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A prominent analytical psychologist once asserted gender to be so ‘archetypal’ that she was unfailingly able to determine the sex of a dog by looking into its eyes. In my own confusion, I have envied her certainty. For three decades of feminist anger, enthusiasm, scholarship, and simplicities have precipitated a crisis in our collective understanding of gender. More recently a ‘men's movement' has drummed, flustered, and claimed no end of plausible absurdities to resolve the crisis. The Jungian doctrines of anima and animus not only have little light to shed but have instead become the focal points of our professional confusion.
Peter Tatham has ventured into this field of strife and darkness, refreshingly without defensiveness or even definite answers. His book, ‘about breaking down the stereotypes of meaning’ (p. xix) is a series of meditations on the Daedalus mythologems. Collectively, he calls them daidalos, an archetypal field that celebrates ‘well-craftedness’. Within this, the ‘myth-ego’ (cf. ‘dream-ego’) Daedalus, represents a style of consciousness in stark contrast to that of Herakles and speaks to a ‘blind spot’ in analytical psychology: its inability to see any form of maleness as ‘chthonic and generative’ (p. xxii).
Herakles is a vengeful killer who gains acceptance by labouring rather than by being himself. He clubs to the ground a life-like image of himself crafted by Daedalus, and goes to Hades to put the shades to flight. He is thus an enemy of the imaginal realm of psyche and (in killing Hydra) of multiple consciousness (pp. 13f). In contrast, Tatham recommends the image of Menelaus capturing Proteus by holding on through the god's shapeshifting, thus modelling for us a steadfast, unflinching grip that yields information, wisdom, and progeny (pp. 15f). The resulting new image of maleness has at least four characteristics: (1) he does not kill the mother but relates to her as an equal; (2) he demands certainty but can tolerate multiplicity and confusi