ABSTRACT
Having spent many pages up till now arguing for the postmodern qualities in Jung's psychology, it is now time to consider where Jung appears far more essentialist, conformist, and, to the contemporary reader, reactionary. In a way that is quite in contrast to his radical critique of modernity and modern consciousness and rationality, Jung's perspective on the feminine, and on the psychological attributes of, and differences between, men and women strikes many as old-fashioned, irrelevant and often offensive. In Jung's psychology, women and men appear to be tied to the abstract principles of eros and logos with a rigidity that compares with Freud's more physiological emphases on the presence or absence of a penis as formative of psychological difference. Granted, there is an emphasis on the contrasexual element to be found in the unconscious of a man or a woman which Jung formulates as the archetype of the anima in the first case and the animus in the latter. But this only serves to deepen the tendency towards essentialisms in Jung – a universalising trend that finds its ultimate expression in his theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, itself.
