The ecofeminist critique, as it surfaces across the depth-psychology corpus, is not a unified program but a convergence of several streams: the homology between the domination of women and the domination of nature, the recovery of goddess traditions as ecological correctives, and the resistance to patriarchal mythologies that suppress both feminine psychology and the natural world. Clarissa Pinkola Estés constructs the most sustained argument, proposing that wounds on women’s bodies, on culture, and on Nature herself are isomorphic — each wound at one site corresponding to a wound at the same site in the others. Marion Woodman extends this into embodied spirituality, linking the failure to love one’s own bodily matter (‘mater’) to civilizational estrangement from the earth. Christine Downing, via Daniel Noel’s critique of Campbell, challenges the tendency of depth psychology to psychologize the goddess — to recuperate her for inward individuation while neglecting her ecological and social-critical force. James Hillman’s archetypal ecology gestures toward a soul-of-the-world ontology that renders the technology-vs-nature dualism obsolete. Richard Tarnas traces the cultural-historical emergence of ecofeminist spirituality under specific planetary configurations. The central tension runs between those who see the feminine-nature dyad as liberating and those who warn that idealizing ‘the innate feminine’ merely reifies the very essentialism ecofeminism seeks to dismantle.
Where there is a wound on the psyches and bodies of women, there is a corresponding wound at the same site in the culture itself, and finally on Nature herself.
Estés articulates the foundational ecofeminist homology: the wounding of women’s bodies, culture, and Nature are structurally identical and mutually constitutive.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The harm to nature is concomitant with the stunning of the psyches of humans. They are not and cannot be seen as separate from one another.
Estés explicitly refuses the separation of ecological destruction from psychic damage, insisting that industrial violence against the earth and violence against the soul are one continuous event.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Much of the energy for feminism’s rediscovery of the goddess has come precisely because she may help us recover a more whole relation to the natural world — before we autonomous humans destroy it.
Downing, via Noel, argues that the feminist recovery of the goddess is driven by ecological urgency and that Campbell’s inward turn forecloses this social and environmental dimension.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990thesis
Much of the energy for feminism’s rediscovery of the goddess has come precisely because she may help us recover a more whole relation to the natural world — before we autonomous humans destroy it.
This parallel passage contextualizes the ecofeminist critique of Campbell’s mythological system as one that aestheticizes the goddess while evading her ecological and political dimensions.
, The Power of Myth, 1988thesis
If we go on with our power tactics, we’re going to destroy the earth. That’s why we haven’t got a long time to evolve. We’re either going to make a leap in consciousness or we aren’t going to be here.
Woodman links patriarchal power dynamics directly to ecological catastrophe, positioning a transformation of consciousness — figured through goddess energy — as the necessary ecofeminist response.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993thesis
the emergence of ecofeminist spirituality, the increasing popularity of Sophianic Christianity, the upsurge of interest in and reported visions of Mary in Roman Catholic popular piety
Tarnas historicizes ecofeminist spirituality as part of a broader archetypal constellation involving the recovery of the feminine divine, placing it within a cyclical cosmological framework.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
Is not a basic cause of contemporary environmental devastation ‘out here’ a continuation of Western history’s determination to keep control ‘in here’ over the most potent and enduring of the ancient gods?
Hillman argues that ecological destruction is psychologically driven by the repression of Pan and chthonic nature-gods, offering an archetypal rather than strictly feminist but structurally allied diagnosis.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
we will go on killing and exploiting in a frenzy of false separation from nature and so from our deep selves, and we will continue to ruin our world.
Harvey and Baring ground the ecofeminist position in the recovery of the Divine Feminine, arguing that reconnection to the web of interdependence is the antidote to ecological and spiritual ruin.
, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996supporting
A mother who doesn’t love her own body is not connected to her own life energy… Mother is ‘mater,’ and few of us love our own matter.
Woodman traces the ecofeminist wound to the psychosomatic level: the failure to love bodily matter (mater) is simultaneously a disconnection from the earth and from feminine embodied life.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
Conscious femininity… involves an awareness of the energy of the rock and the love in the bird, the tree, the sunset. An awareness of the harmony of all things, an awareness of living in the world soul.
Woodman’s ‘conscious femininity’ is an ecological attunement in which embodied awareness of the natural world is inseparable from psychological and spiritual integration.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
whether there is not too great an emphasis on the innately feminine with the consequence that ‘the feminine’ is idealised.
Samuels raises the critical internal tension within depth-psychological ecofeminism: the risk that affirming a ‘primal feminine energy pattern’ reinscribes essentialism rather than critiquing it.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
technology would no longer be contrasted romantically with nature, technology bad and nature good, cities bad and country good, soul in trees but not in the saws that cut them.
Hillman’s soul-of-the-world perspective complicates the simple nature/culture binary that underlies some ecofeminist positions, proposing instead that soul inheres in all things.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Nature, that is our mother and our healer and our home, as well as our ultimate fate; Nature, that we are reviling and doing our best to devastate — is the great whole to which we belong.
McGilchrist’s left-hemisphere critique of modernity provides a neurological correlate to the ecofeminist argument that Western rationalism constitutes a structural attack on Nature and embodied life.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the cumulative effect of intentional solitude begins to act like a vital respiratory system, a natural rhythm of adding knowledge, making minute adjustments, and deleting the unusable over and over again.
Estés frames women’s interior practice as an ‘innate ecology,’ drawing an implicit ecofeminist parallel between the rhythms of psychic self-maintenance and those of natural systems.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
Jungianism has long been suspect for its claims to universalism — most glaringly, cultural assumptions about social differences in gender have been codified into claims about universal, deep psychic realities.
Noel’s critique of Jungian universalism touches on the ecofeminist concern that archetypal essentialism naturalizes gender distinctions in ways that impede rather than support feminist liberation.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990aside