“For Better and For Worse”

The seriousness of my title, taken from the marriage vows, merits a matching seriousness of treatment now, for relationships between men and women are both more possible and more impossible as a result of recent profound changes in the perception of women's identities. I stress the “both-and” nature of the possibilities of relationship because the boundaries of the perceived person have been so enlarged. Women are throwing off projections of fixed images of the feminine, which means men must see these images, heretofore fixed on women, as part of their own psychologies. Men are now faced with the task of fashioning their own relationship to feminine modes of being as they experience them in themselves as well as in other people. Women are faced with the task of relating to all parts of their femininity, not just those of which they are clearly conscious or that our culture labels as feminine. Both men and women are faced with the task of putting together their male and female aspects.

A sense of relationship between the sexes applies to intrapsychic life as well as that between persons. Jung's point here is apposite, that the whole person is contrasexual, not just male or just female, not bisexual with exchangeable parts, and not androgynous, if that is taken to mean a neither-nor gender identity. We are female with a masculine aspect grasped through the imagination and symbols that touch body as well as soul, or male with a feminine aspect and comparable contrasexual experience. One's ego is met from within by the archetype of the opposite sex which stands in the unconscious at the gateway of the Self, the center of the whole psyche. Thus, the conjoinings and disjoinings between one's ego and the contrasexual archetype connect or disconnect both the consciousness and the unconscious. We must understand that relationship between the sexes goes down as well as out. This depth accounts for the tremendous