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One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir
This sex which is not one. Luce Irigaray
The controversial notions of gender set forth by Jung through his ideas of masculine and feminine mentality and the contra-sexual anima and animus have been in a state of constant revision. Indeed the theme of the feminine has been substantially scrutinized in analytical psychology from several perspectives: essentialist, constructivist, and cultural.
Since Freud (1925, 1931, 1932, 1937) women are considered subjectively submitted to a castration complex. Different from men in not possessing a phallus to be castrated, women are doomed to a masculine complex and an unresolved femininity.
The underlying assumption is the dichotomy between body/nature related to woman and mind/spirit related to man. This cultural fallacy was denounced by Simone de Beauvoir (1986), Karen Horney (1967), Michel Foucault (1990), Julia Kristeva (1982), Luce Irigaray (1985), Judith Butler (1990) and Hélène Cixous (1976, in Butler 1990) among others.
Jane Gallop (1988) expresses this conceptual fallacy in a precise manner, as follows:
The question of whether one can separate ‘phallus’ from ‘penis’ rejoins the question of whether one can separate psychoanalysis from politics. The penis is what men have and women do not, the phallus is the attribute of power, which neither men nor women have. But as long as the attribute of power is a phallus which refers to and can be confused (in the imaginary register?) with a penis, this confusion will continue to support a structure in which it seems reasonable that men have power and women do not. And as long as psychoanalysts maintain the separability of ‘phallus’ from ‘penis’, they can hold on to their ‘phallus’ in the belief that their discourse has no relation to sexual inequality, no relation to politics.
Post-Jungians are aware of historical gender differentiation and have tried to conceptualize classical terms to align with the pr