multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.
Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world
we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;
prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,
governments contemptuous o f their people, people
filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,
rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition
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Woman Hating
gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,
want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those
phenomena mark the distance between civilized man
and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social
patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced
way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how
it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment
when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable
humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence
was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and
social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then
imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had
with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even
know much of what happened before people made
pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps
would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have
(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part
of the natural world, not set over against it; when men
and women, male and female, were whatever they were,
not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into
castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined
whole.
In recent years, depth psychologists in particular
have turned to primitive people and tribal situations
in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of
male and female. The most notable effort was made by
Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable
as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers
Androgyny: The Mythological Model
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have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as
archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined
as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and
embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is
defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.
