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This short paper is Dr Gordon's contribution to a symposium on ‘Desire’ published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In it she sets the themes of desire and of the feminine within the context of what she calls three key Jungian concepts: archetypes, the symbol, and animus and anima.
With regard to archetypes, Gordon clarifies points which often lead to misunderstanding: she stresses that the archetype is a model, a conceptual construct, to be judged on its usefulness, not on its ‘truth’. In relation to observable facts it can be used only as an adjective: it conveys a sense of power or of the absolute, a fascinating, larger-than-life, fairy-tale quality.
The symbol, Gordon's second key concept, has long been one of her preoccupations. Here she contrasts Freud's view of symbols as ego-defences, employed to disguise painful or shameful contents, and Jung's; that is, that a symbol is ‘the best possible expression with which to describe a relatively unknown and complex fact’. This suggests both a broader and a more positive function of symbols: they point beyond the immediate object to the universal.
The third key concept, that of animus and anima, has undergone considerable development since Jung's first culture-bound description. Animus and anima are usually taken as referring to the unconscious countersexual personality, but Gordon believes that they both ‘exist in both men and women and that what matters is with which one a person identifies, and which one he projects on “the other” ‘.
Gordon discusses developments in the understanding of feminine psychology, ranging from Freud's account of his treatment of Dora, which exemplifies a conceptualisation based on instinct theory, to one which encompasses early infantile experience, and particularly the relationship with the mother.
Recognising the importance, for both boys and girls, of this relationship is essential to the understanding of feminine psychology as well as an appreciation of the differences in the developm