Feminine Identities - Assignment Example

Running Head: FEMININE IDENTITIES Feminine Identities [The Writer’s Name] [The Name of the Institution] Feminine Identities Women today must face the issue of their own authority. We live in explosive times when traditional models for women no longer hold. New models are insistently foisted upon us from every side. The bewildering variety threatens us. We are told that we must recognize ourselves as androgynous, or that a lesbian life really is a valid life-style, or that we must not be duped by any of these new ideas but implant old-fashioned motherhood in ourselves. Or we must strike out for a career lest we fail to be our own person. Every possible vision of the female is offered as a credible option, leaving us with the intoxicating freedom to find out own ways to be women, putting together as best we can a personal combination of background, tradition, innovation, and original experience to create a personal identity that will hold authority for us. Such freedom is as arduous as it is liberating. The opportunities for personal definition are greater now than ever before precisely because of the loosening of conventional opinions, inherited values, religious convictions, political certainties, and social stereotypes. But without clearly articulated definitions to rebel against, complain about, and react to, the burden of creation presents, as Kierkegaard said, a dizzying effect. Our need for authority grows all the more urgent with every failure of nostrums and panaceas for quick and easy use. The locus of authority now shifts for women. They must recognize themselves as no mere variations on the male. The symbolism of the feminine is more than a complementary part of masculine images, and both stand for a special way of being and becoming, each with its own impetus and direction. Such an approach may lead to the discovery of an abiding authority those issues from women's own experiences. Authority yields an extraordinary range of meanings. In this understanding, one with authority can delegate power, adjudicate issues, possess persuasive force or conviction. In Greek, authority has a similar range of associations: to begin, beget, project, or stand forth with power, prominence, and dignity. More striking meanings come from the Hebrew: the one with authority is a maker, creator, nourisher, bestower, master, teacher, supreme counselor, and one who carries a burden--the weight of dignity. To find our own authority as women we must look into our experience of the unconscious as well as what we know consciously, and out of those depths we must beget actions, engender persuasive force, nourish, counsel, conceive and develop distinct feminine perspectives from which to view reality. Jung's notion of the animus proves a useful metaphor that helps us come to terms with our own capacities to function in ways that have traditionally been assigned to men. To find our authority as women means we must integrate the animus--the so-called masculine side of ourselves--with our identities as females so that it is at our conscious disposal for use in our lives and in the world. Jung's notion of the whole person as contra sexual is a radical twentieth-century image. It steers us clear of sex-role stereotypes where we must be exclusively male or female, pressured from within and without to squeeze ourselves to fit some abstraction called the feminine or the masculine, or take the consequences of guilt and ostracism if we fail to conform. (Ann, 2001, 197-212) Contra-sexuality squarely faces the fact of concrete sexual identity. We are born into male or female bodies which shape our psychological perceptions of self and world. A parent of the same sex initiates different psychological dynamics in our development from those that come from a relationship with a parent of the opposite sex. Our sexual identity as men or women comprises a central part of our personality and cannot simply be ignored. It must be lived by us in a personal way, neither lacquered over according to abstract prescription nor simply avoided because we are afraid of the enormous work involved. Contra-sexuality emphasizes a paradox in gaining a secure sexual identity. In coming to terms with the unconscious archetypal contra-sexual factor in ourselves--what Jung calls the anima in men and the animus in women--we become all the more a person of specific and workable sexual identity. We become more, not less, our own woman when we integrate the masculine components of our personality. The woman who comes to terms with her masculine side becomes fully and freely her own feminine being. She creatively improvises her identity from materials in her cultural conditioning and anatomy, but she is not herself solely determined by them. In integrating the animus archetype, a woman enlarges her sexual identity to include her own way of being and behaving in the "masculine" manner. (Mary, 1999, 234-43) Thus, she finds her own style of relating aggression, ambition, and determination to the so-called traditional feminine virtues of caring and concern. The anima and animus are archetypes--that is, forms of readiness for response, without fixed contents. What they mediate to the ego as images of masculine and feminine is modified under the influence of culture. Jungians recognize that it is not only erroneous but clinically dangerous to assign fixed contents to the contra sexual factor, to equate anima with feeling or animus with thinking, for example. We need instead to observe closely what a particular woman's animus presents to her ego. Within the wide range of symbolism there exist distinct clusters of imagery associated with masculine and feminine, but we cannot assign set contents to the anima or animus of real persons. These must always be discovered in the concrete human situation. The result of integrating the contra sexual side of our natures is to heighten, deepen, and make more comfortably inhabitable our identities as women or men. (Valerie, 2002, 151-65) A woman with her animus function integrated becomes more her own particular female self, radiating the life force which flows through her. Through the workings of this fuller sexuality and contra sexuality, she keeps in touch with the deep spiritual resources of her feminine being. We especially need these resources in the society, particularly now with more women entering the ministry. Our faith has too long been parched, mechanical, prescriptive. We resort to ethical programs and political exhortation when we are estranged from the living centre of religious experience. We need women who are connected to their feminine beings all the way deep down inside themselves, women who can communicate to the unconscious levels of being of their hearers rather than simply to a consciousness that is so often clouded with anger, arguments, fear, and resistance. But to do this a woman needs to be securely and consciously anchored in her own feminine being. Paradoxically, this means consciously to receive her masculine side. Without it, we lack the toughness to initiate new ways of being. On the other hand, if we allow the animus virtually to replace the ego's functions, we lose our own feminine identities. The animus is a psychic complex that forms a bridge between a woman's conscious ego and the deeper layers of her unconsciousness. (Jung, 1953, 188-212) To function in a connected way is one of the chief hallmarks of the feminine. Heart and head cooperate so that at their best women has a capacity to generate a personal relatedness to their activities and spheres of work. The personal relatedness a woman feels to what she is doing or thinking brings into her activity in a caring mode. (Jean, 1996, 147-50) To the radical splits in our world between what we believe and how we act, this expression of care carries a healing effect. It is caring of a different quality from that seen in the efforts of modern bureaucracies that try to meet the needs of particular persons with an officious impersonality. This connectedness operating in a woman helps her to harmonize disparate elements, such as the diverse personalities of her family, or the polarities of sexual and spiritual experience. The centrality of connectedness to the feminine is made poignantly clear in the pervasive distress we feel when disconnected. (Chodorow, 2004, 95-101) Then we feel eaten alive by the various needs and demands of our children, our husbands, our jobs, our friends. We know little success with schedules that compartmentalize our various tasks. When we do succeed in such compartmentalization this hour for errands that hour for lovemaking our life's blood drains away. Resentment sets in the atmosphere reeks with poisonous reproach or despair. We complain of feeling scattered, in pieces, confused-all symptoms that we have lost touch with a capacity for harmonious connectedness. Problems arise when men think women duplicate the characteristics of their own anima and therefore deserve the same treatment or mistreatment given to their anima. The anima lacks the vital force of the female; it is, after all, only a component part of the male personality and hence more passive and properly secondary to male ego functioning. If men project their animas onto women they unconsciously assume that women's place in the world is also secondary. Lacking the ruthless potential of a real woman, the man's anima tends to be more sentimental than women are, more given to vanity and soft headedness. Thus men say one thing and do another. They vote "yes" when in fact they believe "no," because they fear others' dislike or that they may hurt someone or get hurt if they follow their conscience. They may do more harm to others as well as themselves by betraying their conscience, but the blame is spread around and not clearly located at their door. Whereas if they were to stand up and say "no" outright, they could be criticized. (Jung, 1953, 188-212) A particularly good example of lack of anima toughness turns up in some men's responses to the women's movement. These men enthusiastically agree with feminist claims, consciously accept their own guilt en masse, as a sex, for the mistreatment of women. But what they give with one hand, they withhold with the other. The man who indulges in abstractions of guilt fails to pay his cleaning lady a decent wage, or to share in the housework with his wife. Unconsciously he remains untouched in his basic attitudes. He plugs publicly for rights of women, but do not expect him to clear the table. When he gets a job offer, the family must move, despite the uprooting of his wife's career. Another example of a man under the sway of the anima is seeing a woman as a mere sex object. Breasts, bottoms, and genital parts as well, stare at the viewer from the glossy girlie magazines, but the male reader rarely treats an actual woman's sexual parts with such intense scrutiny or loving inspection. Without real women, this tendency to sentimentalize may go unchecked, a problem often seen in the society. The rise of anima femininity may also account in some circumstances for the appearance of homosexuality. Men begin to live out of their contra sexual side at the expense of their conscious masculine adaptation. This occurs in part to supply the feminine presence missing from the scene and in part because the anima does not receive adequate attention from the ego and swamps it. (Otto, 2001, 121-30) The women's movement shows a corresponding rise of attraction to lesbianism. The contra sexual side of women's personalities accumulates in an all-female atmosphere and some women come to live out of it more than from their conscious female identities, especially if they cannot easily receive their reality as females. Projection onto women by men happens most frequently in professions where women are excluded from equal footing with men. When no woman's presence is really felt, the contra sexual anima factor in men tends to build up as if to compensate for the outward lack. However, the contra sexual element always differs significantly from conscious sexual identity in the opposite sex. The femininity of the anima, for example, is not the same as the femininity displayed in the personalities of actual women. The female stands forth as a bearer of an extraordinary paradox, the paradox of the simultaneity of personal and nonpersonal life, the paradox of the mixture of the concrete and the symbolic. Women are emerging now from the stereotypes and collective labels fixed on them. We are learning to improvise our own particular identities out of all our elements, of body, culture, and psyche, of our individual gifts, and of our limits. We stand for new ways of dealing with projections. We are working to bring sexual images into consciousness, not simply identifying with projected images, or angrily repudiating them. What have been warring opposites of the masculine and feminine need no longer blur into an undifferentiated unity or simply be ignored. We can arrive at the other side. Bit by bit we can integrate these opposites in ourselves and others, creating a new concreteness of real flesh-and-blood persons living in space and time, more fully themselves than they have been before. (Wolfgang, 2003, 210-20) To push beyond the polarization of the sexes is possible only in a step-by-step process, affected by particular persons with concrete identities openly worn. It cannot be achieved by fiat. A receiving woman knows a special ministry to the particularity of persons, against abstract definitions and prescriptive stereotypes. She probes being in its many concrete, individual faces. Through her reception of differences between the sexes, she makes perceptible the similarity of the sexes. She knows that to focus on concrete persons does not lead to a confining personalism. (Karen, 1997, 87-93) The personalist way is a false way; it issues from the artificial compartmentalization of persons into public and private spheres, the inevitable sterility bred by people in categorical confinement. To focus on persons rather than categories is to reopen the flow of life, to see persons gathered in communities rather than collectives, into intimacies with each other rather than statistical units, person next to person all around the world. A person's fanatic embrace of the mode of being-one-with may appear as acceptance of it, but that is a sham, quickly evidenced by that person's compulsive insistence that it is the only true way of knowing. Then the familiar us-them mentality follows, with the projection of all evil onto anyone who holds different views. From this perspective, another temptation is to throw out both the masculine and feminine modalities of being and knowing in favour of a unisexual androgyny. This alternative presents the danger of regression to a presexual, disembodied, ethereal identity, where the whole issue of sexual differentiation has not yet emerged into awareness and is not allowed to do so. Instead of integrating two modalities of being into a fresh and unique personality of man or woman, we lose the clear definition of either to a blurry indefiniteness that masquerades as man woman. That soft of identity differs significantly from the strong male who possesses large feminine sensibilities, or the vibrant female who manifests vigorous masculine qualities. (David , 1999, 132-35) The men and women who possess their contra sexual sides confidently and clearly stand out from the shapeless unisexual as flexible and open, large in their identities as men or women. In contrast, the androgyny exudes indefiniteness that on closer inspection often turns out to be an as yet uprooted identity that cannot endure the stresses of sexual commitment. In psychological terms we are talking about the difference between a pre-Oedipal and a post oedipal personality. The pre-Oedipal person is not yet formed in his or her own identity, does not yet possess a rudimentary core of superego conscience, for that is one of the legacies bequeathed to us by working through Oedipal conflict. Thus the religious feeling associated with unisex identity tends to regress to pre-monotheistic phases of religious formation. There, one is apt to identify as religious any intense or startling experience of incipient identity of self, whether through an unconscious dream, a spontaneous image, or a special moment with another person, to the exclusion of the ethical, the prophetic, or the transcendent aspects of faith where one feels addressed and even commanded. Of special importance is the experience of ambivalence that is so marked in pre-Oedipal life--those emotions of love and hate, good and bad, both in oneself and others. (Sigmund, 1965, 135-39) We live now in a historical era of unparalleled opportunities for fundamental changes of consciousness. There are accessible to us in increasingly articulated forming the images, concepts, and symbols of the feminine modality of being. These can be added to--not subtracted from or substituted for--the masculine, to give us our understanding of what it is to be human. We have begun to be liberated from the mutually exclusive dualisms of spirit and flesh, heaven and earth, active and passive, penetration and reception that traditionally have been symbolized in the images of masculine and feminine and set against each other as polarized opposites. For a time these original distinctions helped us articulate the fundamental dynamics of our experience. Over the years they have become increasingly rigid and sapped of their symbolic power as they have been applied more and more as prescriptions for the identities of actual men and women. In recent decades these divisive categories have lost some of their hold on us. Women's challenges liberated all of us to some extent from their prescriptive tyranny, but we have not yet integrated the modalities of being human that they symbolize, not yet secured them for conscious disposal. Women who would receive all of themselves and who insist on being received by others as all of themselves, lead the way at the moment in shaping what could become a radically new consciousness. A woman wanting to receive all of herself faces the feminine as it is, in its own right, accepting the shaping influences of her female biology, of the history of women, of the distinct cluster of imagery and affect traditionally symbolized as the feminine. Shunning those reductions that equate recognition of the feminine to passive subscription to double standards, and shunning the notion that if one denies the distinct existence of female persons as female, somehow all problems will disappear, she embarks on a third course. She actively inquires what it might mean in a variety of ways to approach things from a distinctly feminine point of view. (Helene, 2005, 139-44) Hers is neither the univocal one-sex view, nor the equivocal no-difference-between-the-sexes view. It includes a strong emphasis on women shaping their own styles of personal identity in response to their cultural heritage, the influence of their bodies, and the symbols long associated with the feminine. It centres on openness to the guiding impulses of spirit that herald a new vision of woman as containing within herself a masculine side as man has a feminine side. The receiving woman, then, begins with the feminine and with the female's psychology. Each woman is seen in her own right, guided by her own intrinsic psychological and spiritual qualities. Women can and do show their own distinct ways of being human, and in the history of symbols the feminine does offer a cluster of images with a vast number of associated emotional and behavioural patterns that gather specific equipment and endowments as modes of human reality. These must now be explored. There are certain examples of specific women who put together tradition and originality, the problems and possibilities of being human, feminine and masculine elements of being. Such qualities become concrete in their individual temperaments, tempos, problems, and relationships to all that is other in their lives--to specific pasts, specific biological realities, and specific symbols of the feminine. They introduce and underscore particularity as essential to being human. They make us see that we do our best work not by levelling down to a category, but by including in our lives all the personal variables. These efforts by individual women offer us models for collective patterns of employment, for humanizing work through an assertion of sexual differences, for a realistic exchange between the private and public dimensions of life without sacrificing either. It is a great sin to tell such pioneering, self-assertive, model making women that theirs is a "selfish endeavour," that they are involved in some "bourgeois illusion," that they are retreating into a "privatistic indulgence" while neglecting the world's injustices. Such an attack attempts to draw them away from their personal life into abstractions, from the concrete elements of their own being into empty generality; steering them away from an active and receptive consciousness into what must be for them a senseless struggle. This attack sabotages efforts to create out of parts of life a living, personal whole, both as individuals and as members of communities; as loving persons receptive to other persons. It altogether misses the fact that they are persons firm enough in their own identities to receive otherness in all its forms--other cultures, other ways of looking at the same tasks, other ways to conceive meaning in life, above all the otherness of truth. Only a woman receiving her own identity can be open to otherness with all its religious implications. These women attempt the new and know it as a fragile undertaking. Their effort is much more difficult than denouncing the failures of tradition. Their course of life is much more subject to doubt than that of the accusers of others. They seek new channels of personal life, of wider consciousness to include in a female fullness of personal identity what heretofore has been split up between the sexes. Hatred of the image of sexual polarity, like most hatred, leads to a dead end. Sexuality gives us a primary and universal experience of difference. It acts as a paradigm for most of life's tensions, contrasts, and oppositions. The masculine-feminine polarity turns up in psychic material and in the world's mythologies and religions as a principal symbol for both the interconnectedness and the divisive competition between basic pairs of opposites. In it are expressed the psychological processes of conscious and unconscious, affiliation and negation. It reflects such mythological realms as heaven and earth, light and darkness, sun and moon, logos and Eros. Every effort to annihilate the images of sexual polarity amounts to little more than repressing them into the unconscious. There, dissociated from the civilizing influence of the ego, the image regresses to more primitive states and contaminates whatever else remains unconscious. Repressing sexual polarity amounts to denying the evidence of our senses, of body differences, and of the reception of the psychological significance of those differences. To repress this knowledge requires huge expenditures of energy that builds up enormous tension in the unconscious. This sets the stage for the inevitable return of the repressed content by devious routes, usually in heightened agitation about almost all other polarities, as if conscripting them to play the central symbolic role that sexual symbolism so long enjoyed. We see evidence for this interpretation in the displacement of sexual polarization onto political polarizations, best summed up by the dualism of oppressor and oppressed. The feminists who reject images of sexual polarity show a particular fondness for this set of stereotypes. Just as hatred of sexual imagery leads to all-out political attacks on society as we know it in the West, so the prescriptive sexual stereotypes are transmogrified into rigidly prescriptive roles for political activists, insisting on an "us-them" mentality. The sequence is clear: sexual polarity is perceived as a hostile polarization of the sexes; therefore the imagery of sexual polarity is repressed in hopes of cutting off injustice at its root. But this central paradigm of human behaviour re-emerges in its displaced forms in political polarities that quickly undergo the same inner distortion into reified stereotypes of polarized opposites. Political polarity changes into an anguished politicization with all its attendant abuses. Holders of this view fall under the same old unconscious assumption: "we" are right and "they" are wrong; hence "they" deserve all violence because "they" do not conform to our standards. Flight into abstractions occurs just as in the worst abuses of sexual stereotyping where an immutable reified content of "female" or "feminine" hangs like a moon in the sky. The content is different but the process remains the same. Political polarization encourages the timeworn utopian fantasy that we can make ourselves and our world perfect if people will only do what we say. We point to lofty abstractions and global solutions, all distant from the immediate concrete facts and problems that demand our attention. We see our cause stretching to the far horizon, ourselves conscripted into an unending fight for principles--unending because they are comfortably abstract and hypothetical, without the awkwardness and untidiness of the concrete and immediate. The same labelling with facile slogans occurs as in the worst abuses of sexual stereotyping, the same bullying tactics and vilification of sexual identities. The "real woman" now must subscribe to a code of politicization, a code of dress, a code of behaviour that if deviated from brings down on her head the kind of ostracism. A woman dragged under by repression of sexual polarity is bound to behave in exaggeratedly oppressive ways. She is not likely to recover her own feminine identity, or to win recognition for feminine modalities in collective consciousness. Rather, she loses big chunks of her feminine ego to the unconscious, replacing it with what Jung calls animus slogans--generalized prescriptions uttered to herself and to others, both women and men, about how things ought to be. There is no bridging connection to the woman she actually is or to the concrete reality of the other person. She offers others a caricature of masculine behaviour, a driven, dissociated, hell-bent, bit-in-the-teeth determination to get her own way regardless of the sacrifice of values involved. (Donald, 72-84) The horrible irony of this dilemma shows forth in the ardent hard-line feminist who behaves in a flagrantly sexist manner toward other women. She seeks them out for a job, for example, not on the basis of talent or qualification, but simply on the basis of anatomy, hiring by vagina. But let that candidate for employment reveal a different view of politics or of "the movement and the ardent feminist will drop her cold, labelling her with contempt as a "good girl" or "queen bee" or "the enemy." The myth of sisterhood collapses. Any woman not holding precisely the same views is rejected and cast out. Caught in a repression of her own concrete identity as a woman, this hard-liner cannot see any other woman's concrete reality. (Donald, 72-84) For her there are only broad categories and narrowly applied abstractions. The effects on general political life of such constricting sexual politics prove equally unfortunate. Acquiring as it does a displacement of sexual energy onto its own political procedures; the procedures in turn take on a frenzied, agitated quality, full of the restless tensions of unlived sexual emotion. Like an animal in sexual season, persons caught in obsessive politicization compulsively sniff for potential issues, prowl in search of grievances, seek a suitable injustice on which to vent their undischarged energies. A "rally round the flag, boys" mentality is generated, whipping up emotions for the cause. Such emotions can quickly turn into their opposites, love and hate switching roles with frightening rapidity. The polarity of the sexes represents a self-other polarity too. In unfolding its young self a child quickly comes to acquire gender identity as a male or female. Later the intimacies of sexual love open deeper experiences of finding oneself in the loving embrace of the other, who is sufficiently different to mark off the boundaries of self and sufficiently alike to reinforce a common humanness. Only an adult sexuality in a true love relationship can match the infant-parent relationship in open inspections of body and spirit, in mutual contemplation and handling of the other's embodied self. As a mother mirrors the face of her child, so a lover reflects the face of the beloved. Finding his or her real self cherished and valued, each partner communicates to the other recognition of value of the human person that infuses life with meaning. Thus enters spiritual reality--the perception of truth and value that makes life worth living, the sense that one matters even in one's imperfection, that one is alive and real even in one's mortality. Without lovingness released into human relationship, we suffer a deep loneliness that drives us into madness. In defence against that loneliness where we receive neither self nor other, we resort to polarization. Rather than preserve the tensions of agreement and difference, the similarities and dissimilarities of female and male sexuality, we either split them into opposing polarizations or substitute divisive politicizations for them. Today it is often proposed to replace the old imagery of sexual polarity with a new one of human sexuality as androgynous. This image holds great appeal. It frees us from sexual stereotyping. It pictures the whole person as a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics. It emphasizes the role of cultural conditioning in forming gender identity. If we change our cultural images of male and female, the argument runs, we can condition our children toward a peace-bringing androgynous sexual model. Several objections immediately come to mind. The first is, we must be careful not to replace one reductionism with another. We know the familiar Freudian slogan: "Anatomy is destiny." Is it any better to announce now that cultural conditioning is destiny? Is it any real improvement to assert that our male and female sexual identities arise solely from cultural influences on our gender formation? This view ignores the concrete reality of our bodies, which are predominantly male or female and remain the loci in which we live in the world. The body houses the spiritual, physical, psychological forces through which and by which we touch other people and are touched by them. Our body space does affect and shape us; but it does not altogether determine us. Our particular psyches, cultural backgrounds, and large symbolic inheritances of masculine and feminine images influence us decisively. To say we cannot do without our images of the masculine and the feminine does not condemn us to use them only in their present forms. The images can change; indeed they must change and do, and we can sometimes hasten the change. But in our zeal to combat the discriminatory abuses of sexual polarity, we can fall into the fantasy that we can control all its imagery. On the one hand we regress to a neither presexual, non differentiated image of neither nor androgynous unisex. On the other, we compensate for this regression with exaggerated emphasis on ego control. Our consciousness will somehow produce the images our unconscious has neglected. We will import feminine imagery where it has been lacking. All pronouns will now be he-she; the godhead will be referred to as Mother-Father, and so forth. We confine ourselves to ego plans and ego engineering and almost entirely lose touch with the expansive potentialities and organic growth of our unconscious mental processes. Ironically, we employ as solution the very attitude we have defined as the problem. We criticize the domination of masculine imagery and yet we caricature its worst expressions in this quick-fix mentality to make present what is absent. We get a conscious solution to a consciously defined problem; we do not get a new image that connects us to a newly unfolding reality. A change in grammar is not an adequate response to the exclusion of women and of the feminine in collective consciousness. We apply a remedy rather than participate in the organic growth of new images born from new mixtures of conscious and unconscious processes, from cultural and psychic influences, from women and men receiving all of themselves. (Harry, 1998, 149-53) We must also object to the attempt to bypass human reality in this way of addressing the identity issue. If we adopt the image of androgyny as a literal description of human sexuality, we are almost bound to flee the concrete tasks of learning to live as men and women, to differentiate conflicting images within us, to integrate instinctual drives, and to harmonize the symbols that insist on proclaiming the masculine and feminine sides of ourselves. Regression to a pre-Oedipal state where no firm differentiation exists between maleness and femaleness may offer relief from the tensions involved in achieving gender identity and relations to the other sex. In such a state, ego-boundaries are fluid, sexual impulses blur with their opposites, love and hate merge. One appeal of bisexuality or of homosexuality as an alternative life-style is this easing of strain involved in attempting to achieve a discrete dominant identity as male or female. In place of composing a reliable identity as woman or man, and of finding and creating one's personal style of sexual identity, one can simply float, merge, blend, and remain vague in outline. This state seems more flexible on the surface, but breaks down when intimacy is attempted with another person. References Ann Belford Ulanov, "Jung on Male and Female", in Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban T. Holmes III, Christian Approaches to Sexuality ( Seabury Press, 2001), pp. 197-212 Chodorow, N. "Family Structure and Feminine Personality", in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Woman, Culture, and Society ( Stanford University Press, 2004); 95-101 David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence ( Beacon Press, 1999), 132-135 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 72--84 Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self ( International Universities Press, 1998), pp. 149-53 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, Vol. II (Grune & Stratton, 2005), p. 139-44. Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women ( Beacon Press, 1996). 147-50 Jung, C. G. "Anima and Animus", in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, Vol. 7, tr. by R. F. C. Hull (Bollingen Series, XX; Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. 188-212. Karen Horney, "The Dread of Woman", in Feminine Psychology (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997); 87-93 Mary Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries ( London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1999), pp. 234-243 Otto Rank, 2001 "Feminine Psychology and Masculine Ideology", Cambridge 121-30 Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove , The Wise Wound ( Richard Marek Publishers, 1978). Sigmund Freud, "Femininity", in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton & Co., 1965), p. 135-39 Valerie Saiving Goldstein, "The Human Situation. A Feminine Viewpoint", in The Nature of Man in Theological and Psychological Perspective, ed. by Simon Doniger ( Harper & Row, 2002), pp. 151-165. Wolfgang Lederer, The Fear of Women ( Grune & Stratton, 2003). 210-20 Read More