Feminist Views from Somewhere

Post-Jungian themes in feminist theory

Leslie Gardner, Frances Gray, Leslie Gardner, Frances Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317484479
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Feminist Views from Somewhere: Post-Jungian Themes in Feminist Theory explores what and how Jungian thought contributes to feminist thinking. Broadly speaking, feminist thinking, or thinking by and about women as autonomous, intelligent and independent agents, has opened up scholarship through insightful, reflective critique and practice. This is the starting point of this collection from a range of theorists, interested in the multiple concerns of Jungian and analytical psychology.

The contributors take a unique approach to Jungian thinking. Rather than focusing on its mythological aspects, the authors develop alternative, feminist approaches that enhance the appreciation of the possibilities for Jungian and post-Jungian studies.

With a primarily theoretical orientation, the rigorous, critical approaches in the collection highlight the possibilities of imaginative Jungian theory. Divided into three parts, 'Viewing Earth', 'Clinical Perspectives' and 'Literary Landscapes', the chapters cover themes including embodiment, intersubjectivity, individuation and narrative. The contributors vividly reflect the range and diversity of opinions amongst women influenced by Jungian thought. Feminist Views from Somewhere is essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, women's studies and gender studies, as well as analytical psychologists in practice and in training.

PART I
Theme: Viewing Earth

1
WOMEN AND LAND

Reflections on Physicality

Lyn Cowan

In recent years I have become increasingly occupied with thoughts about physicality, about the place of the body in depth psychology, and particularly with my own body – that of me which is of the Earth, dirt, clay, sand, dead leaves, scrub brush, and still sprouting a seedling of something new now and then. It is this humus as much as the imagination that makes me one of the human species and connects me to all other living things on Earth. James Hillman wrote that “concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors,”¹ which means to me that the body must have co-primacy of place in my imagination. This would not have been possible in the 1950s in America, when I came of age, because my female body then was considered useful or valuable only for the sexual pleasure it could provide men and for making babies. (And it had to look like Marilyn Monroe.)

My body doesn’t work as well as it once did, and some parts hardly work at all, but my memory is sharp and my mind is intact, even retaining a certain suppleness and flexibility – in some ways, more so than in decades past. And so this latest concern with body is joined with another ongoing concern: language. How to speak the psyche’s reality in its own language? If, as I think (following Jung), the psyche’s mother tongue is the language of metaphor, then such speaking and writing must also be metaphorical language. Psychological writing is literary writing. Conceptual language, while often conveying deeply interesting and important ideas, has never touched me emotionally. Only the language of metaphor – poetry, literature, drama – can do this. And so I am casting this essay in the form of a reflection, a reminiscence, a metaphorical tour of that “citadel” and the land on which it lives.

Those things about which we ought to be most conscious and to which we ought to be most naturally and organically connected, are just those things from which cultural attitudes, prejudice, and history cut us off and keep us unconscious. I imagine as a psychological ideal an adaptation in which we have a sharper, instinctive sense of our own physical bodies, a sensitivity to wild animals and their habitats as we are co-relatives and co-habitants, a responsiveness to climate, and an appreciation of the land itself.

Urban dwellers are perhaps most vulnerable to this kind of unconsciousness. Fitness programs, ski weekends, camping trips, and vacation tours to Mount Rushmore are fun but not radical attempts to see through to how subverted we’ve been and how deeply disconnected we are from the very ground on which we walk. It is no wonder that in our culture we do not usually and respectfully take off our shoes and call our ground “holy.”

The fact and idea of “ground,” its physicality, is worth examining as an experience from the perspective of the soul, and especially from a soul in exile from its ancestral land.

I used to think “land” was just “dirt.” I used to think “land” was just “the ground,” not hearing any metaphorical resonance in that, no deeper sense of ground, being grounded, standing one’s ground. Ground was just something you were not supposed to be under, because if you were it meant you were a political threat or you were dead. “Ground” is not a very romantic word; it sometimes carries a suggestion of defeat, or exhaustion: being ground down, the daily grind, knocked flat on the ground, having the ground give way under you.

But “land” is nearly always a poetic, romantic word, a word that often appears with other pleasant, poetic words: the land of the free, a land of milk and honey, a green and verdant land, home land, promised land. We don’t want to give ground, but we ask to be given land, lots of land.

Since I am only one part rural and three parts urban, my images of land have been somewhat romanticized in the absence of a solid, grounded relationship to land. I didn’t even make mud pies when I was a kid. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942, and I knew only cement until I was six years old. I walked to school and back every day, but what I saw were cement and iron fences, cement and brownstone houses, cement and asphalt roads, cement sidewalks and cement subways.

Then, in 1951, we moved to a house my parents bought on Long Island. We were first-generation suburbanites, living just a few miles from famous Levittown in a large subdivision of houses still under construction when we moved in. There was dirt everywhere, of which my mother complained – we were not to track it in, the dust was impossible, there was gravel in the new wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, when would they finish paving the roads already? My father set about immediately covering the exposed ground outside around the house, as if its nakedness were a silent criticism of his husbandry. The dirt of the plot was graded and topsoiled and graded again, and rocks were hand-picked out. We had a corner plot, and my father put little stakes all around it with little white rag strips hanging down. This was to keep human feet off the new grass that had been planted. Narrow cement walks were laid to the front and side doors.

None of us ever thought of this little corner plot as our land, our ground. We thought of it, and spoke of it, as “the house” and “the lawn.” We lived in the house, and the lawn lived around us. For me growing up there and imagining my future, the “plot” came to mean a fearful conspiracy to trap me into the crushing conformity of suburban life.

But there was a rural part of me too. My grandfather owned about 200 acres in what was then a secluded, forested, mildly mountainous region of central New Jersey. I spent summers there for 16 years, although I only remember the years beginning at age six when I started riding horseback. When I was there, in the late 1940s and through the fifties, there were few paved roads, houses were miles apart and most of them were farmhouses. Within just half a mile of my grandfather’s house you could be lost in the forest, and my cousin and I often were. But still, all that acreage in New Jersey, all that wilderness, that freedom of movement and sense of expansion – the exhilaration of unlimited possibilities because no one seemed to own all that land – with all this, there was no conception in my family of “the land,” not even “our land.” It was “property.” Buildable, developable, taxable, rentable, appreciable property.

Brooklyn cement, Long Island plot, New Jersey property. These are not nourishing, romantic, poetic images. They are images of constrained living, with fixed social conventions and rarely questioned attitudes, life measured in square feet and acres, quality of life measured in the absence of weeds in the lawn.

My family was not psychologically able to put down roots that penetrated through the concrete; they were not able to develop and transmit to me a sense of rootedness and being grounded, even though they owned some land and the titles to it were legally secure. I do not think this was because they were just greedy materialists or because they were shallow and incapable of psychological depth. Not at all. I think it was rather that the collective prevailing attitude of controlling the land took as its sacrifice a sense of working with the land. And secondly I think it was because my family are all Jews, which historically has meant (among other things) a condition of exile and forced wandering. Our attitude toward land was conditioned more by our long Jewish history of migrancy than by the fact of actual ownership in modern America. After centuries of displacements, it is hard to settle down in just a generation or two.

One’s ethnic history determines the basic formations of one’s psyche, its geological configurations, if you will. But however modern and removed from the past we may think we are, psyche remembers the great mythic images of land: virginal and unspoiled, lush, like a woman’s body: wild in dance, soft, curved, vulnerable to plows, receptive to seed, and capable of erupting with furious volcanic passion in fire that can melt rock and destroy what men have built. The somewhat romantic notion some of us have about “returning to nature” or “communing with nature” or “getting back to nature” is a recognition that we are separated from nature; we do not even know that we are nature. It is a double metaphor expressing the psychological reality that we have lost, or been robbed of, the sense of the natural world and the sensuality of our natural bodies. The separation of a woman from her “land” is an interior separation of a woman from her own body: both land and body have been appropriated to an unnatural degree primarily for male purposes, and both have become property, with all that implies: territorial rights, boundaries, No Trespassing signs, and control of production and reproduction. The evidence for this is everywhere visible in the world, under the guises of religion, politics, or commerce. And after all, a husband is both a keeper of the land and a husband with a wife.

I know in myself and in my body volcanic rage that accompanies enforced exile from the land. I know this in my blood as a Jew, having witnessed in my own lifetime both Holocaust and re-creation of homeland in Israel. And I know the rage that is the proper and inevitable response of the dispossessed – of Native Americans, of Palestinians, of Syrian children, of African girls, too many instances to cite – and the fury that comes when my rage is dismissed as paranoia or personal psychopathology. It may be more than just a quirky personal association on my part to note that the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps were built of cement, and so are our so-called freeways and other reinforced concrete bunkers in our minds.

My own roots have to pierce through the concrete of Brooklyn pavement if I am to be grounded and rooted at all. I was born separated from the Earth by femaleness, by Jewishness, and by concrete, and at a time when my people were being returned by the millions to the Earth in ashes. And I believe that as women we share a collective psychic ground, which has also been covered over by concrete so that we often cannot see it, and sometimes we cannot even feel it.

The ancient image of women in relation to land is that women are land; but the reality of our lives is that this image has been both degraded and overly romanticized – and also concretized (made literal) so that we do not truly own our bodies anymore than we truly own any land. Most of the land now belongs to giant agri-businesses, or oil companies, or banks, or is owned by the State, to be controlled, managed, zoned, preserved or reserved, as if the living Earth – woman – doesn’t know how or can’t be trusted to take care of herself, and is incapable of self-possession.

We have to go under ground to find out who we are as women; self-knowledge requires that we be psychologically subversive. We are not just potentially fertile females waiting to be plowed and fulfilled – this is a male idea of woman-as-land. Under the ground, under this male image of land, there is another reality – other images of women’s bodily and psychological reality. “Underground” is not just mysteriously dark and sexually damp, it is also brightly lit with hot fires at the Earth’s core that keeps Earth alive with body heat; there are vast expanses of thick continental shelves, moving in shifts of slow, sure power to change the face of the world. Beneath the surface there are coral beds, artesian wells, oil deposits, icebergs, and fossils. All of which may have many meanings attached to them – coral beds of deceptive beauty and natural formations, wells of clean renewal, unlimited wealth of valuable deposits as yet unclaimed by women, icebergs of implacable purpose and hatred where necessary, and fossils – the memory of our foremothers, whose bodies bore us and whose images are still imprinted in our souls as rock, even though long sealed and buried under layers of soil and oppression. Remember Rosa Parks, carrying the fatigue of centuries, tired after a hard day’s work, who sat like an immovable rock on an ordinary bus one day in Alabama, and whose “No” (the one word most commonly forbidden to women) helped ignite the volcanic eruption of a human rights movement. Remember Malala Yousafzai, young in years but ancient in wisdom, beautiful in compassion for her sisters, resisting with the power of spirit the guns of those who would destroy her.

A double reclamation of land by women has to take place. Literally, we must reclaim the land as Earth because she is our mother, and without her to nourish and provide foundation we all perish, and other species with us. The second reclamation is psychological: we need to reclaim the land and give it dignity in the form of our own bodies. We need to re-image land from a female imagination. This is a compelling necessity for women, whose bodies have been imaged in metaphors of Earth and ground and land and treated patriarchally and patronizingly the same way: owned, rented, harvested, exploited, exhausted, platted, plotted, parceled out, covered over, landscaped, plowed, stripped, furrowed, seeded, fenced, staked out, claimed, bought and sold. Even though every woman has an absolute, rightful claim to her own body, historically it too often has been physically hazardous, psychologically crippling, spiritually exhausting, and economically suicidal for her to exercise that claim, when it has been possible for her to do so at all. And in too many places of the world, at this moment, it is still so.

One of the ways this reclamation takes place is through memory. This is one of the ways historians and storytellers keep us alive. Think of Maya Angelou, who took the pain inflicted on her own body and helped work the redemption of her ancestors and sisters and mothers and daughters through the poetry of her story. I think of my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, who conveyed to me the dignity and determination to survive that characterized our people’s history through suffering, even though she struggled with a language that was not her own, and I received it more through the cellular memory of my body than through the understanding of my mind.

Another way of reclaiming our land, our bodies, is through poetry, a sensual body and language of images that speaks the way the land itself speaks: in pulsing rhythms, currents of rivers, falls of water, aspirations and hopes of mountain peaks, desolate beauty of deserts, and the horror and ugliness of landfills and toxic waste dumps. Women who are filmmakers, novelists, musicians, sculptors, intellectual theorists, gardeners, mothers, innovators in all areas of life – these women are at work reclaiming our creative ground: their generative work is regeneration for all of us, for we need their art, their produce, to live and to provide a future for our planet. Writers like Toni Morrison, filmmakers like Marleen Gorris, sculptors like Liza Todd, gardeners like my friend Bonnie Fisher, and farmers like my friend Anda Divine, all multiplied a million times over now and through past centuries, fertilize and feed us. Theirs is the fruit of the Earth.

Another way of reclaiming the land is the concrete working of it. This is very different from working concrete over it, which was the only way I knew as a child. Working it, tending it, turning it over, planting it, worrying about the weather and insects and diseases, dreaming it, sifting through it, feeding it, watering it, dancing on it, clearing it, leaving parts of it alone for a while – all of these are the labors of land workers, and they are also the labors of women caring for their physical and psychic bodies. One’s psyche is a farm and must be worked the same way. One’s physical body needs all this farming and one’s soul needs all this cultivating. Like the land, we are seasonal, we have psychological cycles and metabolic rhythms. And sometimes the process of reclamation, of restoring ourselves, requires a seventh day (or month, or year) of complete rest.

I don’t know if death is the “last thing” or not, but I do know it is inevitable. I know this intellectually, of course, but I know it more surely in my body, which registers the smallest gradations of decline every day. But meanwhile, there is life to live and work to do. So I want to end here with part of a poem by Gertrud Kolmar, a German Jewis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on contributors
• Background
• Introduction: Feminist views from somewhere?
• Part I Theme: Viewing Earth
• Part II Theme: Clinical Perspectives
• Part III Theme: Literary Landscapes
• Appendix Voices from the IAJS forum October – December 2013
• Index