"Menstruation and Shamanism" by Marilyn Nagy deals with meaningful aspects of feelings and emotions accompanying menstruation. Is there an unconscious psychic factoring process accompanying the physiological structure of menstruation? There is "some evidence for speaking of the psychic cycle of the woman as contained within the menstrual cycle, at least as a model"In this study we discover unique components of women's initiation through the menstrual cycle. The author analyzes the development of feminine eras using women's dreams and myths and their relation to women's inner and outer relationships. Dr. Nagy presents a provocative hypothesis about taboos relating to the menstrual cycle in traditional cultures from a contemporary perspective.
Marilyn Nagy, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst practicing in Palo Alto, California. A graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, she is presently a faculty member of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. She is also a professional member of the Swiss Society for Analytical Psychology, the Graduates of the C. G.Jung Institute, andthe San Francisco Jung Institute, of which she is former secretary and chairperson of the Reviewing Committee. She has published in Psychological Perspectives, Quadrant, and the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, and Voices.
I became interested in studying menstruation many years ago when I was suffering from horrendous depressions which went on and on, every month before my period came. The depressions must have begun sometime late in my teenage years. I don't remember exactly when. But I do remember a time in the 1950's, when I was in graduate school in Boston, going to the doctor for a yearly checkup and telling him about my symptoms. He gave me a prescription to take for pre-menstrual depression.
The whole idea of pre-menstruation syndrome was very new at that time. I was relieved to think that my depressions had a psychological cause. Just what that cause was no one knew, but it seemed reasonable to think that medical researchers were on the way to finding out what kinds of hormonal changes might be causing this pre-menstrual distress. Well, as a matter of fact, this hasn't happened. We know now that endocrinologically, menstruation is a relatively quiescent interval, with the lowest body levels of estrogen and progesterone of any time of the month. At the same time, in the last 25 years we have gained much more clinical awareness of the emotional concomitants that surround menstruation. In Japan there has been much work done on periodic menstrual psychosis. In the United States we know quite a lot more about the depression, sleeplessness and emotional lability of the syndrome than we did before.
But this is nothing new. Women know that they are "not themselves" at their periods. A woman may be cold, or, on the contrary, unusually warm. She may every month suffer days of depression, or she may find herself unexplainably cheerful, only to have this mood swept away by a softly teary sentiment. Women are so accustomed to all this that they excuse themselves by saying, "Oh, it's just my period." They direct their psychological behavior to a physiological cause. But just what the physiological cause of our menstrual emotional symptomatology is eludes us completely.
But now let me go back to my own story. The next phase of the development of the idea, on the conscious level at least, came in Zurich six or seven years later. I was 2 or 3 years into my own analysis, and by this time I was well-initiated into Jung's point of view that not only the aberrations of my behavior, but also the apparently accidental meetings with people who became important to me, the seemingly spontaneous chain of events in my life, and, of course, my physical illnesses, all had a meaning-that is, a psychological reason for happening.
Now this is an important key to what I want to say, because I want to try to take you with me on the same journey that I've been on-a journey in search of a reason, namely the meaning of menstruation and especially of the emotional events which accompany it.
About this same time or a year or so later, while I was still mulling these things around in a very confused way, I started my analytical work. I happened to have two or three women analysands who were rather passive and didn't find very much to say during their sessions. They also did not bring any dreams. But at intervals, without anything very different happening in their outer lives so far as I could tell, they suddenly seemed to be dreaming more frequently, or perhaps their dreams were much stronger in affect. These women then became very active and brought in emotionally laden material, so we could really work. It occurred to me to ask them casually if they happened to be at their periods. The answer was so often yes that my interest in the mailer became acute. If an intensification of the emotional life is actually Typical of the onset of menstruation, then why? What does this mean?
This observation suddenly reversed my thinking. What if the depression or (as with my analysands) emotional alertness were not caused by menstruation per se, but by a psychological factor at work in the whole menstruation syndrome? It is after all only in modern western culture that medical knowledge about conception and menstruation has tended to depotentiate our valuation of the menstrual period. In pre-literate and traditional societies it is everywhere given the greatest attention as an important and extremely dangerous time. Our current collective view that normal bodily processes should not be emotionally disturbing does not prevent some women from highly singular behavior at monthly intervals. I had seen that in myself, and I was seeing it again in my analysands.
Of course, not all women complain of special moods at the menses. And some, who are often disturbed, have occasional periods go by unnoticed on the conscious level. But I have the impression that sometimes women do not notice because society expects them not to notice. One woman, who recorded her dreams together with her menstruation dates for me, wrote, "I don't know whether it was so before I started writing down these dreams, but now it seems that everything goes along and piles up till the end of the month and then explodes."
I decided to see what I could find out about menstruation, but not by dealing with consciously experienced moods and feelings at the menses. I wanted to look at unconscious material, to see if there might be an unconscious psychic factoring process, an archetype, at work within the physiological structure of menstruation. This meant I had to go to the mythology and folklore of primitive societies, since modern societies have suppressed such material as taboo. And I also had to study women's dreams.
In the beginning of my research I found a mass of confusing material. The mother of a menstruating girl in Malabar pours a jar of water over her head; a Javanese girl is powdered yellow; a Malaysian girl has her front teeth filed away. Out of the ancient world, Pliny reports that "contact with menstrual blood turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, seeds in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the bright surface of mirrors in which it is merely reflected is dimmed, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, a horrible smell fills the air, to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison." What can we conclude out of all that? Apparently, menstruating women everywhere , except in our modern western societies, are in a very holy or taboo condition. And this taboo condition has something in it which is a strong force opposed to our everyday life.
I found out that menstruating women are very frequently separated out of their social groups. They live in menstrual huts outside the village and are sometimes secluded for as long as two or three years at the pubertal onset of menstruation. I wondered why that was, until I read that the Maori male lives in deadly fear of menstrual blood because he believes the evil spirit Kahukahu inhabits it.
Then I began to find in one text after another that at the time of menstruation the woman is possessed by an animal or a god-like spirit. Among the old Iranians it is the demoness Dshahi, the goddess of prostitution. It is through her works that menstruation was created, and each month during her period the woman is in the power of this evil spirit. The Siamese thought it was the evil spirits swarming in the air who entered in and caused the "wound," the monthly menstruation of their women. In Cambodia, unmarried girls were called the wives of Indra. Ancient Assyrian texts refer not only to the lilith, the ghoulish feminine spirit who could possess a man, but also to the idlu lili who possessed a woman when she became niddah (or men-struous).
Louis Ginzberg wrote about a Jewish tradition which says that menstruation is the penalty for Eve's sin, and "since sexual desire is considered as the result of the eating of the forbidden fruit, the Gnostics, as well as the Kabbalists, maintain that menstruation came to Eve with the enjoyment of the fruit." The fruit in question came from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Apparently there is a connection between (a) menstruation, (b) temporary marriage to the idlu Hli, (c) sexual desire, and (d) knowledge of good and evil. The more I thought about this the more excited I became, because it seemed that here might be a clue demonstrating that all these strange customs have a meaning in common. But I could not really understand it yet.
What seemed to be the key was the idea among all these societies that menstruation was connected with being possessed or married to a demon or god. There is a folk legend stemming from a mountainous district in Japan which reflects the emotional stress and danger of the menstrual period, both for a woman and for her social group. The story is called Otowa Pond:
Once upon a time a beautiful but humbly clad lady came to the temple of Cho fu ku-ji which stands beside this pond and asked for lodging. The priest pitied her and received her and she gave her name, Otowa.
In the rice planting season, Otowa went gathering bracken and without noticing what she was doing, got too near to Mt. Konhoku, which hates the presence of women. On the way home at dusk she washed her blood-stained underwear in the pond and suddenly the pond grew larger and a voice came out of the haze saying, I am kami of this pond. I have been waiting for you to come for a long time. You must become kami of the pond in my place. This is the fate that has been determined since the fore-world.' Otowa begged for pardon but received only three days grace. She went home in a trance and when the priest asked her the reason she told him, weeping bitterly. The priest preached the way of Buddha to her until she conceived faith as though reborn, and on the third day at dawn a voice called outside her door. She said farewell to the villagers and rode toward the mountain. There was a sound of hoofs, a strange wind and a bitter rain. Then a noble man on a white horse appeared, picked Otowa up on his saddle and disappeared into the morning mist. He was the kami of the pond. Still today the village people give offerings to the pond, commemorating the day when Otowa wed the former kami.
In this story we can see clearly the connection between the affective state of the heroine and the image of the demon husband. That is to say, we do not see why they have to be connected, but only that they are both part of the situation, like a priori factors belonging to menstruation. The strong attracting power of Otowa's menstrual-blood stained clothes delivers her into the power of the demon of the pond and forces her to marry him. The weak emotional state of the heroine is also entirely typical of other legends of menstruating women. She is so forgetful of the protective taboos as to go near the forbidden mountain, then to wash her clothes in the pond. She returns home in a trance, gives herself over to weeping and on the appointed day accepts her rendezvous with death in the pond. She is completely in the power of her demon husband. The fateful violation of the taboo also results in a religious conversion, but not in remission of the penalty. Otowa is "reborn" but not into life, so that her religious experience is not psychologically integrated. If the menstruating woman in traditional societies is really in such a state of possession, then it is understandable that she is taboo; both she and her social group have to be safeguarded.
By this time I felt fairly certain that the common image which keeps appearing in the folkloristic traditions is that of the demon lover or spirit husband. But the prevalence of this image is not confined to ancient and primitive sources. In the twentieth century, Freudian theory about what a woman experiences at the menses is strikingly similar.
Basically it is this: a woman experiences her menstruation (a fully normal phenomenon) as an unnormal wounding of her inner parts; hidden behind the bleeding is the secret belief that it is the bleeding from a wound, namely the wound of her castration. The fantasy says, "I have neither child nor penis." Failure to menstruate may represent an attempt to heal the wound and to have an undamaged sexual organ like men have.
In this mythologem there is the sense of being inwardly wounded, just as the Siamese believed that evil spirits entered into the wombs of their girls and wounded them. The suggestion is that women want to be men and feel the loss of their masculinity in the form of the penis most keenly each month at menstruation. Let me anticipate my own conclusion: what I suggest is essentially the same tiling. A woman is "wounded" each month by the painful encounter with her inner lover or with her spirit husband. The pain arises out of the experience of the two sides of her own nature. " I have neither child nor penis," means "I have both a masculine and a feminine spirit in me."
Freud's contention that a woman's ego remains incomplete because she is caught in permanently unfulfilled longings for her father ought perhaps not to be rejected out of hand, though I might wish to translate the terms in which his clinical observation is expressed. The sense of loss, of wounding, of desire (loss and desire are paired opposites), corresponds in a surprising way to the affective character of the images of the lover which appear as menstrual motif in traditional societies and in the dreams of modern women. Women may be, not so much "incomplete," as marked by eras as the connecting principle to the opposite sex, with "relatedness" as the central factor of the feminine ego.
While I was doing research on this subject, I collected women's menstrual dreams. Would there be a correlation between whatever I found through historical research and the content of modern western women's dreams? Originally I had no idea that I would find this image of the menstrual lover. I thought there might be something about the mother. I did a small pilot experiment obtaining 500 dreams which occurred just before and just after the onset of the menses, when emotional tension appears to be at a high point. Since that time, two doctoral dissertations have much expanded the design and repeated the experiment. However, the matter still seems unsettled, since the results of one experiment, done with adolescent girls, differ from the results I obtained; while a second experiment agrees with my conclusions. In my own sample, I was struck by the statistical frequency of the recurrence of an image which I finally called the Strange Man.
Many of these dream images sound remarkably like the images of the other-worldly lover of so much of menstrual mythology. The Strange Man is an intruder in the established order. We would not be very surprised if a woman dreams of her mother, or even of her father, or of marriage. They all belong to family life and to a traditional feminine role in society. But the image of the unknown man who appears on the scene, often in a highly threatening and dangerous pose, disrupts the harmony and suggests an opposition to the present state of things. This "opposition," personified in the image of the stranger, appears to be the new factor in the psychological situation. The attributes of the image, together with the affective qualities attached to it, may indicate the direction along which a change in consciousness is taking place.
Here is a sampling of fragments of dreams from that experiment. Of course they cannot be interpreted in any way, since the dreamers are completely unknown. What I hope one can hear through them is how the emotions of love, sexual arousal, fear, aversion and fascination are inextricably bound together with the image. Here we are beginning to make a connection between an inner image and some of the outer behavior so typical of menstruation. The dreams:
(a)Our choir director was also there, and I was somehow close to him. It was a beautiful, erotic feeling, which made me very happy.
(b)I got left alone at a subway station and couldn't get out. Men started coming around me and saying rude things and laughing. I had feared this and tried to reason with them.
(c)I travel in a train at night. An asthenic looking man climbs through the window into my compartment. He speaks to me, kisses me, throws a flaming red blanket over us in order to protect us from the glances of other people . He says I should go with him. Almost without any will power I follow him. We go across a meadow where we have to be careful of dangerous hornets in the grass and then come to a lake where we want to go swimming.
(d) A terrible, angry man bursts into the house where my sister and I are alone and rapes both my sister, who is married, and me, a virgin.
(e) It is late in the evening. I have just finished taking a shower and putting on a pale pink nightgown. I open the bathroom door which opens onto my bedroom. The bathroom light is on but the bedroom is in darkness. I barely discern the sleeping figures of my husband and three children in the bed. They all seem to be sleeping face down. Now
I become aware of a figure standing in darkness in the hall doorway. I can see only his leg. Somehow I know that he is not going to do anything. He only wants me to know that he is there. There we stand in two doorways, side by side like a medieval diptych, and visually we are opposites. He, in darkness, male, dressed in rough dark clothes, and
I, female, in the light of the bathroom, all pink, light, soft and moist .
How can it possibly make sense to lump together such disparate imagesunder one heading? Can the images of a subway rapist, a choir director as lover, an unknown stranger in one's home, be described in common terms? Shouldn't we guard against the unknown man and welcome only men we know to be safe for us? The answer to these questions devolves from our characteristic response to events in life. Surely we can suppress new experiences for a certain amount of time. But no one can master his life so as to prevent all change, and still live. Whether a new event is greeted with hope or cursed as a dark fate may depend not entirely on whether it is good or bad but also partly on the inner attitude of the person to whom it happens. Love is like that too; every lover comes first as an unknown stranger and promises a woman both great joy and great danger. Perhaps these menstrual dream images of the strange man have a psychological purpose pertaining to just those inner attitudes.
In the face of widespread prohibition separating a woman from her husband at the time of her menstruation was the almost equally widespread belief that conception takes place most easily, or exclusively, just before, just after, or even during, the monthly bleeding.
The ancient Chinese said the last day of menstruation was the best time to conceive. Susruta, the great Indian physician (c. 100 A.D.) agreed that at this time pregnancy most readily occurs because then the mouth of the womb is open, like the flower of the water-lily to the sunshine. Aristotle, Pliny and Galen all thought that women conceive at the menses.
The Talmud, although strictly forbidding the man from approaching his wife until seven days after the conclusion of her bleeding, nevertheless admits the possibility of conception during the prohibited time. But the children born of union during the menses will be "scrofulous, feeble-minded, crippled, epileptic, or insane." And later on, in the Christian church, Thomas Aquinas held that not only was intercourse during menstruation a deadly sin, but that children born of it would be leprous or monstrous.
As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, the great German gynecologist Hermann Ploss and the American gynecologist Havelock Ellis thought that all the evidence pointed toward menstruation as the time of conception.
Margaret Mead, in an early study of cultural patterns in a North American Indian tribe, describes the falling into disuse of the old prohibitions during menstruation. An old Indian woman says: "When we were young we kept away from our husbands for four days, now this is no longer done and look at the young women today, they have a child so high, and so high, and so high, and one hiding in their skirts, one on their backs, and one in their bellies." Conception therefore clearly occurred during those four forbidden days.
The observation that sexual desire among women is often heightened just before and even during menstruation has been made since ancient times. That was partly the reason why physicians thought conception must take place then. But since the discovery of the fertility cycle in 1937 by Knaus and Ogino, this factor has been disregarded, since it clearly did not fit the "procreative purposes of nature." Yet Havelock Ellis, in two essays, "The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity" and "The Menstrual Curve of Sexual Impulse," amassed a great body of evidence to show the "tendency of the female to sexual intercourse during menstruation." He used two cases, in one of which the incidence of masturbation and in the second of which the erotic content of dreams were correlated in the menstrual cycle. In both cases he found a positive harmonious curve which supported his conviction that the time of conception is coupled with the period of desire in women and with the menses. It represented a remnant of her former "animal nature" in which oestrus was the normal time for receiving the male. The taboos against intercourse at menstruation were only a cultural overlay with which an enlightened knowledge could well do away.
Today we know otherwise. Children are not conceived at menstruation. Yet the long-held belief that conception takes place at menstruation is a psychic fact, if not a physiological one, and points to the psychic presence of one who can give the woman a child. The stringent warnings from medieval pulpits against intercourse during menstruation would not have been necessary were there not some powerfully attracting force toward doing it-neither would the death penalties in Semitic societies nor the death-producing shock of even seeing a menstruating woman among some primitives. Either the woman is somehow especially desirable at this time, or she is especially desirous, which is to say the same thing.
We are still on our journey in search of a meaning. If women, in fact, do not conceive at the menses, although for thousands of years it has been believed they do, this belief is a fact which must have a reason. If women are often sexually aroused at menstruation, then we are observing an instinctive reaction which does not serve a procreative purpose. But then, what purpose? I began to find some of my own answers when I came across descriptions of shamanistic initiation practices for women, both in rituals which have been culturally preserved and in North American Indian legends. In Mircea Eliade's book, Shamanism (1964), he describes how girls become shamanesses among the aboriginal tribes of India. First, the girl has a dream in which a suitor from the Underworld appears and asks for her hand in marriage. The girl at first refuses, with the result that she is plagued by nightmares. The divine lover threatens her with attack or with fall from a high place. The girl may then fall ill or be dissociated for a time. She wanders about alone in the woods or fields. Finally she accepts the call to be a shamaness; the family arranges her marriage and afterwards her tutelary husband visits regularly; takes her into the jungle for days at a time. She bears him a child, but the relationship is not primarily sexual. She is instructed by him through her dreams and thus fulfills her tribal duties.
Almost exactly the same thing is described in a myth of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest coast, called K. almodelanaga:
The tribe was at its winter quarters. Their chief was named Q.ade, and he was giving a winter dance. Then his sister, Q.walanenega, disappeared. She had not long disappeared when she became really sick, at the place where the women stay when they disappear. But after two nights she was heard talking with the spirit, who is called Helemil, asking him to give her a sacred song. Then she disappeared again, but at night they heard her song from far away.
Then when night came they all went into the dance house and began to beat quick time on their boards. And then Q.walanenega uttered the cannibal cry at the door of the dance house. And as soon as she came in she turned into a shaman. She sang her sacred song, and then she bit four men and she said, have been brought back to life by our friend Helemil, and he said to me that if any one should make love to me inside often years, he would immediately kill him. Thus said our great friend to me. And for ten years I shall cure the sick ones among you.'
The "place where the women stay when they disappear" is the menstrual hut, located outside the tribal area. The sister of the chief goes away for her usual separation period. But then she receives a call to become a shamaness, and really disappears, meets her tutelary spirit, Helemil, spends a period of time with him in the woods, and then re-enters the tribe to take up her shamanic duties. How similar, and yet how different is this story from the tragic Japanese Legend of Otowa, who met her death with the kami of the pond. Here the meeting with the spirit at menstruation leads to a vocation as teacher and healer.
Another tale, of the Kathlamet Indians, is called "The Gila'unalX Maiden Who Was Carried Away by the Thunderbird." It tells the story of a tribe which used to go hunting elk high in the mountains. But there was a narrow trail through which they had to pass, which was possessed by the Thunderbird spirit. There was a young girl who was menstruating for the first time, and she was not allowed to go. But she did not like to stay alone by the tents, and one day a woman said to her, "We are going to dig roots. I went up there, although I was menstruating, and nothing happened to me. Perhaps they deceive you only." So on the next occasion the young girl went with the women, but then when they were on the mountain, the other women lost her. They searched for her but could not find her. A mist covered everything. Then they went to the high trail possessed by the Thunderbird, and there they found her, near the rocks. They called her, took her hands and tried to pull her, but she did not move and did not speak. Her face was changed. So the women finally left her and went back to the tribe and told the people that she had become a monster and they were all weak with fright. The next day the tribespeople went to search for her but could not find her. The tale concludes:
When it becomes foggy, she is heard singing shaman's songs in the rocks. Thus she did. When they came to the place where she was, she sang shaman's songs. Then the people gave up the search and went home. The chief of Gila'unalX went home. Therefore it is forbidden to take girls who are just mature up Saddle mountain, because that girl was taken away. The Thunderbird took her.
It seemed to me that with the discovery of these legends my search for a psychological, rather than a physiological explanation of those peculiar emotional states accompanying menstruation had finally found an answer which could satisfy my desire for a meaning. That meaning focused on the image of the strange lover or the spirit husband which appears in the myths, legends and dreams of menstruation. The union of the woman with this lover cannot have to do with the bearing of children in the outer world. Yet the character of the imagery bears all the marks of a truly instinctive and therefore purposive phenomenon. The Indian shamanic legends show that it may have an inner, spiritual purpose. In that case the problematic affective condition of the woman at her period may indicate an inner pre-occupation. That is what it really means to be possessed.
In neither of these myths does the fact of becoming a shamaness have a very happy result for the personal development of the young woman. In the Kathlamet myth the girl falls into a psychotic state (a cataleptic or fugue state, if we take the text literally). I suspect that the ego-consciousness of the relatively primitive groups out of which these stories come was not differentiated enough to permit a real confrontation with so powerful an archetype, nor an integration of its contents. Therefore the women who fall into possession of the Spirit are really lost to all further life in the tribe. Perhaps that is why the menstruating woman was regarded as so terribly dangerous; because her state of possession at this time threatened the collective ego of the tribe. Only in modern western culture has consciousness become strong enough to give even the possibility of assimilating the appearance of the Spirit-lover at the menstrual period.
What do we mean by an ego consciousness that is differentiated enough or strong enough to permit assimilation of an inner figure? And how do we pass from a stage of culture, personal or collective, where assimilation is not possible, to one where it is? It should be remembered that menstruation appears only in the highest of the species-from the primates on upwards. In most lower animals, the moment of ovulation is simultaneous with heat or oestrus, and with coitus. The female is therefore absolutely identified with her instinctive nature. Among humans, mating is not limited to the period of heat. There is a distinct difference between ovulation and the moment of physiological conception and menstruation, which ends the post-oestrum and begins the new cycle. The human female is not bound to accept her lover only when she can conceive a child, as with other female animals. She can take him at any time she wishes. And this fact represents also the beginning of psychic differentiation.
It marks a moment where choice, or personal eros, intervenes in the biological scheme. Instinctive desire is split off from a necessarily procreative goal. The primary unconscious identity between subject and object is broken when the object can be perceived and valued. Where a woman can choose, the existence of an other than herself becomes subjectively real for her. This provides a polarity in which differences, and thus psychological consciousness, are possible. Thus the energy which is released toward the onset of menstruation and which the unconscious presents in image form as the strange lover or god-husband, may have as its purpose the psychic development of a woman. It is not the physical child which is conceived at menstruation, as was so long thought, but the spiritual child.
Yet it is the same instinctive eros which leads to the conception of a child at ovulation. We have then some evidence for speaking of the psychic cycle of the woman as contained within the menstrual cycle, at least as a model. Half of it, the time leading up to ovulation, belongs to her collective and instinctive life as mother and procreatrix. The second half, leading up to menstruation, belongs to her psychic life as an individual, with a personal destiny to understand and fulfill.
Of course, seen from the outside, things are just reversed. In the days after her period the woman is often released from confusing emotions. She is open and energetic and capable of much creative work. And in the days approaching her period she is quite obviously in a regressive state. She is apt to suffer alienation from others; conflicts which can usually be contained assume monstrous shapes. Daily duties may be suddenly altogether impossible. And we have seen in legends how really dangerous this regression can be.
But the introverting libido of the second half of the cycle seeds the extraverting libido of the following period. I think that is why the figure of the shamaness appears in the legends of women at the menses. She represents the inherent possibility of the woman not only to bear children, but also to understand, to teach and to heal. It is the mysterious interweaving of both phases which gives meaning to the whole.
At a still deeper level, the possibility of personal eros which is contained in the separation of ovulation from menstruation in women also opens out, in the fact of desire made conscious, the whole realm of the shadow, of conflict and the problem of love. We are back now to the Kabbalist legends about menstruation as Eve's penalty for enjoying the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Hood and evil. Desire wants to possess what it desires, yet never succeeds. The reality of the shadow is born, together with eros, when the image of the lover is constellated, within or without. The creative tension of these dual aspects of instinct libido makes it possible for the true individual to emerge. Eros creates an energetic continuum along whose path all creative activity takes place, but it is maintained only because of the dark fact that eros never stops wanting and is never finally fulfilled. The tension of eros obviates true altruism. Yet without that tension life is also flat and unreal-and unconscious.
If the love problem (the union of opposites) is insoluble in outer life, so is it also insoluble in inner life. This does not mean that there is no way to go. It means that the way to go is back and forth, from inner to outer and then again inwards. The meeting of the woman with her lover at an inner level where conscious understanding of her life is developed, where personal creativity finds its expression, where spiritual values can be affirmed-that is, where the whole difficult process begins to make sense and be worth doing-is a mere preparation for the shattering demands of love in real human relationships.
We never come anywhere near coping in a responsible way with the need for intimacy and tactful distance in friendship, with the "me" and the "you" in our roles as parents. We fail in our capacity to carry both the suffering and the companionship of marriage relationships. We are in love and out of love, filled and empty, hungering and devouring, affected so deeply that we are engulfed, or so little that nothing happens. We defend our personal integrity against the invasion of love. We use power techniques to avoid exposure, and power to catch and limit the freedom of the loved one. Yet the demand for union is so compelling that we are forced to improve on our failures. It is a false dichotomy to speak of the resolution of the problem of love on either the "outer" or the "inner" level. It must be worked on, though it cannot be finally resolved, at either level. Otherwise life has no meaning.
This is the model that we see in the menstrual cycle, where we find evidence of bi-phasal patterning in feminine psychic life-a phase in which energy progresses into outer life; and a phase where adaptation breaks down, where affectivity predominates, and the image of the lover is presented in unconscious material.
Does this mean that we succeed in the progressive, less emotional phase of our lives, only to fail in our emotional times? No, I think not. This is just the danger of the rationalistic temper of much current thinking. It is precisely the psychology of the woman to succeed where she is failing. Her capacity to submit to being in love both on the outside and the inside, to be involved with an other than herself, marks her capacity for change, for experiencing what she did not experience before, and thus for both true consciousness and for conscious loving. The capacity to accept emotion is the condition of conscious psychological and intellectual development, not its antithesis.
Jung's concept of the animus as an inner male component of the female personality which is the carrier of her potential for psychological development is repugnant to many women nowadays, who consider that men and women are in fact much more similar than culture until now has allowed them to he, and that a strong ego and capacity for achievement in the world are certainly not male perquisites. It may well be that Jung's descriptions of the animus were relatively undifferentiated and depended largely on the type of transference projections he was apt to constellate in his women patients. Yet anyone who has worked extensively with women's dream material and listened carefully to what makes their lives move, cannot avoid realizing that women's dreams about men and relationships with men have an enormous effect, whatever their stage of maturational development. Why should we be surprised at that?
Biologically it is simply a fact that the sexual libido reaches a level where it is useful for the preservation of the species when it is focused on heterosexual relationships. This fact has symbolic and psychological as well as biological significance. Whatever the life of woman is all about, it must not be different in kind from her biological determinants. It must also be fruitful for the life of the species. The symbolic imagery which expresses the extension of the biological into psychological functions will surely not lose track of body imagery and instinctive libido. How inhuman if it did!
The unconscious appears to ignore the fact that women today are experimenting with great freedom in all sorts of love arrangements and goes on producing endless dreams of the male lover. Perhaps such dreams are even exacerbated, because of our tendency to resist a compensatory, unconscious viewpoint, or because collective attitudes in the western world have become rationalistic, ignoring the presence in psychic life of a contra-sexual "other" which cannot successfully be integrated into ego consciousness.
What I pay attention to, more than the arguable content of what the image of the lover is, is the quality of what is happening in the relationship between the woman and her opposite-the one who is the "not I" in her life. The mystery of love is that the loved one can be received but not won, or else love fails. Desire may be fulfilled in a moment outside time, but is never finally satisfied, so long as life lasts. The loved one remains different and unattainable. What does happen is that increasingly the need for a personal and productive relatedness-to people, to general goals, to the world of ideas-is embraced and accepted as the goal of life.
Insofar as what I have just been saying has to do with the relationship of the feminine ego to the unconscious and thus with psychological development, the appearance of the figure of the "strange lover" in the menstrual cycle of women may indicate that the patterning of the individuation process in women is different than with men. Menstruation belongs to the first half of woman's life not the second. Perhaps she is not so able to split her development chronologically into two halves, with collective duties in the first years and personal development later. Woman's collective duties with children and family are in any case highly personal, and her personal development is apt to have results for the collective. Perhaps her whole psychological development depends from the beginning on a dialectic between inner and outer relationships.
Individual differences among women must be respected; they surely cover a wide range. But if it is true, as I believe, that the psychology of women is reflected in biological rhythms (or vice versa!), and since it is clearly the case that women's biological functions fall into the same time span as the first appearances of the strange inner lover who beckons the woman to personal psychological development, then affective relatedness must all along be the key to feminine psychology.
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