The Seba library treats Female Element in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Winnicott, D W, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Govinda, Lama Anagarika).
the pure female element relates to the breast (or to the mother) in the sense of the baby becoming the breast (or mother), in the sense that the object is the subject. I can see no instinct drive in this.
Winnicott defines the pure female element as a pre-instinctual mode of being-as-identity-with-object, fundamentally distinct from the drive-based male element.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
Either the mother has a breast that is, so that the baby can also be when the baby and mother are not yet separated out in the infant's rudimentary mind; or else the mother is incapable of making this contribution, in which case the baby has to develop without the capacity to be.
The mother's embodiment of the female element is the environmental precondition for the infant's capacity to be, making its absence a clinical catastrophe.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
The female element, which you expect in a complete family, is not represented. The main action is concerned with the finding of the right female, upon which depends the inheritance of the kingdom.
Von Franz reads the absent female element in fairy tales as a structural index of psychic imbalance, with the narrative arc oriented toward its recovery and integration.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
'To be, … or …' and then he would pause, because in fact the character Hamlet does not know the alternative.
Winnicott reads Hamlet's soliloquy as dramatizing the dissociation of the female element—the capacity simply 'to be'—which Hamlet cannot access and so defaults into sado-masochistic alternatives.
, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
The othersex element may be completely split off so that, for instance, a man may not be able to make any link at all with the split-off part.
Winnicott describes the clinical presentation of dissociated female element in male patients, where the split-off feminine exists as an encapsulated, inaccessible part of the personality.
, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
in her early management of him the mother held him and dealt with him in all sorts of physical ways as if she failed to see him as a male.
Clinical case material illustrating how a mother's misidentification of her son's sex constitutes the aetiological origin of dissociation of the female element.
, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
the union of male and female in the ecstasy of love — in which the active element (updya) is represented as a male, the passive (prajña) by a female figure
Govinda situates the female element within Tibetan Buddhist cosmology as the passive-receptive principle whose union with the active male element constitutes enlightenment.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
male element, 25, 26, 28, 130, 132, 133, 219, 220, 230, 239f 246; see also father
An index entry confirms the sustained co-occurrence of male and female elements as a paired conceptual structure throughout the Jungian mythological corpus.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949aside