ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence of older philosophies and mythologies in their work on the feminine. C. G. Jung pre-dates Irigaray’s argument in acknowledging the loss to culture of an essentially female identity and, through it, a positive cognitive relationship between self and world within a phenomenological point of view. Painting seems closely associated both with the “mask” of woman and the phenomenological ground of being which is always in itself, a “surface” world—a masquerade. Jung was to offer in “The psychological aspects of the Kore” a relationship between phenomenological process and a particularly female aspect of consciousness which is especially valuable in exploring phenomenological ecriture within an archetypal setting. In a dialogue with the work of C. Kerenyi, Jung considered the strange importance of the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greek culture. As a search for female subjecthood, it is invoked in phenomenological metaphors that are both fluid and lucid.
