Women's Aggressive Fantasies

Details: Last Updated: Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37; Written by Sue Austin

Opening Remarks for the Jung-Seminar October 5 - October 7, 2000

Sue Austin In order to introduce myself and the Jung-Seminar, I thought it might be useful to write a little about how the paper which forms the basis of the next three days of discussion came into being.

Back in January 1986 I went into a three times per week analysis with an SAP Jungian in London (I am a Londoner, and came to live in Sydney 11 years ago). A couple of months into analysis, I started to read around the process that I was in and promptly walked into the wall of Jung's sexism in the form of his essay 'Woman in Europe'. Next I looked to a psychoanalytic text which was written by a woman and happened to have come my way. That was also deeply unsatisfying as it too failed to meet any of the questions which analysis was stirring up. In hindsight I would say that I was trying to find a well thought-out and emotionally honest psychological account of a woman's experience of what it is to be female in the contemporary world. What I kept coming up against instead were a series of more or less able discussions of women in history, or fantasies of women in men's minds, or women viewing themselves through theories which were created on the basis of the exclusion of the female subject. What I knew at the time was that none of what I was reading felt 'right' or took me anywhere very new intellectually.

For want of any other obvious ways forward, I went back to Jung's writings on women's psychology and they continued to infuriate me. Yet flickering behind the specifics of his text was something which caught my attention. I could not put my finger on what it was, but read on through his work being irritated and arguing all the way. Some years later I came across a reference in Claire Douglas' The Woman In The Mirror which expressed what I had glimpsed in Jung's text that had kept me reading, in spite of myself, in which Jung comments:

...women often pick up tremendously when they are allowed to think all the disagreeable things which they had denied themselves before.

This quote seems to me to run in quite a different plane to many of Jung's simpler, culture and period-bound formulations of his thoughts on women's psychology. As a comment it struck me as powerfully accurate, and it set me a task of unpacking it and trying to understand it personally, as a clinician, and as a theoretician.

The first thing I thought about was the number of times I have been in conversations in which women describe their 'darker' thoughts, and then say something like '. . . of course I wouldn't tell my therapist about this stuff . . . they'd lock me up!' The apparent 'undiscussability' of such thoughts set me wondering: what are the disagreeable thoughts which women deny themselves? What is the permission which is needed for women to think these thoughts, and whose is it to give? What possibilities for movement and change can be accessed? Why is it so hard or frightening to engage with such thoughts?

In particular, I became fascinated by the dark thoughts which form the basis of the 'inner critic' which berates so many women and the way in which of Jung's female followers, especially those in the first generation, discussed it. The voice of the 'inner critic', a voice which feels as though it has the authority of God, repeatedly tells a woman that she is useless, ugly, stupid, fat, hopeless and so on. Clinical work with male patients has indicated to me that men have equivalent phenomena, although they seem to be psycho-socially structured in different ways.

My primary theoretical interest at that stage however, was around the ways in which some of the women who worked directly with Jung described and theorised their 'self-hater'. These women discussed the phenomenon under the title of the 'negative animus' (generally understood as women's internalised version of a universal 'masculine' principle).

Marie Louis Von Franz described an example where she woke from a dream in which a burglar-rapist was breaking into her house. Later that morning she noticed that she had started to think that book she was working on was useless and that she should throw it away. Von-Franz went on to explore this thought in terms of her own internal animus being the carrier of her internal 'masculine', represented internal aggression.

When I read this, it struck me as a very powerful move, offering clinical possibilities which seem to me to have been largely lost in subsequent feminist revisions of depth psychology. What Von Franz did in linking her intruder dream and her subsequent barely conscious, self-hateful thought was to provide me with an opening for exploring Jung's comment about women getting better in therapy when they allow themselves to think disagreeable thoughts. Clearly, one cluster of self-censored disagreeable thoughts seemed to revolve around aggression and violence. Ironically, the traditional Jungian framework, with its reliance on profoundly conservative, if not patriarchal fantasies of eternal, universal, foundational gender archetypes had thrown up a radical feminist insight.

What was so important to me about Von Franz's link was that she took both her dream and her thought seriously and tracked the barely conscious attacking thought back to an unconscious origin. Second, she saw the aggression in the self-destructiveness as something to do with her: it was not simply an external attack on her creativity which she was inevitably victim to. Third, this meant that she was at some level, responsible for her own destructiveness and its consequences, and that offered her a degree of freedom of choice. It took a while for me to realise what it was in all this that interested me, and it only really 'clicked' in a conversation with Andrew Samuels where he referred to what I was interested in as 'women's aggressive fantasies'.

Given the context in which she was writing, it was inevitable that Von Franz gave her account of these phenomena in terms of Jung's notion of the archetype of the animus, since this was the only avenue through which a woman in her position could sustain for herself and others an intelligible 'good feminine self', while also being able to inspect her own aggression and violence.

Jung's own ambivalence towards his concept of animus, and the phenomena it referred to, is, of course, well known. Claire Douglas provides an extensive exploration of Jung's concept of the animus and draws our attention to the fact that in his entire writings Jung had 3 good things to say about the animus, and all of them are in sentences of between 8 and 14 words, hedged with qualifiers. In the light of this, we can see that the first generation Jungian women were walking on dangerous ground with their self exploration.

As these thoughts turned into a PhD and analytic training, my theoretical interests have branched out to include contemporary feminism's explorations of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and post-structuralist/post-modern theory. Inevitably, this has thrown up questions about what is left of my interest in Jung and post-Jungian thought, and the Women's Aggressive Fantasies - A Post-Jungian Hermeneutic paper was partly an attempt to answer that. I knew that I still thought "like a Jungian/post-Jungian" - that was clear when I interacted with academics and with clinicians from other backgrounds, but I wasn't sure why or how I was still Jungian/post-Jungian. This paper was, amongst other things, an attempt to answer that question for myself by examining the strands of Jungian/ post-Jungian thought which I had assimilated into my very being and relied on to make sense of the clinical and personal world, on a daily basis. When I looked closely, I found that I had already hybridised those strands with certain elements of feminism and that the task was one of unpacking the results into something discussible with colleagues and useable with patients.

In the light of this background to the paper, I would be especially interested in discussing a number of themes in particular over the next three days:

First, and most importantly, women's aggressive fantasies or dreams, regardless of whether the women who has the fantasy/dream is the perpetrator or victim of the aggression. This area of interest also extends to fantasies/dreams/material in which women find themselves in / explore states of resistance to identity, or the need to psychologically 'come undone' in order to escape, blow up, puncture (etc.) the illusion of coherent feminine identity. Bersani uses the expression "self-shattering jouissance" and this intrigues me.

Second, clinician's experiences of violent or aggressive countertansference fantasies around women patients (the therapist OR the patient, OR both can be the enactor of the violence in such fantasies or dreams).

Third, I continue to be interested in the stuff women censor out of their therapy and why. Clearly, some of this is individual and will have to do with matters such as therapist gender and the nature of the fit between therapist and patient. I suspect, however, that there may be more to it in terms of how women feel they have to package themselves to be appropriate subjects for the (bourgeois) therapeutic endeavour. Obviously, the conscious aim of therapy is to get beyond these sorts of 'deals', but I do wonder about the extent to which therapy unconsciously trades on them for its sustainability.

Forth, I am still intrigued by Jung's comment about the value of women's disagreeable thoughts and am still wondering what else this category might include and why it is so hard for women (and men) to think about women's disagreeable thoughts in ways which go beyond stereotyping such as '... she's such a bitch!' / 'she's animus possessed' etc.

Fifth, how these ideas translate for men, and where the areas of overlap/difference seem to be, especially on an individual, experiential basis.

Finally, I would like to thank Don and Dolores for making this seminar possible, and for all their support and hard work. I would also like to thank Harvest, the London-based Journal For Jungian Studies (who originally published the paper that forms the basis of this seminar) for giving permission for it to be reproduced on the C.G. Jung Page. A warm welcome, and thanks to you for your interest in this seminar. I hope that between us we can find ways of discussing these ideas and questions which hold something of value for us all.

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