Reflections on the Psychology of Women

THE SEX OF ANYONE who writes about feminine psychology has been thought relevant for a long time. Jung expressed that opinion when, as a man, he wrote, ‘The elementary fact that a person always thinks another's psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology’ (JUNG 7, p. 116). The same observation was made by the woman psychoanalyst Karen Horney: ‘It is only right and reasonable that [men analysts] should evolve more easily a masculine psychology and understand more of the development of men than of women’ (HORNEY 4, p. 324). She opened, in that paper, a new phase in the long discussion that has been going on ever since in the publications of psychoanalysts, on the central problem of the extent to which anatomical differences and genital development affect the psychology of men and of women. She rather mildly remarked that her

intention in this paper was to indicate a possible source of error arising out of the sex of the observer, and by so doing to make a step forward toward the goal that we are all striving to reach: to get beyond the subjectivity of the masculine or the feminine standpoint and to obtain a picture of the mental development of woman that will be more true to the facts of her nature—with its specific qualities and its differences from that of man—than any we have hitherto achieved (Ibid., p. 239).

Books and papers by analytical psychologists on matters connected with feminine psychology have also appeared over the years; I will mention by name only a few which seem to me most characteristic of the breadth of study that has been done: Emma Jung's Animus and anima (JUNG, E. 9), Ester Harding's Women's mysteries (HARDING 3), Neumann's The great mother (NEUMANN 16) and June Singer's recent Androgyny (SINGER 17).

The topics of the father and the mother archetypes, of the anima and the animus, of inter-sexual envies, of feminine masochism and masculine sadism, of bisexuality, of homosexuality, of gend