Feminine Individuation

The proposition, first sustained by esther-harding, that the woman’s individuation follows an arc with its own archetypal stations — girlhood, the ghostly-lover projection and its breaking, friendship, marriage, maternity, the devouring-mother confrontation, middle life, old age — and is not a derivative of the masculine individuation carl-jung had already described. In the-way-of-all-women Harding treats the historical moment at which women were “forced out into the world” and “marriage no longer offered the only career for them” (Harding 1970, p. 92) as opening a genuinely new developmental territory.

Harding’s analytic anchor is the differentiation between collective and individual feminine functioning. A woman “functions collectively as ‘a wife’ or ‘a mother,’ ‘a friend,’ ‘a citizen,’ ‘a lady’ or ‘a good sport’” (Harding 1970, p. 109) — and collective functioning “according to a role whose characteristics and limits are already defined, having been laid down by custom” (Harding 1970, p. 109) is precisely what individuation dissolves. The feminine individuation is the slow extraction of the particular woman from the collective role, through the crucibles of friendship, love, and maternal conflict.

The concept is load-bearing for the post-Harding feminine Jungian line. erich-neumann‘s neumann-great-mother provides the structural map of the archetypal mother against which the individual woman differentiates. marion-woodman carries the work into the body. marie-louise-von-franz‘s readings of fairy tales elaborate the motifs.

Relationships

• individuation
• ghostly-lover
• devouring-mother
• virgin-as-psychological-type
• animus

Primary sources

• the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970)