"Jungian Psychotherapy" from goodtherapy.org
Ugh, I haven't been able to get anything done for this blog for so long (but I am working on stuff, really!). I had an insanely busy assignment for the most of the last year then, right after that ended, some family issues for the last few months. And now I'm going back to school (yay on that, though!) and will probably still be busy but I saw the above quote and something fell into place that had been sitting on the back burner of my brain for a while: "Logos" vs. "Eros".
One of the things that annoys feminists about Jung's writings (and quite honestly makes me uncomfortable as well) is Jung's ideas about what is masculine and what is feminine. I've personally veered back and forth between agreeing and disagreeing with him on this issue, not just to be PC but because it seemed at odds with my own personal experience as a very logical and unemotional woman.
When I'd read Jung's stories about dealing with women I saw in my mind an introverted, thinking-type Jung struggling to deal with extroverted, feeling-type women. Many women are feeling types, it's true, but many men are as well (think about those Poseidon-types with their still waters running deep, who can erupt into hurricanes of emotions when aroused.) I tend to be attracted to these warm, emotional type of men and my theory was that whatever your ego was, your unconscious, and hence your shadow as well as what you were attracted to, would be it's opposite; if your ego was more intellectual then your shadow and your anima/animus would be emotional and vice versa, regardless of your sex.
This is very different from being more concerned with personal or interpersonal success, which I do feel is very sex-dependent: men, regardless of whether they're emotional or intellectual, are more concerned with and oriented to their success in competition with others, whereas women, again regardless of their primary function, are more interested in their relationships with significant others. At any rate, this has been my observation.
The above quote rung a bell in my mind because it revealed what has always bothered me about Jung's theories in relation to the sexes. For a thinking type like Jung, then yes, Eros would be in the unconscious, because whatever is the opposite of the primary function is pushed down into the unconscious by the very act of developing one's strongest function. But what if a man's primary function is feeling? Then the opposite would be the case here, and thinking would be his "royal road to the unconscious."
Both Logos and Eros can be developed by the Ego, in which case the higher differentiated function would be the Ego's way of functioning in the "outer world" in the most efficient way possible. In either case, the opposite function would be the one most connected with the unconscious, the most childish and undeveloped, the weak spot in the personality that allows the unconscious to come through. And both men and women can be either emotional or intellectual.
At the same time, one thing I've noticed, again purely through personal observation, is that the anima of men is more primitively emotional and the animus of women more primitively intellectual, regardless of the person's primary function. When I get possessed, it's definitely with animus thoughts, and I can tell when my feeling-type boyfriend is possessed when he starts getting sulky and annoying (and I'm sure I annoy him as well when I get animus possessed.) But, at the same time, it seems to me that my animus possessed thoughts have an emotional rage that a feeling type woman might not get, and G's anima feelings are mixed up with really silly ways of thinking that keep dragging him down and keeping him from working toward his dreams (ideas like "Don't try that because you might fail!")
I guess I still have some thinking to do about this. Not that it'll ever be completely figured out, of course. There are too many mysteries surrounding the sexes.
