The Way of All Women

Introduction

It is a pleasure to comply with the author’s wish that I should write an introduction to her book. I have read her work in manuscript with the greatest interest and am gratified to find that it does not belong in the category of certain priggish books which expatiate on the psychology of women with as much prejudiced one-sidedness as loquacity and finally overflow in a sentimental hymn to holy motherhood. Such books have another unpleasant characteristic: They never speak of things as they are but rather as they should be, and instead of taking the problem of the feminine soul seriously they benevolently gloss over dark, and therefore unpleasant, truths with advice which is as good as it is ineffectual. Such books are by no means always written by men—if they were they might be excusable—but many are written by women who seem to know as little about feminine feelings as men do.

It is a foregone conclusion among the initiated that men understand nothing of women’s psychology as it actually is, but it is astonishing to find that women do not know themselves. However we are only surprised as long as we naively and optimistically imagine that mankind understands anything fundamental about the soul. Such knowledge and understanding belong to the most difficult tasks an investigating mind can set itself. The newest developments in psychology show with an ever greater clarity that not only are there no simple formulas from which the world of the soul might be derived, but also that we have never yet succeeded in defining the psychic field of experience with adequate certainty. Indeed, scientific psychology, despite its immense extension on the surface, has not even begun to free itself from a mountain-high mass of prejudices which persistently bars its entrance to the real soul. Psychology as the youngest of the sciences has only just developed and, therefore, is suffering from all those children’s diseases which afflicted the adolescence of the other sciences in the late Middle Ages. There still exist psychologies which limit the psychic field of experience to consciousness and its contents or which understand the psychic to be only a phenomenon of reaction without any trace of autonomy. The existence of an unconscious psyche has not yet attained undisputed validity, despite the presence of an overwhelming amount of empirical material which could prove beyond the peradventure of a doubt that there can be no psychology of consciousness without the recognition of the unconscious. Without this foundation, no datum of psychology, if it be in any way complex in nature, can be dealt with. Moreover, the actual soul with which we have to deal in life and in reality is complexity itself. For example, a psychology of woman cannot be written without an adequate knowledge of the unconscious backgrounds of the mind.

On the basis of a rich psychotherapeutic experience, Dr. Harding has drawn up a picture of the feminine psyche which, in extent and thoroughness, far surpasses previous works in this field. Her presentation is refreshingly free of prejudice and remarkable in the love of truth it displays. Her expositions never lose themselves in dead theories nor in fanatical fads which unfortunately are so frequently to be met with in just this field. In this way she has succeeded in penetrating with the light of knowledge into backgrounds and depths where before darkness prevailed. Only one half of feminine psychology can be covered by biological and social concepts. But in this book it becomes clear that woman possesses also a peculiar spirituality very strange to man. Without knowledge of the unconscious this new point of view, so essential to the psychology of woman, could never have been brought out in such completeness. But also in many other places in the book the fructifying influence of the psychology of unconscious processes is evident.

At a time when the frequency of divorce reaches a record number, when the question of the relation of the sexes has become a perplexing problem, a book like this seems to me to be of the greatest help. To be sure, it does not provide the one thing that all expect, that is, a generally accepted recipe by which this dreadful complex of questions might be solved in a simple and practical way so that we need rack our brains about it no longer. On the other hand, the book contains an ample store of what we actually need very badly, namely understanding—understanding of psychic facts and conditions with the help of which we can orientate ourselves in the complicated situations of life.

After all, why do we have a psychology? Why is it that just now especially we interest ourselves in psychology? The answer is, everyone is in dire need of it. Humanity seems to have reached today a point where previous concepts are no longer adequate and where we begin to realize that we are confronted with something strange, the language of which we no longer understand. We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of red-headed devils responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain. A sign of this dim intuition has also penetrated the relation between the sexes; we do not all of us say to ourselves, Everything good dwells within me, everything evil within thee.

Today there already exist super-moderns who ask themselves in all seriousness if something or other is not out of joint, if we are not perhaps somewhat too unconscious, somewhat antiquated, and whether this may not be the reason why when confronted with difficulties in relationship between the sexes we still continue to apply with disastrous results methods of the Middle Ages if not those of the cave man. There are people indeed who read with horror the Pope’s encyclical on Christian marriage, though they can admit that to cave men the so-called Christian marriage means a cultural advance. But although we are far from having overcome our prehistoric mentality, and although it is just in the field of sexuality that man becomes most vividly aware of his mammalian nature and also experiences its most signal triumphs, nonetheless certain ethical refinements have entered in which permit the man who has behind him ten to fifteen centuries of Christian education to progress toward a somewhat higher level.

On this level, spirit—from the biological point of view an incomprehensible psychic phenomenon—plays no small psychological role. Spirit had an important word to say in the idea of Christian marriage itself, and in the modern questioning and depreciation of marriage the question of spirit enters vigorously into the discussion. It appears in a negative way as counsel for the instincts, and in a positive way as defender of human dignity. Small wonder then that a wild and confusing conflict arises between man as an instinctual creature of nature and as a spiritually conditioned, cultural being. The worst thing about it is that the one is forever trying to do violence to the other, in order to bring about a so-called harmonious and unified solution of the conflict. Unfortunately, too many persons still believe in this method which continues to be all-powerful in the world of politics; there are only a few here and there who condemn it as barbaric and who would rather set up in its place a just compromise whereby each side of man’s nature would receive a hearing.

But unhappily, in the problem between the sexes, no one can bring about a compromise by himself alone; it can only be brought about in relation to the other sex. Therefore the necessity of psychology! On this level psychology becomes a kind of special pleading or, rather, a method of relationship. Psychology guarantees real knowledge of the other sex and thus supplants arbitrary opinions which are the source of the incurable misunderstandings now undermining in increasing numbers the marriages of our time.

Dr. Harding’s book is an important contribution to this striving of our time for a deeper knowledge of the human being and for a clarification of the confusion existing in the relationship between the sexes.

C. G. Jung

Zurich, February 1932

1. All things to all Men

In childhood we are taught certain stories and myths telling of the origin of the world and of mankind and giving a general view of life and of conduct. It is as though they said: This is the way things came into being, and this shows their essential nature and relationship. These legends and tales which appeal so immediately to the child are for the most part as old as historical man and hark back to the infancy of the race. The views they express, insofar as they are still binding today, must represent something deeply embedded in the mind of man. Man has corrected and refined these beliefs in certain realms; in other spheres they remain powers in the background, determining his conduct. In no way are these unseen and unrecognized forces more strikingly manifested than in man’s general attitude toward woman.

In the beginning—according to the record in Genesis—God created the heaven and the earth with all that they contained. The summit of his creation was mankind—male and female created He them. In this statement is expressed a belief in divine creation, but the statement is also intended to account for the simple fact that mankind is both male and female. The first chapter of Genesis contains, however, another and a better known version of the making of man: it is the story of Adam’s sleep and of the creation of Eve by the removal of one of his ribs. This story shows woman conceived of as a part of man, taken out of his side while he is unconscious. It is a myth which represents woman as an unconscious part of man, wholly secondary to him, without any living spirit or soul of her own. This myth illustrates an attitude fundamental in man’s view of woman. If the story had been told by women we should have had a different account of the creation. For instance, in a school examination paper the question was set: Give an account of the creation of man. A little girl wrote: First God created Adam. Then He looked at him and said, ‘I think if I tried again I could do better.’ Then He created Eve. Here we have a perfectly naive feminine version of the story.

There is a great discrepancy, I admit, between a myth hallowed by age and religious tradition and this school child’s version of it. But from the psychological point of view they are nonetheless valid examples of the rift between two attitudes. This rift is illustrated, on the one hand, by man’s still prevalent way of regarding woman and, on the other, by the worst exaggeration of the feminist movement.

Where does the truth lie? Is it to be found somewhere between the two points of view or is it necessary to approach the whole subject from an entirely different angle?

The first condition for an impartial investigation into the relationships between men and women is to rule out old assumptions of the superiority or the inferiority of one to the other. We must not hold the view that woman is man’s inferior, nor must we take our stand on the little girl’s version of the creation and assume that man is a creature who has not yet evolved to the female standard. This latter view is secretly held by many women, but they never express it directly, for to do so would be heresy. Indeed, the majority of women who hold it most firmly would deny it if challenged. But if we talk with them we can see this assumption underlying such simple comments as: Men are so stupid, Men, poor things, they can’t help it, They are all children, and so on. The implication is that women are wiser and more adult than men, but this is kept secret. It is not only not talked about, it is not even formulated, and the women who say such things about men do not really think them in their heads.

It is not the woman who resembles the aggressive woman of the feminist movement who makes such comments. She is too concerned with trying to be man’s equal and so discounts all differences, physiological as well as psychological. She never depreciates man, for her aim is to be like a man, equal to a man, no whit his inferior. She no longer has any standpoint for criticism of him, because she has sold her birthright, her feminine inheritance, her uniqueness, by cancelling the difference arising from the fact that she is female. It is only the very feminine women who in secret speak so condescendingly of men. Such women are strong in their feminine position; they make no attempt to rival men; they do not want an individual position in the world, for they are wanted by men who, indeed, are even willing to support them.

Just what, then, is the difference between the woman who is the man’s woman and the woman who is not the man’s woman? Men have often commented upon it. Their attention has been caught by the latter type of woman only because of her competition, which threatens them in business or in the professions, or because of her insistence on her political rights. But their deeper interest has been in the man’s woman, primarily on account of what she has meant to them personally. She has been repeatedly portrayed in plays and novels and we can sense her peculiar influence in lyric poetry which so often celebrates her. She figures in myths and legends, but she is always shown from the man’s point of view. And even when, as in these modern days, attempts are made to give a more objective picture of human beings, we find that such women are still described, for the most part, from the masculine point of view. There is, for instance, no outstanding autobiography written by a woman of this type which presents to our closer scrutiny her own inner experience of life. For these women most often present themselves to us solely in terms of their external experience; they recount outer events and the part they played in them but fail to convey a picture of their inner experience. Possibly they are not sufficiently aware of themselves to be able to give a picture of what their subjective life is like. For this type of woman is generally very unselfconscious; she does not analyze herself or her motives; she just is; and for the most she is inarticulate. Furthermore she has, as a rule, no urge to make herself understood by a large audience. Her interest and her life lie in her relation to one man or perhaps to two or three men; hers is a personal interest, not one which concerns itself with a larger group. Hence it is that women of this type, numerous as they are—for, indeed, they may be considered to make up the primary type of womanhood—have never been interpreted truly. Their silence has become their mystery. A mass of literature has grown up about them which purports to explain them, but the explanation is always based on the man’s idea of the woman; it is never the woman’s interpretation of herself.

C. G. Jung faced this problem more effectively than any other psychologist. Not only did he analyze the problem of the significance of woman from the point of view of the man, but he, alone among psychologists, clearly differentiated between this subjective significance and the objective reality of the woman herself and defined clearly the type which can most readily carry for the man the significance of his own subjective and unconscious values. But here Jung’s further discussion of the subject necessarily meets a blank wall. He, as a man, can tell us relatively little of the woman herself and of her part in the proceeding. Only from the point of view of an observer can he tell us what value, if any, she gains from carrying the image of the man’s unconscious values and from associating with the man who thus glorifies her.

Such a woman, who is peculiarly adapted through her own natural gifts to be man’s partner, in the fashion implied in the Genesis idyl, is the primary type of woman in nature. She is the female human animal, whose whole attention is focussed instinctively on her mate. She adapts herself to his wishes, makes herself beautiful in his eyes, charms him, pleases him. These things are naturally a manifestation of the fundamental biological relation between the sexes. But where these instinctive reactions appear in modern women the aim of Mother Nature is masked, in accordance with the conventional code, while the woman herself may be quite unaware of the hidden meaning of her actions.

Primitive woman was doubtless quite content with the role the Genesis myth assigned to her, for in primitive situations, where the biological aim is the sole guide in life, that the woman shall be attractive to the man and shall call forth and hold his interest is all that is important for life and for her. Even until today some women have remained almost as unconscious as their most remote ancestress and are still content to be only man’s helpmeet and counterpart. But humanity at large has moved since those days toward a greater consciousness, chiefly through the emergence of a conscious and personal ego whose aims have conflicted with the simple urges which Mother Nature first implanted in our breasts. Thus, as woman has evolved and become more aware of herself as a separate entity—an ego—a conflict has arisen within her psyche between the individual values which she has attained and the ancient, collective, feminine trends—and conflict is the beginning of consciousness.

There are three typical stages of development through which the human being passes in the gradual evolution of consciousness. These may be called the naive, the sophisticated and the conscious. The first, or naive, is related to nature only. It is a way of functioning which is entirely unselfconscious. It is, so to speak, the state of man before the Fall, when he was entirely innocent and at one with himself. In this stage there is hardly any differentiation between conscious and unconscious, for selfconsciousness has not arisen. The individual lives in a primitive union with nature, a state broken only by the emergence of the ego. This is a change of great importance in the development of the personality and is a definite step toward consciousness.

From this point the individual enters the period of sophistication. The natural powers within him and the resources of the world without are gradually explored and exploited, and the capacities and powers thus gained are organized under the leadership of the ego. Personal aggrandizement and the satisfaction of the ego arise and form a new life-motive. The lust for power comes to occupy an increasing place. But at this point a new factor may come into the picture. The selfishness of the power attitude may obtrude itself on consciousness. Love perhaps arises which will dispute the dominant position of the ego, or some other value which transcends personal considerations may replace those formerly held. This change in emphasis inaugurates a gradual redemption of the personality from the dominance of the ego, and the third stage—the stage of consciousness—begins.

In the innocent play of domestic animals we may see certain ways of acting which we recognize as fundamentally masculine or feminine. The arts and wiles which the female uses to attract the male are so nearly akin to the ways of a pretty woman that we cannot help smiling. These things are manifestations of primitive femininity. They can be seen too in tiny children. A little girl, while still quite young, begins to act in a different way from a little boy. Where he is independent and aggressive, she is coy and winsome. She begins very eary in life to gain her ends through coaxing or merely through being adorable. Her whole way of functioning is in relation to someone else from whom she may attract attention or care or love. In many grown women we see the same process at work. The woman herself is doubtless unaware of what she is doing. She may have no deeper motive than eagerness to please, to do what is expected of her, to fulfill another person’s ideal of her. This other person is usually a man. She rarely stops to ask what she herself wants or how she feels. She is content if he is content, provided his contentment is only to be attained through her. In this way she makes of herself a sort of mirror which reflects the man’s mood, his half-unrealized feelings. If he is sad, she is melancholy. If he is joyous, she bubbles with mirth. And, indeed, so subtle is her unconscious, or half-unconscious, intuition of his mood that often she will react to it while he himself is still unaware of what his mood is. So it is that he seems to discover what should be his own feeling in her. For men tend to be exceedingly unconscious of their own feeling moods. Even though a man may have suffered an intense personal loss he is very likely to react to it as an almost impersonal emergency, requiring a practical adaptation only, and to remain entirely unaware that he has also a feeling reaction to it as a personal experience. All he knows is that he feels out of harmony with himself. In this state he goes to see a woman such as we have been describing. She senses his mood almost before he speaks to her. Regardless of what she had been thinking or feeling before his arrival she now reflects the feeling of which he is unaware. If he has had a blow which he does not recognize as an emotional one, it is melancholy she reflects—a great vague, contentless yearning. As he does not know what there is to be sorry about, her melancholy cannot have much point or content, but this very vagueness allows his own sorrow or regret to find a place in her. He can project his unconscious feeling on to her, and no matter what it may be it can flow into her and so find its own form, undisturbed by any preconceptions on her part. He feels his personal sorrow raised to the level of a universal grief and is relieved of his own pain in contemplating the pain of mankind. By his contact with her he has gained a contact with his own feeling, and through the generalization of her mood he has found a way of adapting to his own grief which, left unrealized, might have overwhelmed him.

So it is that a man can find in such a woman an image or picture of the other part of himself, otherwise unknown to him, which indeed he does not recognize as belonging to himself. This image seems to be in her; he perceives it, but as though it were her feeling, not his own. When a subjective content is experienced in this way it is commonly spoken of as projected. The fact that its subjective source is not recognized means that it is in a sense unconscious. When projected by a man upon a woman it is like a mirage, an illusion, concealing the woman who is there; his own unconscious feeling-contents meet him in personified form. The sum of these contents make up the unrecognized part of man’s psyche and when brought together into a whole constitue the man’s feminine soul,¹ which exercises over him an irresistible fascination and appears variously as La Desirée or La Belle Dame sans Merci. This feminine soul of the man Jung has called anima.

Men with the same inherited background have anima figures which are strangely similar, so that the anima herself can be recognized by her characteristics, which are universal and collective. In imaginative writings, especially in novels and plays the anima is often drawn unmistakably. Anima figures form the central characters in such imaginative stories as She by Rider Haggard, Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson, and many others. She-who-must-be-obeyed and the Bird Girl represent the anima of their authors. They have certain characteristics in common: they are only part human (each is both more and less than a real woman), they carry feeling values, and each has a quality which makes her lightest word a command, absolutely binding on the hero.

These are portrayals of the anima herself, the collective soul of man, which we feel to be non-human, but many women, both in fiction and in real life, show certain anima characteristics which are more or less modified by human traits. For although it is true that a man’s anima as a rule becomes apparent to him only when it is projected onto a woman, yet the anima herself is not a real woman. She represents rather a collective, or universalized, picture of woman as she has appeared through the centuries of human experience in relation to man. This last factor is important. All that a man sees is colored for him by his own subjective contents. And inasmuch as woman, throughout the ages, has been to man the symbol of his unknown feminine soul, his eyes have been peculiarly blinded when he has looked at her. A man without a soul is but half a man, consequently when his soul is projected onto another human being it is as though half of himself were in her. The woman becomes enormously important as well as enormously attractive to him. He longs to get into relation with her, for by so doing he will come into relation once more with his own soul, which is otherwise lost to him.

Certain women have a peculiar aptitude for reflecting the man’s anima. However, not all women have this gift. Those who are so endowed form a definite group, although naturally the women comprising it differ markedly from one another in many particulars, for this group makes up a large proportion of womanhood throughout the world and contains women of many qualities. Yet there are certain characteristics held by all these women in common—a fact which justifies our speaking of them as forming a distinct anima type.

The general characteristics of the anima woman change as she passes through the different stages of psychological development. In the first, or naive, stage she is a natural, instinctive creature. She manifests in her every action the innocent functioning of feminine instinct. Her whole attention is directed, albeit without her conscious knowledge, to the effects she produces on men. She is completely naive. She has no conscious critique of her own actions and motives; she has no objective standard or criterion at all. It never occurs to her to judge herself by an external standard, or, indeed, to view herself as object. She is just female creature, as unconscious of herself and as innocent as the domestic animals. If a man projects his anima onto her, she is unaware of it. She simply lives what she feels and what she is. She is related to herself and to her own instinctive satisfactions, just as the animals are. She is a nature product. And for this reason she never knows beforehand what she wants. She is ambiguous. She will and she won’t. The opposites in her sleep side by side, so that she has a certain bivalent quality, like nature. The man senses his soul in her and seeks to be united with her. His anima is also, like nature, bivalent. So her ambiguity fits in with his need.

In time the ego awakes in her and the second stage of development begins. She finds that by living instinctively she attracts the attention of a man or of men. The man, finding in her a symbol or picture of his soul, wants a close relationship with her so that he may be reunited to his own soul. Because of this urgent need he is willing to give her almost anything she asks. She wants a relationship with him too, or perhaps we should say Nature in her wants it for biological ends. But because she is, as a rule, unaware of this natural urge within her she acts as though she were indifferent, with the result that the man pays further court to her. Then if her ego comes to consciousness she makes a discovery, namely that this seeming indifference makes her more desirable from the man’s point of view; and she begins to use it as a definite trick, of which she is at least partly aware, to attract the man’s attention and gifts. Or perhaps the woman is truly indifferent and cold. She may really not want the man’s attentions but she realizes that the power she has over him is a great asset. If she then, either deliberately or half-unconsciously, begins to exploit the man’s projection using his need to her own advantage, the flirt gradually emerges, who in her worst aspect becomes the gold digger.

Ego development in the anima woman, however, may show itself in a much more adapted and social form. For instance, a woman may use her charm and the attraction she has for men in a socially desirable and acceptable way, which is yet a conscious use of her gifts to attain an end. If she is married she develops skill in managing her husband and the whole situation between them. She is always at hand, she always anticipates his wishes, she makes home so pleasant that he of necessity has to fall in with her plans and do what is expected of him. A woman of this type makes what is popularly called a wise wife. Her ego orientation is not directed to such purely personal and selfish ends as in the case of the flirt and the gold digger, but to ends which are seemingly legitimate, namely making her husband happy and her marriage a success. The danger of this orientation becomes apparent, however, when we sense a subtle emphasis on the possessive pronoun. It is her husband, her marriage! In order to keep her husband happy such a woman almost inevitably has to reserve a part of her reactions. She gives him only as much of her feelings as is calculated to be good for him, and by skillful management she keeps him unaware not only of a certain lack of reality in her reactions but also of the fact that life is humdrum and dull. If, however, she should be ill or obliged to be away from home it may be that the husband will wake up and begin to find life apart from his all-loving wife far more interesting than when he was perpetually lapped about by her solicitous care. Then he becomes aware that her kindness and unselfishness are not all they seemed, and the egocentric attitude behind her mask of the good wife peeps out.

If such a woman is to develop beyond the stage of egocentricity something more is needed than the refinement of her desires for personal success and happiness. Her natural capacity to attract the man’s anima projection gives her an importance and power which are in a certain sense fictitious, for she has done nothing to merit them. They depend solely on the man’s illusion. It is like a fortune put into her hands for which she has not had to work. To sacrifice this power requires real devotion to a purpose or value which is superior to her own ego. Redemption from primitive instinct, on the one hand, and the domination of the egotistic attitude, on the other, demand first that the woman become aware of her own instinct and of the part she plays in relation to the man. If she truly loves him or if a deeper relation to life develops within her, then the whole current of her desire may be diverted toward a non-personal goal—to one which supersedes the goal of personal satisfaction and superiority. Thus a fresh step is made in the conscious development of the individual—a step toward individuation.²

It is the primitive, feminine element in woman which catches the projection of the man’s anima in actual life. There is in all women a streak or thread of this primitive femininity, although in some women it may be almost entirely repressed and in others kept out of sight by a conscious effort. Our Western education of girls seeks to eradicate its manifestations as far as possible; hence with the majority of our women it remains a trend, a factor of their psychology, but not the dominating one. This trend, however, is the ruling factor in the personality of certain women and girls who make up the groups of anima women. It is interesting to note how such a woman functions in life and how she affects those around her.

When a woman of marked anima type comes into a community, all the young men, unmarried and married alike, are immediately fascinated by her. Their heads are turned and they cannot say too much in her praise, while they vie with each other in showing her attentions. The women, however, have a different opinion of her. At first they are merely cold and aloof but soon become critical and blame her for the defections of their husbands and lovers. They usually make the mistake of criticizing her to their men and are horrified to find that the men defend her. Or if masculine courage is lacking for that—and it takes a courage of no mean order for a man to defend a woman when feminine public opinion condemns her—the men compensate