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With the work of Polly Young-Eisendrath we move into completely different territory. While Toyoda, Douglas and Woodman see the feminine principle as an opportunity for development, an area suppressed by the patriarchy, Young-Eisendrath adopts a feminist position and views ‘the archetypal feminine’ as a construct of the patriarchy. It is a construct to keep women in their place, to deny their complexity and force them to model and enact the ‘erotic’ for men. She turns the argument of classical Jungian women writers on its head, viewing the feminine not as the sought for treasure which eludes modern women but as an oppressive weight or burden.
In Gender and Desire, Young-Eisendrath reveals that she has agonized over her Jungian identity. If she is so different from classical Jungian women writers, is she still a Jungian? In a controversial move, which seems to owe as much to Andrew Samuels (1989) as to her own originality, she decides that the ‘feminine principle’ has been a mistake from the beginning. Jungians have been muddled about archetypes and they treat them as essences and the field has become ‘essentialist’. For classical Jungian writers, the archetype is a model to aspire to, which is supposed to bring liberation to the hidden self within women. But for this post-Jungian writer, the archetype is described as a ‘constraint upon our ability to see and know things’ (p. 16). The Jungian ideal is a chimera, in her view, a mirage or illusion.
Competing books on the feminine make one long for conversations between positions, but at present the field is one of discord and opposition. I see valuable contributions coming from both Jungian and academic sides of the debate, but we lack a discourse to enable any meaningful exchange. However, Young-Eisendrath's challenge to the classical Jungian writers needs to be responded to, and if Jungian psychology wants to find a place in the university it has to become familiar with the arguments of Young-Eisendrath, Susan Rowland,