ABSTRACT
Has any aspect of Jung’s work raised more discussion or drawn more heat, anger, disappointment and passionate defence than the theories he spins around the core of ‘the feminine’? They fascinate us, it seems. They confuse us. They animate us! They can focus the collective weight of a century and more of unprecedented upheaval in relationships between Western women and men; they can touch the most private parts of the psyche in search of individual identity. We cannot leave them alone, forever elaborating from this perspective or that; they are a-buzz with -isms. We are drawn by them into elaborations we may not have intended at allof dreams, of mythologies, of the theory of archetypes itself; clear thought is veiled into a haze. These theories work on us, in fact, very much as Jung tells us that animus and anima will. This congruence seems to me extraordinary. I feel I have hardly begun to grasp and be grasped by what it means.
