Androgyny occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, serving simultaneously as a cosmogonic archetype, an alchemical symbol, a psychological ideal, and — for its critics — a dangerous abstraction. Jung’s engagement with the theme is extensive: from the hermaphroditic Primordial Man of Gnostic doctrine and the dual-natured Adam as prototype of Christ, through the alchemical rebis and the coniunctio of opposites in Mysterium Coniunctionis, to the androgynous implications of the child archetype in its twilight state of non-differentiation. Hoeller reads androgyny as the authentic Gnostic-psychological goal, carefully distinguished from the merely sociological ‘unisex.’ Samuels subjects the concept to post-Jungian scrutiny, noting how Singer’s androgyny, alongside rival formulations, approaches Freud’s ‘polymorphously perverse’ and Lacan’s rejection of pre-given gendered entities. The sharpest internal critique belongs to Patricia Berry, who argues that the concept, precisely in its clinical tidiness, evacuates the flesh, pain, and historical disrepute that psychic life actually requires. The Jungian hermaphrodite — appearing in cosmogony, alchemy, Gnosticism, and Christ-imagery — thus names both a primordial psychic state and an eschatological aspiration, while remaining, for archetypal psychology, a suspect consolation.
The very word androgyny is clinically clean, straight, and sterile, free from the germs of time and struggle and disrepute. There is no sense of inferiority, for androgyny is the transcending, trans-sexual solution, not the soiling one.
Berry argues that androgyny, as typically conceived, is a sanitized abstraction that evades the embodied conflict and inferiority essential to genuine psychological work.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
Not unisex but androgyny is the true goal of the transformation of the psyche, but this androgyny, rare and precious indeed, is to be found only in the highest flowering of the soul and consequently of humanity.
Hoeller distinguishes genuine androgyny — a rare psycho-spiritual integration — from the superficial unisexual model, positioning it as the authentic telos of inner transformation.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
Its veiled androgyny reflects the hermaphroditism of the lapis, which in this respect has more affinity with the views of the Gnostics. In recent times the theme of androgyny has been subjected to quite special treatment.
Jung traces the Christ-image’s androgynous character to Gnostic doctrines of the hermaphroditic Primordial Man, linking it directly to the alchemical lapis as symbol of psychic totality.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955thesis
Perhaps the majority of cosmogonic gods are of a bisexual nature. The hermaphrodite means nothing but a union of the strongest and most striking opposites.
Jung and Kerényi identify the hermaphrodite/androgyne as a near-universal cosmogonic symbol representing the union of opposites, persisting from primitive twilight-consciousness through the highest levels of culture.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
androgyny/dual nature/hermaphroditism of, 11, 16, 210, 373, 383f, 404f, 406ff, 416, 440, 455
The Mysterium Coniunctionis index records the pervasive treatment of Adam’s androgyny and dual nature as a central alchemical and Gnostic motif throughout the text.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
Singer’s ‘androgyny’, Goldenberg’s ‘primary impetus in human libido’, my ‘relation to difference’, all take analytical psychology close to contemporary psychoanalysis and its development of Freud’s bleak but brilliant insight that infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse.
Samuels situates Jungian androgyny within a broader post-Jungian and psychoanalytic convergence around the idea of irreducibly plural, non-gendered libidinal disposition.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
it is also a phallic symbol and thus has an androgynous character. (For Christ’s androgyny cf. Mysterium Coniunctionis, pars. 526, 565 & n. 63.)
Edinger notes Christ’s androgynous character as a recurring Jungian reference point, connecting it to alchemical and dying-god symbolism.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
Adam’s dual nature reappears in Christ: he is male-female. Boehme expresses this by saying that Christ was a ‘virgin in mind.’
Jung traces the androgyny of Adam through Boehme’s mystical theology into the Christ-figure, demonstrating the persistence of the male-female union as a symbol of spiritual completion.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
androgyny, 218–19, 250
The index of Samuels’s survey confirms androgyny as a recognized and substantively discussed concept within post-Jungian discourse on gender and the anima-animus.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Androgyny, 147–148
Hoeller’s index locates androgyny as a discrete and substantive topic within his Gnostic-Jungian framework, linked to the transformative cosmology of the Seven Sermons.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
When gender is restored to its polymorphous roots in pleasure, rejoined with an awareness of variety, changeability, shifts of role and function — then its pleasure includes a sense of the lower, the multiple and the incomplete.
Berry proposes an alternative to androgyny’s tidy synthesis: a polymorphous, sensuous multiplicity of gender that retains inferiority and incompleteness as psychologically necessary.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
hermaphroditism of, 173ff
The Archetypes index cross-references hermaphroditism of the child archetype, signaling its structural importance within Jung’s account of pre-differentiated primordial wholeness.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959aside
Three kinds of them existed: male-male, female-female, and male-female. The gods then became unhappy about them, betrayed them, and Zeus and Apollo cut them up in half.
Campbell invokes Plato’s Symposium myth of original androgynous wholeness and its violent division as the mythological substrate for the longing that drives erotic and spiritual seeking.
, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001aside
several writers have suggested that animus and anima should not be regarded as two separate archetypes so that we may speak of relating to the anima-animus; and, hence, be able to verbalise more freely the possibility of experiencing or integrating a wide range of options.
Samuels notes proposals to collapse the anima/animus distinction into a unitary anima-animus, a move that implicitly approaches androgynous models of psychic structure.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside