In this article, I suggest that the tendency on the part of men to endow female romantic partners with redemptive force, reflected in Jung’s notion of Anima, derives from a failure of socialization in puberty. Although culturally sanctioned, this misconstrues the potency of erotic relationships to reshape the psyche, substituting the confined ego project of redemption for the more open-ended one of spiritual emancipation; it also undermines erotic polarity and as such is largely self-defeating.
Continue reading “The Archetype of Woman as Redemptress: psychodynamic, literary and patriarchal aspects”
Tag: archetype
Apocalypticism and the next social revolution
History suggests that millenarian fears of social breakdown are a device which has often been generated and instrumentalized by the establishment in moments of existential threat. Even if such fears reach the extreme stage of collective psychosis, this does not mean there is a real prospect of such breakdown, and in fact the social conditions which have sometimes underpinned descents into authoritarianism in the past are fundamentally different at the present juncture and hardly seem prone to reconstitution. Insofar as such fears bring latent conflicts into the open, whilst they certainly raise concerns and have unpredictable consequences, they also offer an opportunity to unmask these conflicts and to reshape social institutions. Continue reading “Apocalypticism and the next social revolution”