Remaking Men

Jung, Spirituality and Social Change

David Tacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798798
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

The nature of masculinity is a popular subject for contemporary authors, either treated critically from a sociological standpoint, or analysed from a psychological and spiritual perspective.
In Remaking Men, David Tacey argues that we must strive to bridge the gap between these separate traditions - masculinity should neither be hijacked by the spiritual, Jung-influenced men's movement, nor discussed merely as a product of socio-political forces.
Examining his own and other men's experience in a critical and lively discourse he evades the simplistic optimism of the 'inner journey' approach and the chronic pessimism of contemporary academic arguments. This is a fascinating and very accessible look at masculinity for those who want to explore self and society with intelligence and soul.

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Archetypes, Gods, Men and Women

All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true.

Jung¹

Popular Distortions of Jungian Theory

The advocates of popularised Jungian theory, and the hypercritical opponents of Jung, appear to agree on one thing: that contact with primordial archetypes produces conformity, gender rigidity, and social-political conservatism. For the popular discourses, this is a cause for celebration and joy, since we are restored to our archetypal ‘origins’ and rediscover how we were ‘meant’ to be. For the progressive intellectuals, this spells political disaster, and an achievement of personal stability at the cost of social progress. How, they ask, are we ever to get beyond hegemonic power structures and rigid gender categories if Jungians keep reinventing the past and, moreover, representing such backward thinking as ‘therapy’? Even Kenneth Clatterbaugh, who provides a fairly balanced and even-handed account of the Jung-influenced spiritual men’s movement, remains decidedly ambivalent about the value of archetypal theory. He writes that, if Jungian work puts the seal of spiritual approval upon conventional and oppressive forms, how can Jungian work support or promote change?²

My own view is that the popular Jungians distort Jung’s message, and that the anti-Jungian intellectuals, in turn, read this popular distortion as ‘classical’ Jung. Unfortunately, this comedy of errors, in which unreal ideas about archetypes get circulated and reinforced, is what characterises much popular and academic discourse about Jungian theory at the end of the twentieth century. It is a rather bleak scenario, but Jung himself is not exempt from all moral responsibility, as I will go on to explain shortly.

For popular Jungianism, truth, knowledge and spiritual direction are all ‘down there’, in a treasure chest of eternal wisdom. A certain infantilism is evident in the hapless and desperate stance of a ‘lost’ modern consciousness that renounces responsibility and gives itself over to the direction of primordial archetypal figures. We slink back to the treasure trove of the collective unconscious, like prodigal sons and daughters, prepared to recover the ancient ways of human experience. We idealise the archetypes as all-knowing parental or ancestral figures, and the ‘advice’ that we receive from these reified oracular presences is usually fairly predictable: ‘abandon your wayward paths and return to the tried and true Way of tradition’. In other words, the ‘archetypes’ sound remarkably like social stereotypes, and the voice of wisdom is basically inseparable from the voice of the Freudian superego. If we start worshipping the superego in times of social instability and gender fluidity, it is little wonder that we end up with profoundly reactionary solutions to our social problems. In so much ‘wisdom writing’ in the Jungian vein, whether we turn to Iron John or Women Who Run With the Wolves, the therapeutic advice is the same: give up the ‘errors’ of consciousness and return to the ‘truth’ of the ancestors. ‘To find the Wild Woman, it is necessary for women to return to their instinctive lives, their deepest knowing. Let us . . . shed any false coats we have been given. Don the true coat of powerful instinct and knowing.’³

To me, this reading of psychological experience is illusory. Why must archetypes always be presented in this idealising fashion? Why is society always represented as a ‘false coat’ and denigrated in favour of the ‘truth’ of primordial instinct? If all the answers are buried in the ancient past, what is the point of the present and the future? Why the imbalance of power, and why represent the ego as a passive figure to be freely manipulated by invisible instinctual forces?

This romantic philosophy, which always seems to me to run very close to fascist ideology, engages in a deliberate and systematic infantilisation of Jungian theory. As I read Jung, the primary, undifferentiated, ‘ancestral’ archetypes are to be resisted, and even defeated – certainly not surrendered to in the manner advocated by popular Jungianism. The Great Mother, the Spirit Father, or the Ancestral Archetypes, are presented by Jung as ‘dragons’ to be battled with and heroically resisted by the developing ego consciousness. The notion that we abandon our stance in consciousness and society, and ‘don the true coat’ of primordial archetypes, is actually Jung-in-reverse. Jung spent much of his intellectual energy warning against an unconscious or infantile return to an identification with the archetypal figures.⁴ For Jung, a loss of social awareness and egoic identity in favour of a new identification with archetypes is tantamount to psychological regression and psychosis. ‘For weak-minded persons’, he writes, ‘the danger of yielding to this temptation [identification with the collective psyche] is very great’. The puny mortal, lost and disoriented in the world, gives way to ‘the nostalgia for the source’, and ‘blots out all memory in its embrace’.⁵ In a terrible irony, popular sentiment reads regression as Jungian individuation, and mistakes psychological infantilism for spiritual progress. It is little wonder that creative thinkers, encountering this popular misreading of archetypal theory, dismiss the entire Jung tradition as claptrap.

Jung insists that individuation is above all a dialogue with the unconscious psyche. The ego needs to maintain its essential connection with social reality as it attempts to ‘have it out’ with the unconscious forces. As the ego makes its ‘descent’ for the sake of renewal, it must resist the ‘inertia’ of the unconscious, and the forces that would paralyse it, and maintain its human integrity at all costs. A tell-tale sign of failure is the tendency to inflate one’s significance, so that we suddenly claim to be a ‘Wild Man’ or a ‘Wild Woman’, and not the complex and confused ordinary mortals whom we in fact are. Naturally the writings which encourage these inflations and identifications become best-sellers, and in many recent cases of Jungian work, the temptation of commercial success wins out over psychological truth. It is fatal for the ego to fuse with any one of the archetypes, and those who encourage such fusions must be counted as the enemies of humanity.

The clear-minded Jungian thinker and the responsible analyst do not encourage a mass stampede back to the pristine sources of wisdom. Rather, the ego must be encouraged to accept its own relative confusion and complexity, as well as the burden of its own individuality and personal isolation. When we make contact with the unconscious, and so become privy to some of the collective secrets of the ages, we must compensate for this ‘dialogue with the Gods’ by increased amounts of humour and humility: two of the best antidotes to spiritual arrogance and inflation. The new-age Jungian gurus of our time – to adapt Jung’s own words in a different context – not only ‘accept [this] inflation, but now exalt [it] into a system’.⁶ Popular Jungianism systematically confuses spiritual enlightenment with infantile fixation – an ironic situation, since the popular gurus rarely mention Freud (if they do so, it is only to attack him), and the Freudian realism and capacity for suspicion in Jung’s own work is lost, forgotten, or ignored. Few wish to be reminded of the fact that Jung was, during the early, formative years of his work, a Freudian. The ‘return of the repressed’ in Jungianism will be synonymous with a new and higher regard for the psychoanalytic elements in archetypal psychology. In some ways, we all suffer massively from the Freud/Jung split: Jungian psychology loses itself in fatuous optimism and empty-headed romanticism, whereas an appalling pessimism and a kind of ‘grey realism’ continues to cloud the Freudian tradition.

Archetypes, Time, and Relativity

The romantic idea that the archetypes are fixed in an eternal dream space, and that these stable entities can be accessed by anyone at any time and in any place, has to be contrasted with Jung’s idea that the archetypes are, ‘in themselves’, unknowable and beyond human experience. Jung insisted that the essential nature of the archetype is a metaphysical question. At its core, he argued, it is invisible, empty and without content. As the archetype enters time and space it acquires content and substance, and at this point it becomes an ‘archetypal image’. All we can know, Jung said, are the archetypal images, never the archetypes themselves.⁷ Thus, archetypal images may have universalist or Platonic cores or nuclei, but they are profoundly determined by historical and cultural factors, and by the contingencies of time and space.

Hence the popular Jungian notion that the ‘trickster’ or ‘magician’ figure, for instance, must be the same across cultures and societies, is misleading. There is no such thing as a fixed archetypal figure, since by definition the archetypal figures are caught up in, and subject to, the flux of temporal and historical conditions. However, the sentimental mind does not want to hear about such complexity or relativity. It wants things to be safe and sure, and the ‘archetypes’ must conform to a naive understanding. Because this is what a certain kind of popular mind wants, some Jungian writers construct manuals and textbooks that list the Gods and Goddesses as if they were frozen in time, and immune to cultural difference and relativity. Jean Shinoda Bolen confidently asserts at the beginning of her book, Goddesses in Everywoman: ‘Archetypes exist outside of time. . . . The Greek Goddesses are images of women that have lived in the human imagination for over three thousand years’^.8 This is nonsensical, but of course it sells books and turns those who risk these pronouncements into instant gurus. Bolen’s books, Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman,⁹ are bestsellers precisely because they take intellectual short-cuts, and falsify Jung and his theory of archetypes. The idea that the Gods and Goddesses of Mount Olympus have been living in some suspended animation for thousands of years, and can today be drawn out of this mythic space and brought to life in the same condition in which they existed for ancient Greeks is simply a piece of science fiction. This would make an excellent story-line for Star Trek, but a hopeless work of intellectual theory. While the invisible core-nuclei remain the same, the archetypal figures are hugely conditioned by culture, and cannot be efficiently transported across time and societies. Bolen invites her readers to ‘look up’ this or that archetype, in the promise of figuring out who and what they are, and in the hope of getting to know themselves better. Invariably, readers fantasise themselves into the shape of some noble and exotic form, creating more mental junk and psychobabble that serves merely to alienate them from the true archetypal ground of their being.

In effect, popular Jungianism attempts to turn the archetypes, the seething currents of psychic change and transformative energy, into reliable, predictable, secure, and familiar ‘building blocks’ of lived experience. Bly’s ‘Wild Man’ and Estes’s ‘Wild Woman’ look incredibly tame after they have gone through the mythopoetic mill and become very ‘conscious’ modern clichés. A parallel with theoretical physics suggests itself. The popular image of the archetype can be compared with the premodern Newtonian understanding of matter as fixed foundations or building blocks. However, the archetype is actually closer to the postmodern notions of subatomic quantum physics, which place emphasis on unpredictability, movement, process, self-transformation. Also, in quantum physics the subjective factor is vital: how we look at matter determines in part how it will be perceived. The archetypes are invisible, unformed sources of light and radiance; a veritable ‘Heraclitian fire’ which has nothing cosy, secure or comfortable about it. It is only the social engineering and manipulation of archetypes that produces stereotypes, those entirely predictable and usually conservative constructs of psychosocial reality. Direct encounter with archetypal nuclei can lead to new life or death, transformation or explosion. In the popular mind, the archetype is confused with the stereotype, a confusion which has resulted in the unfair dismissal and discrediting of Jungian theory.

Soul, Gods and Human Identity

In the popular domain, there is a widespread notion that the ancient Gods can provide models of identity and sexuality for boys and men, while the Goddesses provide such models for women and girls. The origins of this notion are obvious: the Gods are felt to be masculine archetypal essences that have a bearing on males, while the Goddesses represent feminine styles appropriate for women. However, this simple equation is mistaken, mainly because the Gods and Goddesses represent metaphorical possibilities within the human psyche, and cannot be neatly parcelled out to this or that gender. The masculinity of the Gods and the femininity of the Goddesses must not be equated with the maleness of men and the femaleness of women. To make such an equation is to engage in concrete or literal thinking, to read the mythical deities as men and women rather than as immortal archetypal beings.

I have frequently encountered the view that in personal disorientation or crisis, one simply has to make contact with a mythical figure which is of the same sex as oneself, and one can be assured of renewal, increased strength, and personal meaning. This is a convenient fiction which may actually work for some people and may be demonstrably true in certain circumstances. However, despite obvious differences between men and women in bodily structure and social conditioning, I do not believe that men have one kind of soul and women another. Archetypal energies flow through the psyche of whatever sex: archetypes do not obey the gendered distinctions and barriers that may be important in the social and political sphere. As James Hillman has said, ‘an archetype as such cannot be attributed to or located within the psyche of either sex’.¹⁰

In ancient times, the polymorphous nature of the soul was honoured and respected. There was no simple determinism that linked the gender of the God with the gender of human beings. The Great Goddess Athena commanded followers and devotees from the entire community. Dionysus was a male God, but his disciples were mostly women. The cults of Aphrodite involved both men and women. Similarly, men and women worshipped at the shrines of Poseidon or Zeus; men and women prayed to Hestia, invoked Apollo or Hermes, or sought guidance from Hecate. The soul is androgynous, perhaps because it is not entirely or quite human, connecting us to a deep, profound, fluid level of psyche where contradictory forces continually interact, where fixed positions are dissolved, and where one trait or attribute often changes into another.

The popular fusion of archetype and gender is, at bottom, a symptom of the nervousness of our time, an attempt to create a fixed world order amid the chaos of contemporary experience. It is also a fundamental and determined resistance to the bisexuality or androgyneity of the soul. The soul, as both Freud and Jung knew, is structurally bisexual, but many of us cannot cope with that and want to cling to the apparent solidity of a single psychosexual identity. Our indwelling souls are bisexual, but we want to belong only to one sex. A woman might announce, after reading Goddesses in Everywoman, ‘I find my mythic pattern best reflected in Artemis-Diana'; a man might claim, after studying Iron John, that he finds his deepest nature to be embodied in the figure of the Warrior-Hero. Yet a depth psychological analysis of the same people might reveal that the woman is actually governed by a Zeus or Jupiter complex, and the man is actually the son-lover of the Great Goddess. These people would serve their spiritual growth better by acknowledging and honouring these transgendered archetypal identities. We must learn to serve and follow whatever it is in the psyche that wants to appear. But we should not underestimate the importance of our all-too-human fear of internal complexity and bisexuality. In contemporary times, fear of the opposite sex has reappeared as a psychospiritual phobia to the bisexual nature of the indwelling soul.

While it seems that the soul is androgynous, and that our archetypal options are many and diverse, it is also apparent that the limited human self that experiences the archetypal field remains profoundly gendered. We are not the Gods and Goddesses; ‘we’, as experiencing subjects, are bound by time, space, and the body. The subjective ego-self that experiences the objective God-self is incarnated as a specific gender. Thus, we do not, or most certainly should not, describe ourselves as being Athena, Artemis, or Hermes, but rather as the ‘son’ of Athena or the ‘daughter’ of Hermes. This is not only an appropriate recognition of our incarnated selfhood, but also an appropriate recognition of our humility before the Gods. Our experience of gender remains a deep para...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• POLEMICAL INTRODUCTION: JUNGIAN THOUGHT AND THE POST-PATRIARCHAL PSYCHE
• 1 ARCHETYPES, GODS, MEN AND WOMEN
• 2 THE FATHER'S ABSENCE AND DEVOURING PRESENCE
• 3 CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS OF FEMININE MEN
• 4 RITES AND WRONGS OF PASSAGE
• 5 HOMOEROTIC DESIRE AND THE FATHERING SPIRIT
• 6 STRUGGLING WITH THE INTERNAL TYRANT
• 7 UNPROFESSIONAL WORK: EMBRACING THE ANIMA
• 8 CONCLUSION: REVOLUTION IN THE SOUL
• Notes
• Index