The Cat: Redeeming the feminine

X-ray of "Susanna and the Elders," Artemisia Gentileschi

[Image from Kathleen Gilje]


The following are selected excerpts of Marie-Louise von Franz's short but standout book exploring the fairy tale “The Cat,” and what is needed to redeem the feminine soul of the West.

So now we see that the cat is a shadow of the Virgin Mary. It is that part of feminine nature that the Virgin Mary did not represent but which would belong to a complete image of the feminine. Therefore you could say that the Virgin Mary herself has a cat shadow, and in our story, in eating the apples the empress penetrates into the mystery of good and evil within the feminine. The tension is not so much the tension between good and evil, but between the impersonal, collective sublime and what is personal, individual, vital and natural. It’s another polarity which is typical of the feminine realm. And Mary therefore curses the unborn girl and says she has to become a cat.

In fairy tales, the established powers – God, the Trinity, the Virgin Mary and very much also the Devil in Hell – always act against children. That means they want to block future development, and that inertia is typical. Established god-images, established religious archetypal systems and images, are liable to prevent further development and that’s why the curse of the Virgin Mary does not fall on the empress. She could have cursed the empress for having stolen the apples, but instead of that she curses her child. That means she does not want a new form of femininity to develop. And so the girl becomes the cat, which is just the new form of femininity

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The Virgin Mary has no contact with the flesh. She is never represented naked in sacred pictures. She is always well veiled and her body is not visible. Her flesh is discreetly hidden. So that is one part of the unredeemed shadow side of the feminine from the Christian standpoint. Our hero is quite naively and naturally hungry for that flesh and so far that would be easy. You could say the cat catches him by his physical desires and that, in a way, if we take it from a man’s standpoint, is natural because generally the anima first appears in a man as physical desire, for instance a sexual fantasy. Then when he goes after it, he finds it isn’t flesh but only a mirage of flesh and is actually a lot of precious stones.

It is a tantalizing situation and I’ll jump ahead now to say that we know the story from the man’s standpoint is about the assimilation of the anima, her redemption, and from a woman’s standpoint redemption of the feminine. The dead flesh is only a tease, a mirage, which the unconscious uses as bait but then takes away. We have to put the accent on the dead aspect. The anima and the feminine body is of no value if the man looks at it as being dead meat he can eat. If a man treats a woman as a good beefsteak to eat, then he misses the anima.

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“Take the serpent, and place it in the chariot with four wheels, and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea… And there let the chariot with the wheels remain, until so many fumes rise up from the serpent than the whole surface… becomes dry."

What is so important about the carriage is the four wheels. The carriage is a mandala with four wheels around it, and that can be compared to the chariot vision of Ezekiel. You can say that the total structure of consciousness is the carriage, because it is man-made. It doesn’t have much to do with instinct. As the structure of consciousness the carriage serves the gods. Through the vehicle of ego-consciousness the gods are incarnated or actualized. They cannot move a finger if human consciousness does not carry them. That, for instance, is the deeper reason for these processions where the gods are moved through the crowd on carriages; it is to remind people that the god is in a way banished in his temple, and he can’t do anything if he doesn’t move. He has to be carried by the consciousness of the people. That’s why in India, still today, sometimes people throw themselves under the carriage. That would be an unconscious gesture, as if to say, “I sacrifice my life to serve a consciousness that promotes the life of the gods.” That’s more or less what that gesture means. “I have to give up my ego. I sacrifice myself so that the gods can move, can go on living.”

If we are not conscious of the automonous life of the archetypes in the psyche, then they are seemingly nonexistent and, in fact, even destructive. That is why in a society where the archetypes are no longer honored in any way, believed in or taken care of consciously, you have surrogates, morbid political ideas, isms of all kinds, or drugs. You have all the destructive powers overtaking people, because the gods cannot move without humans. They are paralyzed if we don’t carry them.

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So, to come a long way back to her, if our cat is capable of calling up a fire or lightning carriage with a crack of a whip, she reveals in that moment that she’s a goddess and not just a cat. She is a goddess and she is the virgin Mary’s shadow, not a woman. And now you see more what the jewels behind the meat are. Our hero wanted the flesh and instead he fell into the jewels, the eternal or the divine. He has to realize that divine aspect of the flesh. It is not enough for instance, for a Christian who has up until now despised the flesh, to say, “now I’m going to throw my prudish prejudices overboard. I’m going to have juicy sex and enjoy it.” That would be eating the flesh. That’s nothing. If he does that he doesn’t move one inch out of the old kingdom, he’s still caught in it. He only adds the dimension of so-called sin to it. But nothing has happened. He has to realize that the flesh is a form of the divine, a divine revelation, and that sexuality is divine.

That’s what Jung fought with Freud about. He agreed completely with Freud that sex should be liberated and should be lived, not treated with prudish repression, but he wanted to say that sex is a religious experience as in Tantra. And if you live it, therefore, only with the idea, “That’s very healthy for my hormones and makes me physically better,” then you have missed the whole point. Then you have eaten dead meat, rotten meat. The redemption of the feminine means not the redemption of the flesh; it means the redemption of the divinity of the flesh, of the divine, archetypal, godlike aspect of the flesh…

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The old emperor is the old conscious Christian attitude. And if the old conscious attitude now wants to have that newly redeemed feminine for himself, that would look like Susanna and the elders, the lecherous old men; that’s a common theme of art and literature. Concretely it exists. We all know it exists. If you take it as symbolic, it’s the new wine in old bottles. The emperor symbolizes the old principle of consciousness that wants to integrate or to profit from the renewal of life that has come forth in another domain. He wants to assimilate it and would kill it if he could. The poor cat lady would be like an unhappy old hag within a year if she married the old man.

She has the intention of making [the prince] a man and forcing him to take an absolute stand against the old emperor, not just to go away from it but to really say what is what. That is absolutely on the mark of what I feel too, namely that something new must not be peacefully inserted into the old habits. There are certain new things that one must have the honesty to call new and to stand up for, because otherwise the new energy is lost.

Jung once said something to me after I had been to visit a lot of old relatives and had a catastrophic dream that night. Now consciously I thought they were all old horrors and I made fun of them and went home, but that wasn’t enough. The unconscious said, “No, this is really dangerous,” and Jung said, “Yes. If one does not constantly walk forward, the past sucks one back. The past is like an enormous sucking wind that sucks one back all the time. If you don’t go forward you regress. You have constantly to carry the torch of the new light forward, so to speak, historically and also in your own life. As soon as you begin to look backward sadly, or even scornfully, it has you again. The past is a tremendous power.” So the overcoming of the old emperor means to be absolutely inexorable, ruthless about what is different and new.

There is a sense in this fairy tale that she, the cat, is the linen which the old emperor had yearned for and sent his sons out to find. The old order knows in some unconscious or fantasy way what it lacks, and when it comes into view it wants to take it over and claim it for its own, even though a generation has come between. There one has to leave the old emperor alone. One has to leave the past to itself. “Let the dead bury the dead,” as Christ said.

- Marie Louse von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, pg. 61

"We are all deplorables"

Walking to work, and thinking about all the people who voted for Trump but claim not to be racist... who believe his promises to bring back coal jobs (he can't) and build a wall to keep the immigrants out (he won't) and Make America Great Again (too late.) These are the same people who say that they're angry at liberals because they look down on them and think that they're stupid and uneducated... but I'm thinking that I'm not wrong in thinking that they are, in fact, so ignorant and so lacking in the ability to think critically. So what's missing??? I know it has to do with my inferior feeling function, so what is it??

Then later that day I read this article, and I felt it:

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy...

Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who hate you. “In a real sense all life is inter-related,” he wrote in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. …”

It's empathy... but it goes beyond empathy; it's a "feeling with" that accepts weakness and reality, but opens the picture, away from cold, simple facts to a fuller world and relationship. It's sympathy but goes beyond sympathy; it's not mere compassion or pity, not a looking down upon, but a taking in of another's experience, a removal of the glass that's between us to allow us to connect, as one warm human animal to another.

Link:
We Are All Deplorables, by Chris Hedges (Truthdig)

Glossary: Ego

The center of the field of consciousness; the “I” of consciousness. The ego is just one complex among many but it’s very important as it organizes all other contents in the conscious. It's based on the archetype of the Self (the central complex of the total person, both conscious and unconscious); however, the ego is the central complex only of the relatively tiny, conscious part of the psyche. Can be the cause of many problems but necessary for individuation; a weak ego is too “small” to serve as a container for unconscious contents but a strong ego is able to both hold these experiences as well as make the necessary moral choice to undergo the often difficult and even painful experiences required for individuation.

The ego's chief job is discrimination; what is “me” and what is not me? Was that me or was that the persona, or animus, or some other complex? Again, a solid ego is necessary to discriminate the various complexes and relate to them without getting possessed or absorbed into the unconscious.

Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little too.

- The Undiscovered Self," CW 10, par. 491

The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the Self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The Self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves.

- Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," CW 11, par. 391

Through being realized, [the Self] "incarnates" itself, so to speak, in the moral life of the ego. If I had a gift for music like Beethoven's but never discovered or made use of it, it might as well not exist. Only the conscious ego is capable of realizing psychic contents. Even something as great, even divine, as the Self can only be realized by the ego. That is self-realization from a Jungian perspective.

- Marie Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 8

Jungianism: The eternal theory?

Jungian psychology is another such ship. Jung made a ship by creating certain hypotheses to which one can cling when one doesn't know up from down. When one is in danger of drowning in the unconscious, of having a huge inflation or something of the kind, falling into a possession or being overwhelmed by an affect, then such psychological concepts as Jung's can help.

- Marie Louise von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption


If every "ship," every religion/theory of the unconscious wears out, will Jungian psychology not also wear out and have to be replaced?

Maybe... maybe not? The ideas in the unconscious live for a long, long time. We're still finding riches in alchemy, and Greek and Egyptian myths. Maybe it's not the specific ideas which need to be replaced but the emphasis on the one side or the other, as originally we needed to get out of the Mother, and now we need to move back to Her. Certainly, as we collectively integrate more and more of our projections, and are able to see more of the world as it is, our understanding of things, including the unconscious, will change.

However, one thing won't change; the technique. The theory may evolve or even be completely replaced, but the technique of listening to the unconscious, and of the importance of relationship in overcoming psychological problems, will always be true.

Glossary: Dream Series

A series of dreams related by content or subject. Over a person’s life their relationship with internal content changes and grows, and these changes are reflected in the way they change in our dreams. The dreams show the progress of the dialogue between one’s ego and the unconscious. Each individual dream is just one page in a person’s life; you have to look at how the dreams change over time to understand the story of their life.

Glossary: Dream Analysis

Interpreting the symbolism of one’s dream in order to understand the unconscious’s view of a one’s situation. This is done by both looking at the individual’s personal associations with the person or object being looked at as well as through amplification.

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.

- Jung, Collected Works Volume 10, paragraph 317

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness may extend… All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. Out of these all-uniting depths arises the dream, be it never so infantile, never so grotesque, never so immoral.

- Jung, Civilisation in Transition, Collected Works, Vol. 1

Glossary: Primary Function

A person’s strongest function; the one that comes easiest and therefore the one that’s the most highly developed and differentiated. The most socially adapted function, it allows us to survive and even succeed in the world. Because our primary function is the most developed of our four functions we tend to rely on our it the most. The opposite function will always be one’s inferior function.

Experience shows that it is practically impossible, owing to adverse circumstances in general, for anyone to develop all his psychological functions simultaneously. The demands of society compel a man to apply himself first and foremost to the differentiation of the function with which he is best equipped by nature, or which will secure him the greatest social success. Very frequently, indeed as a general rule, a man identifies more or less completely with the most favored and hence the most developed function. It is this that gives rise to the various psychological types.

- Definitions," CW 6, par. 763

The superior function is always an expression of the conscious personality, of its aims, will, and general performance, whereas the less differentiated functions fall into the category of things that simply "happen" to one.

- General Description of the Types," ibid., par. 575.

In deciding which of the four functions - thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition - is primary, one must closely observe which function is more or less completely under conscious control, and which functions have a haphazard or random character. The superior function (which can manifest in either an introverted or an extraverted way) is always more highly developed than the others, which possess infantile and primitive traits.

- http://www.psychceu.com/jung/sharplexicon.html


See also:
The plumb line of personality

Glossary: Countertransference

In analysis, the emotionally charged projection of unconscious contents by the analyst onto the analysand. See transference.

Even if the analyst has no neurosis, but only a rather more extensive area of unconsciousness than usual, this is sufficient to produce a sphere of mutual unconsciousness, i.e., a counter-transference. This phenomenon is one of the chief occupational hazards of psychotherapy. It causes psychic infections in both analyst and patient and brings the therapeutic process to a standstill. This state of unconscious identity is also the reason why an analyst can help his patient just so far as he himself has gone and not a step further.

- “Appendix," CW 16, par. 545

A transference is answered by a counter-transference from the analyst when it projects a content of which he is unconscious but which nevertheless exists in him. The counter-transference is then just as useful and meaningful, or as much of a hindrance, as the transference of the patient, according to whether or not it seeks to establish that better rapport which is essential for the realization of certain unconscious contents. Like the transference, the counter-transference is compulsive, a forcible tie, because it creates a "mystical" or unconscious identity with the object

- “General Aspects of Dream Psychology," CW 8, par. 519

Glossary: Contamination

The propensity for unconscious contents to blend with and get mixed up with each other. Part of the work of analysis is to differentiate these contents.

As these archetypal images are produced directly by the unconscious, it is not surprising that they exhibit its contamination of content to a very high degree. The best instances of this interconnection of everything with everything else can be found in dreams, which are very much nearer to the unconscious even than myths"

- CW 14, p. 293

Glossary: Constellation

Activation of an archetype or complex. E.g. feelings of vulnerability or abandonment can activate the child complex. A time-bound grouping of events.

This term simply expresses the fact that the outward situation releases a psychic process in which certain contents gather together and prepare for action. When we say that a person is "constellated" we mean that he has taken up a position from which he can be expected to react in a quite definite way… The constellated contents are definite complexes possessing their own specific energy.

- "A Review of the Complex Theory," CW 8, par. 198