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In this thought-provoking paper Rigsby addresses the divide between proponents of archetypalist thought and feminist thought. She draws attention to two areas — the concept of archetype and the issue of sexual abuse. In both cases she explores the divide between archetypalists and their bid for metaphor on the one hand and feminists accused of being literalists on the other.
According to Rigsby, in their four essays in Spring, Hillman, Kugler, Stein and Woodworth contend that recent attention to incest and child abuse as actualities constitutes denial of the psychological (p. 47).
However, as Rigsby so rightly points out, it is quite possible to acknowledge the reality of events in childhood whilst at the same time attending to the symbolic. It seems to me that there are several issues at stake here. It is as if, in the desire to distinguish what actually happened, we lose sight of what abuse might mean in the wider sense. Whilst physical abuse is undoubtedly an extremely disturbing experience for any child, it must form only part of a much larger picture where a whole web of disturbing relationships are involved and the child is made use of in many different ways. Rigsby says:
An adult emotionally abused throughout childhood can know that her nightmares and metaphors of sexual abuse are metaphors, that the abuse she endured did not take place in sexual form in history, and at the same time recognize the metaphor's truth — their message that she was met with emotional rape instead of the love she wanted. Another adult, sexually abused in childhood, can know that her memories
Page 493of abuse are historically true and simultaneously recognize that the perpetrator's worst violation of her selfhood was that she simply existed to serve his convenience. (p. 53)
Frequently, unlike the two above examples, we may never know what actually happened. However, there is a subtle but very important difference between exploring the meaning of such a dream/phantasy/memory in terms of metapho