ABSTRACT
Over the last forty years many billions of words have been uttered on the topic of sexual equality and, in common with the ‘culturalist’ views which have dominated discussion of other psychological issues, differences between the roles and status of men and women have been squarely attributed to environmental and social influences. The traditional belief that women naturally differ from men has met with widespread rejection, it being argued that the relative scarcity of leading women politicians, inventors, mechanics and generals is due to masculine repression and lack of feminine opportunity. This has become so widely accepted as to be part of the Western cultural unconscious and believed as self-evidently true. As a result, Jung’s generalizations concerning masculine and feminine psychology have been brought into disrepute and his Anima and Animus postulates have in some quarters met with wholesale rejection. It affords another example of disharmony between Jungian theory and the popular notions of our time.
