Reconnecting with the feminine

 

Carl Jung’s diaries from 1913-1932, the Black books, were published in October 2020. The context of the beginning of the diaries is Jung’s break with Freud, his mentor and an important father figure in his life, and the following crisis in Jung’s professional and personal life. A life-crisis will often imply the falling away of our surrounding structures which represent safety and control, and this may open up for important insights because we get access to the unknown. For Jung, in the crisis he realized that he had somehow lost the connection with his soul. Jung writes on the first page of the diaries:

“A huge task lay before me – I saw its enormous size – and its value and meaning escaped me. I got into the dark, and I groped along my path. That path led inward and downward. (…) My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you – are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you anew. (…) Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted!” Jung wants to reconnect with his soul, he doesn’t want to continue “searching for himself outside himself”. He knows he has for many years forgotten his soul, because he focused on outer things: “I belonged to men and things. I did not belong to myself.”  

Jung’s process of attempting to reconnect with his soul, who he first sees as a girl and then as a woman, is the departure point of an amazing journey inwards. Jung wrote about his wonderful and terrifying journey in detail in the seven Black books, and in a way this, which he called the “confrontation with his soul” and “confrontation with the unconscious”, may be understood as part of the empirical fundament for Jung’s theories about the psyche.  He discovered and described the mythical and archetypal layers in the psyche, which he called the collective unconscious.

One important premise to Jung is that we need to be aware of the myth we are living, because without a mythical awareness we are uprooted, with no true link to the past and the ancestral life which continues within us. Becoming aware of the myth we are living, gives the opportunity to choose differently, to break free from the unconscious patterns and maybe even start living a myth which is more in resonance with the deeper, true identity.

Early in the Black books something really important happens to Jung; in his imagination he sees figures and events which are pointing to the myth or narrative he has been unconsciously living. In one of his early visions he participates in slaying Sigfried, a mythical hero figure in European history of ideas.  This may be interpreted as Jung killing the myth he has been living; the hero myth, which emphasizes the masculine hero – strong, rational and autonomous.

So Jung reconnects with his feminine soul and his inner hero dies, and hence the hero’s power in Jung’s psyche is diminished. I see this as a story of Jung reconnecting with the archetypal feminine dimension in the psyche. The famous jungian Erik Neumann describes the archetypal feminine in his book The Great Mother: “Eros emphasized rather than Logos, relatedness more vital than differentiation, the containing vessel more informing than the discriminating sword, moon knowledge more valued than sun knowledge, Feeling and Intuition more prized than thinking, the informing source of Wisdom and living Nature rather than the scientists and their brains with their dead ‘facts’, the Unconscious more sacred than Ego consciousness”. Neuman says that the health and creativity of every man depend very largely on whether his consciousness can live at peace with this stratum of the unconscious, or consumes itself in strife with it.    

Jung’s journey towards healing and becoming more whole, is in this perspective the story about a man attempting to connect with his emotions, body, vulnerability and dependency on other human beings and nature. In the Black books it seems that this was a struggle to him, maybe a challenge he needed to live rather than a problem which could be solved. But it seems that he realized that the hero-myth he unconsciously had been living had prevented him from living his life fully, so reconnecting with his feminine soul gave access to the flow of creativity, and from this he created his life's work. 

The question to all of us is of course, what myth am I unconsciously living, and how can I connect with the parts of myself which may give access to other ways of living and creating? But maybe more importantly is, what are the myths the collective unconsciously is living in this time of climate crisis and war, and  which are the new myths we need in order to live more in harmony with eachother and nature?