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She
Robert A. Johnson
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eBook - ePub
She
Robert A. Johnson
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About This Book
Robert A. Johnson's groundbreaking, brilliant, and insightful work on how women transition into being mature and developing their own identityânewly reissued.
What does it mean to be a woman? What is the pathway to mature femininity? And what of the masculine components of a woman's personality?
Many scholars and writers have long considered that the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche is really the story of a woman's task of becoming whole, complete, and individuated. Here, examining this ancient story in depth and lighting up the details, Robert A. Johnson has produced an arresting and perceptive exploration of what it means to become a woman. You will not read these pages without understanding the important women in your life and a good deal about yourself as a woman.
More important than ever before, She offers a compelling study of women.
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The Tasks
The tasks Aphrodite lays out for poor Psyche constitute one of the most profound psychological statements in literature. The modern mind cries out, âYes, thank you for all the theory, but what do I doâ. This part of our myth lays out a more coherent pattern of development for the feminine principle than anything else available. The fact that the story is drawn from an era long ago in our psychic history does not make it less applicable, but rather honors its universality and timelessness. Countless prescriptions exist for the masculine way; but our story is one of the few feminine ways in our heritage.
After Psyche has survived Aphroditeâs vitriolic tirade she receives instructions so specific as to thrill one. But why should we have to go to Aphrodite for this? Nowhere else! Psychological events come in a package; naivete, problem, waiting, and solution are neatly done up in one coherent structure.
THE FIRST TASK
Aphrodite shows Psyche a huge pile of seeds of many different kinds mixed together and tells her she must sort these seeds before nightfall or the penalty will be death. Then Aphrodite sweeps off grandly to a wedding festival. Psyche is left with this impossible task. She weeps and decides on suicide again.
An army of ants comes to her rescue. They sort the seeds with great industry and accomplish the task by nightfall. Aphrodite returns and begrudgingly concedes that for a good-for-nothing Psyche has done tolerably well.
What a beautiful bit of symbolism; a pile of seeds to sort! In so many of the practical matters of life, in the running of a household, for example, or its parallel in a professional life, the challenge is to make form and order prevail. Whether it is the cry from down the hall, âMom, where is my other sock?â or the shopping list, or a new outline for that manuscriptâall this is sorting, order and form. Without that essential task of establishing form there would be chaos.
When a man makes love to a woman, he gives her seeds in vast number. She has to choose one and begin the miracle of birth. Nature in her Aphrodite character produces so much! Woman in her sorting capacity must choose one seed and bring it to fruition.
Most cultures try to eliminate this sorting and ordering through custom and law. They stipulate what a woman shall do and this saves her from having to sort. Monday is for washing, Tuesday is for ironing, etc. We are free people and have no such safeguards. A woman must know how to differentiate, how to sort creatively. To do this she needs to find her ant-nature, that primitive, chthonic, earthy quality which will help her. The ant-nature is not of the intellect; it does not give us rules to follow; it is a primitive, instinctive, and quiet quality, legitimately available to women.
Each woman has her own proficiency in this sorting attribute. Tasks can be done in a kind of geometric way, the nearest one first, or the one closest to a feeling value first. In this simple, earthy way you can break the impasse of too-muchness.
It is easy to overlook another dimension of the sorting processâthe inner one. Just as much material comes from the unconscious demanding to be sorted as comes from our modern too-much-with-us outer world. It is the special provence of a woman to sort in this inner dimension and protect herself and her family from the inner floods which are at least as damaging as the too-muchness of our outer world. Feelings, values, timing, boundariesâthese are wonderful sorting grounds which produce such high values. And they are special to woman and femininity.
One may view a marriage as two people standing back to back, each protecting the other in a particular way. It is the feminine task to protect not only herself but her man and her family from the dangers of the inner world; moods, inflations, excesses, vulnerabilities, and what used to be called possessions. These are things a womanâs genius can manage much better than a manâs. Usually he has his own task in facing the outer world and keeping his family safe. There is a particular danger in the modern attitude in which both people face the outer world, both spend their time in outer things. This leaves the inner world unprotected and many dangers creep into the household through this unprotected quarter. Children are particularly vulnerable to this unprotectedness.
When a marriage begins the partners are like two discrete circles overlapping a little. The division between the two is great and each has specific tasks. As the marriage partners grow older, each learns a bit of the otherâs genius, and finally the two circles overlap more and more.
Dr. Jung tells the story of a man who came for treatment of an ailment. When asked to share his dreams he replied that he never dreamed but that his six-year-old son dreamed most vividly. Dr. Jung asked him to record his sonâs dreams. The man brought his sonâs dreams for several weeks and then suddenly began dreaming himself. The sonâs overblown dreams stopped immediately! Dr. Jung explained that the man, unwittinglyâfor he had fallen into the usual modern collective attitude towards such thingsâhad failed to take care of an important dimension of his own life and the son had been obliged to bear that burden for him. If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life, which is hidden in your unconscious until you are ready to face it directly.
Generally it is the woman who tends these inner fires, but in this example it was the fatherâs task that had fallen onto the child. When we speak of masculine and feminine it must remain clear that we are not talking exclusively about male and female. A manâs feminine side may take on the task we usually think of as belonging to a woman and vice versa.
THE SECOND TASK
The second of Psycheâs tasks, arrogantly and insultingly set out by Aphrodite, is to go to a certain field across a river and gather some of the golden fleece of the rams pastured there. She is to be back by nightfall, on pain of death.
Psyche must be very brave, perhaps foolhardy, if she is to accomplish this dangerous task, for the rams are very fierce. Once more she collapses and thinks of suicide. She goes toward the river which separates her from the field of the sun-rams, intending to throw herself in. But just at the critical moment the reeds on the riverâs edge speak to her and give her advice.
The reeds, humble products of the place where water meets land, tell Psyche not to go near the rams during the daylight hours to gather wool. If she did she would immediately be battered to death. Instead, she should go at dusk and take some of the wool that has been brushed off by the brambles and low hanging boughs of a grove of trees. There she will get enough of the golden fleece to satisfy Aphrodite without attracting the attention of the rams. Psyche is told not to go directly to the rams or try to take the golden fleece by force; the rams would be very dangerous if approached in this way. She is to approach these dangerous bull-headed, aggressive beasts only indirectly.
Masculinity often looks ram-like to a woman when it comes time for her to assimilate a little of that quality into her interior life. Imagine a very feminine woman at the beginning of her life looking at the modern world and knowing that she must make her way through it. She fears that she will be killed, bludgeoned to death, or depersonalized by the ram nature of the patriarchal, competitive, impersonal society in which we live.
The ram represents a great, instinctive, masculine, elemental quality that can erupt unexpectedly as an invading complex within a personality. This power is awesome and numinous like the experience of the burning bush. Forces and powers in the depths of the unconscious that can overwhelm the conscious ego if they are not handled correctly.
Our myth gives explicit instruction on how Psyche may wisely approach the ram power. She is not to go to it in the heat of the day but at dusk; and she is to take fleece that has gathered on the twigs and branches, not directly from the rams. Too many modern people think that power is to be had only by wrenching out a handful of fleece from the back of a ram and going off in triumph in the noonday sun. Since power is such a double-edged sword, it is a good rule to take only as much as one needsâand that as quietly as possible. To underdo power is to remain dominated by interior parental voices. Overdoing power can quickly become abusive and rampage about leaving behind wreckage and destruction.
John Sanford, author and therapist, observes that if a young person takes drugs his ego may not be strong enough to withstand the massive interior experience he encounters; he may be obliterated. This would be taking on the ram-power directly or in too great of a quantity. We moderns, men and women, are grasping a ram of massive proportions that may turn on us and destroy us. Our myth cautions us to take the power we need, sacrifice what is not required, and keep power and relatedness in proportion.
The idea of having to take the remnants, just the scrapings of logos, the masculine rational scientific energy, off the boughs, may sound intolerable to a modern woman. Why should a woman have to take just a little of this quality? Why canât she simply pin down the ram, take his fleece, and leave triumphantly like a man?
Delilah did just this and made a great power play of it. She left much destruction in her wake. The Psyche myth tells us that a woman can obtain the necessary masculine energy for her purposes without a power play. Psycheâs way is much gentler. She does not have to turn into a Delilah and kill a Sampson in order to obtain power.
This bit of mythology raises a very large question for modern people: how much masculine energy is enough? I think there are no limits so long as a woman remains centered in her feminine identity and only uses her masculine energy in a subsidiary way and as a conscious tool. So also with a man: he may use as much feminine energy as he can so long as he remains a man using his feminine side in a conscious way. Too much of either can cause a great deal of trouble.
THE THIRD...