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After expressing his debt to Freud for his choice of title, Andrew Samuels goes on to indicate the principal points he will discuss in his paper: 1) the implication for analytical psychology of the modern interest in femininity; 2) research on femininity and the so-called ‘feminine principle’; and 3) his thoughts on the father-daughter relationship.
In the first part of the paper he defines what he considers to be the main points of post-Jungian development in recent years: mainly a rejection of the cult of ‘perfection’, and a democratisation of the concepts of the archetypes and of individuation. In other words, there has been a shift towards a position resembling that of psychoanalysis. This is based on the interaction of a variety of psychic themes, behaviour, images, emotions, instincts, clinically applied within the transference-countertransference relationship and its detailed analysis.
He then goes on to examine whether the contemporary interest in what one may call ‘the feminine principle’ agrees with his own definition of the post-Jungian position. He mentions various women writers in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s who described themselves as post-Jungians in an attempt to question ideas of Jung which appeared to them unsatisfactory or plainly wrong, without, however, rejecting Jung altogether. In his late writings Jung had stated that there was something eternal about woman, and that women exhibit certain characteristics which cannot be rooted in history or the culture into which they are born and must, therefore, be exclusively psychological. Samuels disagrees with this idealisation and psychologising of femininity, and of generalisations of this kind about women. He thinks that this way of thinking is hierarchical and typical of a patriarchal culture, which tries once again to create dogmas.
He then discusses his own views of femininity. In the first place he makes a distinction between sex and gender, pointing out that for certain Jungians there seems