggested to be intertwined with human love itself.
At any rate, Psyche's enlightenment (her newfound consciousness and love) comes with a price. Aphrodite, symbol of that primordial unconscious sexual force, is outraged, and demands that Psyche perform 4 impossible tasks:
First, Psyche must collect and organize an impossibly large heap of seeds. Secondly, she must collect a strand of wool from Apollo's aggressive and bloodthirsty sheep. Thirdly, Psyche must capture water from a high stream that feeds the river of the Underworld — the River Styx.
All of these tasks Neumann regards as encounters with the masculine, namely, masculine promiscuity, violent or deadly masculinity, and the uncontainable masculine, respectively (p. 118).
In every task, Psyche finds assistance, first by a colony of ants, then by a reed growing in a shallow pool of water, then by Zeus's own eagle. But her final labor must be alone. She must journey into the Underworld and retrieve a box from Persephone, which she succeeds in doing. However, she fails to heed the warning not to open the box, and falls into a deathlike sleep as a consequence.
However, for the sake of this short journal entry. The idea here is simply to outline how this overlaps with our evolutionary past and with the role of narrative in making sense of reality. Psyche's story delves into the depths of our unconscious origins, and retrieves something which stands as a sort of literary argument: love and consciousness, at least for the feminine aspect, are one and the same.
Love is born in the darkness of the unconscious. The feminine is most acutely aware of this love, and is responsible for bringing it into being most completely. That is the feminine burden. Whereas the masculine hero must journey into the belly of the beast, feminine individuation requires accepting the dark side of masculinity without recoiling from it. The Great Mother (Aphrodite) demands complete femininity (p. 113), but a girl must become a woman, and understand masculinity properly. Her youth and beauty must be sacrificed.
At the same time, femininity cannot be lost. It is integral to the fabric of human reality. Neumann (citing Briffault) suggests that the feminine concern for relatedness undergirds all of human civilization by playing a pivotal role in the formation and maintenance of social units. In this sense, the feminine is more powerful than we imagine. It is the life force of our communities.
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