You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Taking Dostoevsky's words ‘There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it’ as her motto, Judith Hubback sets out to say something new about Eve, the first woman.
In the first version of Genesis, man and woman are created with an equal share of God's gift of creativity, while in the second, the male and the female emerge as slightly different from each other. Accordingly, Hubback sees Adam and Eve as representing two aspects of the human psyche in a not yet wholly differentiated condition, and therefore Eve cannot be understood isolated from Adam. When Eve disobeyed God's command, she was not going against an inner conscience, which did not yet exist. But by disobeying the parent/God/Law, Eve was laying the foundation for developing her own inner law, her truthfulness to herself, to the Self. So Eve can be seen as the carrier of the human desire to find out about the world, while Adam represents the more cautious and law-abiding part of the human psyche. Though learning about good and evil is the basis for ethical and interpersonal applications of these opposites in modern thought, such questions were not meant to be asked. At this early, natural stage, Eve must have been motivated by the drive of instincts, among which reflection can be seen as the cultural instinct par excellence. In our cultural history males are usually shown as the active ones, and women as the receptive or passive ones, but here it is the other way around. Eve is carrying, and acting on, the forward-going possibilities that all our psyches contain, represented by the serpent as the awakener of the desire for knowledge. The serpent is seen as the Shadow of both Adam and Eve - as well as a part of God himself, since he created everything. So Eve took into herself some of God's decisiveness, which modern analysis sees as an integral part of ego functioning. Bringing to consciousness previously damaging shadow features of our personalities is an essential step towards self-kno