Opening Remarks for the Jung-Seminar October 5 - October 7, 2000

Opening Remarks for the Jung-Seminar October 5 - October 7, 2000

In order to introduce myself and the Jung-Seminar, I thought it might be useful to write a little about how the paper which forms the basis of the next three days of discussion came into being.

Back in January 1986 I went into a three times per week analysis with an SAP Jungian in London (I am a Londoner, and came to live in Sydney 11 years ago). A couple of months into analysis, I started to read around the process that I was in and promptly walked into the wall of Jung's sexism in the form of his essay 'Woman in Europe'. Next I looked to a psychoanalytic text which was written by a woman and happened to have come my way. That was also deeply unsatisfying as it too failed to meet any of the questions which analysis was stirring up. In hindsight I would say that I was trying to find a well thought-out and emotionally honest psychological account of a woman's experience of what it is to be female in the contemporary world. What I kept coming up against instead were a series of more or less able discussions of women in history, or fantasies of women in men's minds, or women viewing themselves through theories which were created on the basis of the exclusion of the female subject. What I knew at the time was that none of what I was reading felt 'right' or took me anywhere very new intellectually.

For want of any other obvious ways forward, I went back to Jung's writings on women's psychology and they continued to infuriate me. Yet flickering behind the specifics of his text was something which caught my attention. I could not put my finger on what it was, but read on through his work being irritated and arguing all the way. Some years later I came across a reference in Claire Douglas' The Woman In The Mirror which expressed what I had glimpsed in Jung's text that had kept me reading, in spite of myself, in which Jung comments:

...women often pick up tremendously when they are allowed to think all the disagreeable things which they had denied themselves before.

This quote seems to me to run in quite a different plane to many of Jung's simpler, culture and period-bound formulations of his thoughts on women's psychology. As a comment it struck me as powerfully accurate, and it set me a task of unpacking it and trying to understand it personally, as a clinician, and as a theoretician.