Haunted by the Voice of Jung: Women’s Power on the Path of Individuation

In her two-essay “manifesto” titled Women and Power, English scholar and classicist Mary Beard (2017) traces the silencing of women’s voices from “very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’” (p. 3). Beard (2017) recounts a moment in Homer’s Odyssey when Penelope enters the great hall of her palace to find a gathering of men, listening to a bard performing epic songs about the tragedies of Greek heroes. When Penelope suggests that the bard sing something a bit more cheerful, her son Telemachus banishes her from the hall, suggesting that she “‘take up [her] own work, the loom and the distaff…speech will be the business of men’” (Beard, 2017, p. 4).

Beard (2017) points out that women in the classical world were not only denied visibility in the public sphere (e.g., they had no voting rights, no economic independence, etc.), but, more significantly, they effectively had no power by which to change their circumstances because their voices were not heard. Beard (2017) emphasizes that “public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. To become a man…was to claim the right to speak” (p. 17). Furthermore, Beard (2017) asserts, there were classical writers who “insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state” (p. 19).

There is power in the female voice, power that so threatens the male order that men have silenced it since antiquity, while convincing women instead that they are weak, their voices shrill, and they have nothing of significance to say. The silencing of women’s voices continues generation after generation and is so deeply buried in the collective unconscious that Western civilization convinces itself that women’s voices have found their expression in modernity by the sheer fact that, at least some of them, sometimes, speak. But to conflate a woman’s speech with the expression of a woman’s voice is to misunderstand not only the distinction between the embodied, affect-toned, dynamic voice and symbolic, logos-driven speech, but to misunderstand, at a core level, the transgenerational trauma that every woman living under patriarchy has carried in her body and her psyche since antiquity that colludes in keeping her quiet. While the field of depth psychology purportedly makes the healing of trauma its business, it cannot heal—without bringing into consciousness—what amounts to its own unconscious complex: the ubiquitous silencing of women that walks side by side as the shadow to the amplified voices of men.

The field of depth psychology, which emerged, in part, from the studies of the classics in which Freud and Jung engaged, is haunted by the voices of men and the silencing of women. To study Jung—to identify as or to become “a Jungian”—is to rehearse and regurgitate Jung’s voice, extracted and deduced from his experiences: his exile from the psychoanalytic community, his insights and shortcomings, and his eventual avowal of his own individuated voice as distinct from Freud’s. To be a Jungian is to learn and remember what Jung said, until it adheres to the inner walls of one’s psyche almost as if it originated there.

But Jung’s voice, while relatable to many people in its ability to echo their own archetypal experiences, does not represent the universal voice of all of humanity. Jung’s voice was only one voice; his experiences, while vast and full of insight, were his own. Yet, for those who study Jung, Jung’s voice compulsively circulates as an autonomous, ghostly presence, insisting on a dialectic that demands that others protect and propagate “his” intellectual “property,” (assuming that any one person can own thoughts or thinking). To speak as a Jungian usurps individual power yet fortifies one’s claims with a potency that borders on religious authority: not my word alone, but his word. Not my voice, but his voice roves within my psyche until I am no longer certain how, or if, I can express my own thinking or feeling, unfettered and unswayed by his disembodied presence, haunting the psychic ether.

“To be haunted,” psychoanalyst Stephen Frosh (2013) writes,

is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going peaceably on our way. It is to harbor a presence that we are unaware of, sometimes overwhelmed by, that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope, and that will not let us be. (pp. 2-3)

To consciously choose to study Jung, day after day, invites Jung’s voice to root in the unconscious psyche, humming quietly beneath the surface of everyday awareness as a phantom presence. The voice of Jung waits to be called upon when needed and inserts itself to supplant one’s own wisdom and knowledge by shaping and coloring the ontological and epistemological lens through which one views the world. But the path toward individuation, so central to analytical psychology’s formation of the Self, necessitates that, above all, one finds one’s own voice—one’s distinct separateness from the inner voices that threaten to take over psychic life against one’s personal will and greater alignment with the soul.

I assert that an individual who identifies as a Jungian cannot wield the power of his or her own voice once the voice of Jung has been invited to inhabit the personal psyche and has taken up residence there. Furthermore, the voice that emerges from a woman who has immersed herself in the study of analytical psychology risks being disturbed, infiltrated, and in effect colonized by the voice of C.G. Jung, whose spectral lineage of patriarchal power and authority threatens to undermine her own ways of thinking, knowing, and, ultimately, expressing herself authentically. While men, also, adopt Jung’s voice in furthering their own scholarship through analytical psychology, the androcentric bias in Jungian psychology is more likely to support their path toward individuation, as it is a voice that echoes their own masculinized experience. For women whose voices are perpetually silenced under patriarchal constraints, the inability to express oneself authentically coincides with a stunting of the process of individuation, which, Jungian psychoanalyst and theologian Demaris Wehr (1987) points out, necessitates “becoming distinct from (attaining a separateness from) inner compulsions and voices that operate on one unconsciously…known in Jungian circles as ‘complexes’” (p. 49).

Jung’s voice, for so-called “followers” of Jung, takes on a monolithic, paternalistic, superegoic tenor that ultimately takes possession of the psyche and informs how Jungians think and talk. While this voice may further the growth and development of a Eurocentric, androcentric perspective on human psychology, the limitations it imposes on the psychology of women has not been problematized enough in Jungian circles. Wehr (1987) points out that

Jung, in contrast to Freud, has typically been considered more sympathetic to women largely because of his emphasis on the feminine as a way of being in the world and on the ‘anima,’ the unconscious feminine aspect of the male personality. Feminists, however, have viewed Jung’s whole notion of the ‘feminine’ with suspicion, seeing it as a projection of male psyche and not an authentic understanding of female humanity. (Kindle location 1)

I am in agreement with this feminist perspective, as Jungian psychology seems to have simply taken the place of monotheistic religion in the lives of many of Jung’s followers, placing Jung in a position of an unseen, incorporeal, male voice that guides and dictates a certain code of thinking, feeling, and being, couched in concepts that suggest that “this is how the psyche is.” Wehr (1987) asserts that analytical psychology contains all of the elements to qualify as a religion, noting that Jung’s followers bring to his work “much the same devoted attitude that religious believers bring to scriptural exegesis” (p. 27).

While Jung himself fought against handing his agency over to the authoritative voice of the Church, in forging his path out from under the control of both a Christian God and Freud the Father, Jung, whether intentionally or inadvertently, made of his own voice, if not a religion, then ostensibly what Jungian scholars Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles (2004) describe as a cultural complex: an “autonomous” entity or constellated set of energies or phenomena that “resists consciousness” and “collects experience that confirms [its] historical point of view” (p. 6). Cultural complexes, according to Singer & Kimbles (2004), “are based on repetitive, historical group experiences which have taken root in the cultural unconscious of the group” (p. 7). As such, when Jungians cultivate and perpetuate a group persona that is itself Jungian, allowing Jung’s voice to take possession over the individual and collective voices of the Jungian community through repetition and dissemination of Jung’s ideas, they are acting in alignment with Singer & Kimbles’ (2004) definition of a cultural complex. This complex constrains the capacity for spontaneous, original thought, thus limiting an individual’s potential to break free from patterned, predictable behavior, with particular ramifications if that individual is a woman.

Wehr (1987) points out that

while Jung’s psychology offers a powerful and important understanding of symbols and methods of working with them…it is also itself in some ways a symbol system with political and social ramifications and thus supports the gender-based social order from which it sprang…the continued use of masculine symbols comfortably masks our society’s fear of women’s authority and power. Vesting divine power in the masculine reinforces internalized oppression in women, giving it a sacred cast. (p. 24)

Here, Wehr (1987) points to the ambivalence of women’s participation in and furthering of Jung’s masculinist, “religious” body of work; while there may be much to be gained from the ideas put forward by Jung, to engage with the material without challenging its (or Jung’s) patriarchal bias may subject women to unconsciously furthering the disempowerment of their own unique voices. To ascribe to and proliferate Jung’s ideas is to deflect one’s own power in favor of borrowing on the authoritative voice of C.G. Jung, who borrowed on the authoritative voices of Nietzsche, of Plato, of Kant, of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and, of course, Freud. To speak as a Jungian, particularly with any sense of validity or authority, is to allow oneself to internalize and express the consolidated revelations of a long line of speaking men—men who thought, talked, wrote, and disseminated their ideas with, amongst, and, most often in service to, furthering the professional and ideological agendas of other men.

In my own studies of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, an informal survey/tally of a two-year curriculum in Jungian and Archetypal Studies reveals that only 15-25% of required and supplemental readings each quarter were authored by women. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to determine whether this curriculum fairly and accurately reflects the proportion of women writers who write from a Jungian perspective or in related, relevant fields, it does not accurately reflect the available literature that is written by women in relevant or related fields. I know this because, when I read related literature of my own choosing, I read almost exclusively female authors who write from a Jungian or depth psychological perspective. While the androcentric bias in depth psychology (and in academia/scholarship in general) does not necessarily support women writers to write with a woman’s voice (indeed, it is exceptionally difficult to extricate oneself from masculine ways of scholarly expression), the fact that those who create the courses could create a depth psychology curriculum that is far more inclusive of female authors (yet they do not) reflects not only that the androcentric bias in the field of depth psychology is, indeed, a bias, but that it continues to view women’s voices as less relevant, less competent, and generally less worthy of being heard.

While there were, and are, of course, always women present, in some capacity, within or peripheral to the “old boys’ networks” of depth psychology (e.g., Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Emma Jung, Toni Wolff, Lou Andreas Salomé), with few exceptions, women’s voices were not, are not, the voices to which Western scholars and academics turn or return when they seek primary, authoritative sources of power and influence in Western psychology. Furthermore, when women participate in academia, in scholarly work, or even in Jungian analysis as analysts or analysands, “women sense, at some deep level, that they are acting in a ‘taboo’ manner if they do not engage in the same conversational terms as everyone else” (Wehr, 1987, p. 17). They therefore take on the voices and speech patterns of men, whether in choices of vocabulary, in affect, or rhetorical style, in a (mostly unconscious) attempt to invoke masculine symbols of power.

Given the androcentric bias in Jungian discourse, I question a woman’s ability to find her own voice as a Jungian, when every time she speaks, her thoughts are not only informed, but in some sense hijacked, by the voice of C.G. Jung. In alternating between communicating by means of Jung’s concepts and vocabulary and choosing (or being relegated) not to speak at all, the feminine voice is essentially banished to the shadowy margins of public life in Jungian circles. The “disappearing” of the feminine voice can be likened to Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera’s (1986) depiction of the scapegoat complex, in which a community

finds the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrong-doing, blamed for it, and cast out from the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness, atoned with the collective standards of behavior…In Jungian terms…what is seen as unfit to conform with the ego ideal, or with the perfect goodness of God, is repressed and denied, or split off and made unconscious. (p. 9)

Though women’s voices are thus banished, they are not fully eradicated, and their silence haunts Jungian discourse much as the voices of men haunt women’s ways of being, knowing, and expressing themselves. The unheard voices of women vie for expression, exerting a kind of subterranean pressure in the background of the Jungian community. While “androcentrism drowns or silences women’s voices and perceptions by the continual pouring-out of male perceptions into the world” (Wehr, 1987, p. 16) women’s internalized oppression manifests as a

“voice that cripples women from within” (Wehr, 1987, p. 20). Thus, I am arguing that Jung’s voice itself functions as a cultural complex in Jungian circles, although complex theory does not seem to offer a way out of the complex, as it, too, hearkens back to androcentric origins. As such, it may serve to reinforce, rather than alleviate, the “Jungian voice complex,” keeping it securely in place.

In complex theory, the activation of a complex is often associated with intense emotional outbursts (Singer & Kimbles, 2004, p. 6) that appear to “come out of nowhere” and take possession over an individual against his or her will, wreaking havoc and creating presumably unwanted conflicts. Jungian discourse, which originates in Eurocentric culture, admonishes that the mark of a healthy ego is the ability to be, think, do, and communicate free from the compulsions of unwanted or unintended affects. While, on the one hand, I am arguing that a woman’s path to individuation must include her ability to think and act unencumbered by others’ impinging voices, when it is her own voice that is “haunting” her, she would do well to listen. When a woman finally hears the ancestral voices of a long line of women who were silenced before her, she may well find that they are screaming to be heard.

While I do agree with what seems to be a Eurocentric bias that speaking with a calm voice is a “nicer” way to live in society, I believe that this mode of communication is a Eurocentric bias that demotes emotionality in favor of rationalism. I challenge the assertion that the way for women to heal their already silenced voices is by further controlling (what Jungians call “integrating”) their already-controlled affect. To be “in the grip” of this particular complex may well be evidenced by outbursts of seemingly “irrational” anger when women find themselves in situations that reinforce the silencing of women’s voices. Certainly, these instances may signal the need for integration and assimilation of the feminine voice that is both haunted and haunting them. However, in the case of silenced women’s voices in a depth psychological context, intense emotional outbursts may well be precisely what is called for in order to heal the cultural complex that silences women in Western culture. While men’s emotional outbursts may be more likely to lead to physical violence or war, and are therefore best sublimated or suppressed in accordance with the overall agenda of depth psychology, the suppression of women’s emotional outbursts may simply reflect men’s fear of the outcomes of intense emotions in their psyches.

Whenever women express themselves, particularly if their voices contain heightened affect, they are at risk of being told they are angry (which women, in accordance with European, Western standards, must never be), hysterical, or “crazy.” They are subsequently more likely to turn their anger inward, choking off their expression rather than subjecting themselves to patriarchal scrutiny. As with other scapegoated individuals (Perera, 1986), women become the carriers of the group’s anger, but, due to power dynamics within the collective, they are largely unable to safely and effectively express it. While women themselves are not, ostensibly, banished from depth psychology, their voices are. The very field that is meant to liberate them from their complexes may, in fact, be more likely to hold them hostage in them due its own fraught relationship to intense emotions and “hysterical” women, whom Freud worked so tirelessly to “normalize.”

Frosh (2013), focusing on the roots of depth psychology in its Freudian beginnings, highlights a plethora of “ghosts” that haunted the field of psychoanalysis at its origins: “then-contemporary ideas on thought transmission and telepathy; images of civilization, scientific progress, and primitivity…having a ‘Jewish father’ to whom one might feel in thrall and, and against whom one might have to rebel” (pp. 4-5), not to mention the presence of the unconscious itself.

The key issue here is the location of psychoanalysis in a historical and cultural position that aligns it not with critical and progressive trends but rather with repressive factors that if anything maintain the presence of ghostly remainders of the past—and continuing—oppression…Psychoanalysis draws on colonialist thinking often and unreflectively, particularly in its use of the ‘primitive’ to refer to ‘unreasoning’ elements of people’s psychic lives. (Frosh, 2013, p. 6)

While Jung echoed these problematic elements of psychoanalytic discourse in his analytical psychology, he added to them the archetypes of the anima and animus, which, respectively, highlighted his fetishizing eroticization of women and his concomitant disdain for women’s presumed incapacity for intellectual engagement and coherent expression. Feminist theologian Mary Daly (in Wehr, 1987) condemns Jung as

particularly seductive [in] the illusion of equality projected through Jung’s androcratic animus-anima balancing act, since women are trained to be grateful for “complementarity” and token inclusion…Thus it is possible for women to promote Jung’s garbled gospel without awareness of betraying their own sex and even in the belief that they are furthering the feminist cause. (p. 3)

Daly’s rather pointed remarks reflect how strongly a woman might reject Jung’s work as not simply androcentric but androcratic, suggesting a hegemonic veneer that blinds women to the possibility that their minds are, in fact, being colonized. Thus, the “colonizing” mentality that is inextricably woven into the field of depth psychology must be carefully examined and deconstructed/divested from all areas of depth psychological discourse. Women must, in fact, train themselves to see when they are being dominated by patriarchal discourses, so that they become capable of decolonizing their own minds.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), in Decolonizing Methodologies, highlights in meticulous detail how the colonizing mind defines the psychological and socio-political frameworks through which academic research is conducted specifically on, about, and within indigenous cultures. She offers keen criticism about the very notion of the “West” as a constructed, rather than ontologically coherent concept, while also pointing out that

from an indigenous perspective, Western research is more than just research that is located in a positivist tradition. It is research which brings to bear…a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space, and subjectivity, different and competing theories of knowledge, highly specialized forms of language, and structures of power. (p. 44)

Smith (2012) further points out that it was the Europeans’ “gender distinctions and hierarchies,” which are “deeply encoded in Western languages” that imposed themselves onto indigenous cultures in ways that had “very real consequences for indigenous women in the ways in which indigenous women were described, objectified and represented by Europeans in the nineteenth century [and] has left a legacy of marginalization within indigenous societies as much as within the colonizing society” (p. 48). She emphasizes that it was the gendered limitations of European language, for instance, that compelled European researchers to document that the “chiefs” of Maori culture were exclusively male, denying and effectively “erasing” the sovereign or “chiefly” status of Maori women (Smith, 2012, p. 48).

While the androcentric colonialist attitude is a focal point in Smith’s (2012) work, she also makes note of how “Western feminism has been challenged, particularly by women of colour, for conforming to some very fundamental Western European world views, value systems and attitudes towards the Other” (p. 45). One poignant and powerful example of a woman who challenges all women to go deeper in decolonizing their minds, bodies, and souls is Black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde, who is perhaps most well-known in popular culture for her oft-quoted essay calling on women to overthrow their internalized oppression in favor of true interdependency that draws on the strength of individual difference:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. (Lorde, 1984, p. 112).

In an open letter to radical white feminist Mary Daly following the publication of her book Gyn/Ecology, Lorde (1984) accuses Daly of “serving the destructive forces of racism and separation between women” (p. 69) by excluding Black images of the goddess from her work, which (similar to the work of Jung/Jungians in their primary focus on Greek mythology) only referenced “the ecology of western european [sic] women” (p. 69) and Eurocentric goddess-images. Lorde (1984) writes:

The assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization…[not only dismisses] the community of Black women and other women of Color, [but also] devalues your [Daly’s] own words. (Lorde, 1984, p. 69)

In her essay titled “The Uses of Anger, Women Responding to Racism,” Lorde (1984) exemplifies the differences between affect-expression by white and Black women, citing the following illustrative example:

I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? (p. 125)

This “white woman” in Lorde’s (1984) example epitomizes the infiltration of depth psychology’s concept of controlled affect disguised as “healed complexes” in white European discourse.

An edited anthology of Writings by Radical Women of Color echoes Lorde’s (1984) frustrated sentiments. In This Bridge Called My Back, Chicana poet, playwright, and activist Cherríe Moraga teamed up with Chicana philosopher, cultural theorist and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) to collect the unique essays, interviews, poems, and testimonials of women who dare to challenge the androcentric, Eurocentric biases of the dominant patriarchal cultures in which they live. An essay by Japanese-American poet, essayist, and English professor Mitsuye Yamada (2015) vividly depicts the challenges that face non-European women who deign to speak in public:

When Third World Women are asked to speak representing our racial or ethnic group, we are expected to move, charm or entertain, but not to educate in ways that are threatening to our audiences. We speak to audiences that sift out those parts of our speech (if what we say does not fit the image they have of us), come up to shake our hands with “That was lovely my dear, just lovely,” and go home with the same mind they came with. No matter what we say or do, the stereotype still hangs on. I am weary of starting from scratch each time I speak or write, as if there were no history behind us…(p. 68)

But there is a history behind us. As a woman who was raised in the United States by immigrant parents who fled their own diaspora, it is my task, my obligation, my duty, and my privilege to call out and call forth my ancestral lineage as I move into my own power and find my own voice on what Jung calls my “path of individuation.” At this juncture in my professional career and my personal development, I sense that my work, ironically, does not lie in further deepening my academic scholarship as a Jungian, but, rather, in subverting and overthrowing it, in favor of a more authentic power, a more authentic voice that draws directly from the suppressed, oppressed, and repressed power of the women of my ancestral lineage, and other women’s lineages whose experiences more closely align with my own. Once “the voices that fill my head” awaken or bring alive some part of me that feels like uncovered memory, once speaking with or through this voice amplifies my sense of agency and autonomy, then I have found my voice—my greatest source of personal power, backed by the power of a collective that supports me to be fully and unapologetically myself.

All power is borrowed power. Our ability to become autonomous individuals, capable of effecting change or exerting influence over ourselves and others depends on our ability to harness and potentiate pre-existing energies in accordance with our own personal will. The power of expression must therefore be informed and supported by others whose voices amplify those of the one who is speaking. Whether this ability to effect change in our environments through a sense of personal agency is observed, learned, and mimicked, or “channeled” in some way from historical or archetypal sources, the power itself is not self-generated, but rather, imported, in a sense, from outside. In order for power to be moved, exerted, or demonstrated by an individual, it must be internalized, felt, and possessed, after which it must, in some way, be expressed. While power can be, and often is, expressed outwardly through the wielding of force, violence, intimidation, or weaponry, the expression of power with which I am concerned is the power of the voice, in both its literal and metaphorical manifestations, to simply express, unencumbered, uninhibited, and unafraid.

While borrowing the voice of C.G. Jung may appeal to the trained, rationalist part of my mind that aligns with positivist, colonialist, Eurocentric, androcentric values, C.G. Jung cannot empower me to find my own voice. To unlock my own capacity for freedom, I must somehow break through Jung’s ways of knowing to find my own. In order to hear and effectively utilize my own voice as an instrument of power that is separate and distinct from that of the (masculine) collective, I must consciously and intentionally seek out voices that can validate, amplify, and help me draw out my own unique expression. In so doing, I may break free from the cultural complex of the silenced voice of the feminine.

References

Beard, M. (2017). Women & Power: A manifesto. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corp.

Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. London, UK: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays & speeches by Audre Lorde. C. Clarke (Ed.). Berkeley,

CA: Crossing Press.

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (2015). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of

color. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Perera, S.B. (1986). The scapegoat complex: Toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Toronto,

Canada: Inner City Books.

Singer, T., & Kimbles, L. (2004). The cultural complex: Perspectives on psyche and society.

New York, NY: Routledge.

Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London,

UK: Zed Books.

Wehr, D. (1987). Jung and feminism: Liberating archetypes [Adobe Digital version]. Retrieved

from Amazon.com