ABSTRACT
The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. Essential woman-ness is a powerful locus of film culture, and its place in Jung's psychology enables the film theorist to enter a discussion of contrasexuality in Jung and in film that engages a range of similar themes and discourses reproduced within the two paradigms. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces Psychoanalytic theories of identification used within film criticism have led to very narrow conceptualisations of cinematic identification. This is a critique that draws on the work of feminist psychoanalytic thinker Luce Irigaray to seek a feminine-feminine: a conceptual and lived femininity that is conceived of, and embodied by, women. The essentialist debate assumed, first, that all women possessed an innate inability to judge the authenticity of the representation of women in film, and, second, that all women film-makers were feminists.
