Repressed Feminine

The repressed feminine is the Seba lineage’s term for the collective-cultural condition in which the archetypal feminine — and particularly its chthonic, instinctual, wild, and erotic dimensions — has been systematically excluded from the public life of a civilization and pushed into the underworld of the unconscious, where it operates as symptom, as projected pathology, and as the return of the very material the conscious order has disowned.

The thesis is central to the post-Jungian feminist literature — [[estes-women-who-run-with-wolves|Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves]], [[harding-womans-mysteries|Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries]], Marion Woodman‘s work on conscious femininity — and it stands in a longer arc that includes Bachofen‘s thesis of the defeat of the matriarchy and Neumann‘s reading of the origins of consciousness as the hero’s separation from the Great Mother. The question the tradition holds open: is this separation a developmental necessity (Neumann) or a historical injury (the feminist reading), and can the mature integration of the repressed feminine be accomplished without regression to the uroboric origin? See archetypal-feminine and woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews.

Relationships

• archetypal-feminine
• woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews
• estes-women-who-run-with-wolves