Female

the recurrent questioning about female seed in our tradition obviously expresses a recurrent doubt about female essence. The problem had therefore to be repeatedly encountered, and female seed had in some way to be accounted for, in order to maintain the image of female inferiority.

Hillman argues that Western tradition’s obsessive debates over female seed functioned ideologically to sustain a foundational image of female inferiority across philosophy, biology, and theology.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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The male is the precondition of the female and the ground of its possibility. Moreover, the metaphor is physical; the arguments build on images of anatomy, physiology, reproduction, and embryogeny.

Hillman reconstructs the theological-philosophical architecture in which Adam is formal, material, and final cause of Eve, establishing male priority as the template for all subsequent Western male-female theorizing.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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The image of female inferiority has not changed, because it remains the image in the masculine psyche. Theories of the female body are preponderantly based on the observations and fantasies of men.

Hillman contends that anatomical and psychological theories of the female are projections of masculine consciousness and unconscious fantasy, not objective scientific descriptions.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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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-identification — a state of merger where subject and object are undifferentiated — sharply distinct from active, drive-based male-element relating.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis

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‘Anatomy is Destiny,’ to vary a saying of Napoleon’s. Her impaired genital is ‘ground for inferiority.’ The anatomical difference has its psychical consequences.

Hillman documents Freud’s persistent reduction of female psychology to anatomical lack, tracing the formulation from early papers through the posthumously published *Outline of Psychoanalysis*.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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in our tradition, wherever it was conceded that there was female seed, or where the even rarer concession was made that such seed was necessary for reproduction, female seed was inferior.

Hillman demonstrates that even when Western tradition acknowledged female seed, it immediately subordinated it, revealing the ideological inescapability of the inferiority thesis across philosophical and cross-cultural contexts.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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According to perceptions of the female in Greek culture, ‘mind’ suffers like a female. In imagery that runs through all Greek tragedies, the mind — like a woman in society, like female sexuality in relation to male — is acted upon, invaded, a victim of the outside world.

Padel argues that Greek tragic imagery homologizes the mind with the female: both are construed as passive, penetrable vessels acted upon by external divine forces, producing a gendered model of mental suffering.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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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.

Winnicott links the provision of the female element in early maternal care to the infant’s fundamental capacity for being, suggesting that its absence produces a crippled existential foundation.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting

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I was rightly amazed and continue to be amazed at the fact, which can never be fully explained psychologically, concerning the acceptance of unpleasure… I came to the realization, following a con[sideration of male and female principles in nature]

Ferenczi introduces a speculative framework of male and female principles as fundamental natural polarities, linking the female principle to receptivity, tolerance of unpleasure, and a late maturation of feeling.

Ferenczi, Sándor, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, 1932supporting

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male and female sexualities are as differently organized in male and female brains as they are in bodies… there are fine anatomical and neurochemical differences between males and females in all these areas.

Panksepp grounds sex difference in neuroanatomy and neurochemistry, arguing that male and female brain organization is as differentiated as bodily morphology, with implications for cognitive style and behavioral tendency.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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acquainted with the infantile idea, which is retained in the unconscious, that the daughter has been made a girl by castration on the part of the father.

Abraham documents the unconscious infantile theory that female sex is produced through paternal castration, illustrating the psychoanalytic reduction of female identity to a wound or lack inflicted by the male.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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the egg is also an extraordinary symbol, observation was of course prey to the fantasy released by this passive, silent, feminine object of investigation.

Hillman shows how empirical embryology was contaminated by symbolic fantasy, with the egg’s perceived passivity and femininity predetermining which morphological forms were judged superior.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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it is possible to observe the extent to which gender behaviour may be influenced by changes in sexual composition… Mother-infant interaction may be affected by the mother’s emotional attitude to the sex of her baby.

Samuels, drawing on Stoller, interrogates the interplay of biological substrate and learned gender behaviour, foregrounding how maternal response to the infant’s sex shapes gender identity from birth.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.

Estés argues that cultural restriction of female comportment to a singular normative ideal constitutes a dual captivity of body and psyche, severing women from the instinctive wildish nature.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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what is now needed is restriction in the use of the oppositional theory and clarification of gender terminology. The latter should be used only when absolutely necessary and warranted by the subject under discussion.

Samuels calls for critical discipline in applying male/female oppositional frameworks within analytical psychology, warning that conflating gender terminology with psychological poles obscures rather than illuminates.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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female immobilization without fear might heighten a vulnerability to a conditioned or learned love. Thus, the male, who conquers the female’s fears and gives her a sense of safety, may trigger the monogamy switch.

Porges proposes a neurophysiological basis for gender-specific myths of female vulnerability and chastity, grounding them in the polyvagal mechanism linking immobility, oxytocin release, and pair-bond conditioning.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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A great deal is known about how the rodent brain elaborates this reflex, but there is an unfortunate paucity of information about brain mechanisms that mediate the active appetitive components of female sexual behavior.

Panksepp notes a significant empirical lacuna in neuroscientific knowledge of female sexuality: the active, appetitive dimension of female sexual behavior remains far less understood than its reflexive components.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment… women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrecognized, it fed the soul anyway.

Estés documents the historical suppression of female creative and psychic freedom in the postwar period, framing unauthorized self-expression as the survival of wild instinctual life under cultural captivity.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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Nothing is more important for the restoration of the Divine Feminine than the rediscovery and holy reenactment of this wonderful tradition… In the rediscovery of the liberating power of sexuality… lie as yet unimaginable possibilities for freedom.

Harvey and Baring locate the restoration of the female principle in Tantric and allied traditions, arguing that the sacred feminine’s liberating power requires embodied, sexually grounded spiritual practice.

Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996supporting

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inasmuch as woman, throughout the ages, has been to man the symbol of his unknown feminine soul, his eyes have been peculiarly blinded when he has looked at her.

Harding articulates the Jungian principle that man’s anima-projection onto woman systematically distorts his perception of her, rendering the female simultaneously over-valued and unseen as an autonomous being.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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left = female is not a universal law. The Andaman islanders, for instance, associate left with male. Nor is left inferiority as widespread as we, standing within our right-oriented tradition, might believe.

Hillman complicates the Western equation of female with left and left with inferiority by citing cross-cultural evidence that exposes this association as culturally specific rather than archetically universal.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

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a relative frigidity exists not only in the sense of the degree of capacity for sensation, but also in the sense that some women are frigid with certain men and capable of sensation with others.

Abraham observes relational determinants of female frigidity, complicating purely constitutional explanations by noting that sexual responsiveness in women is selectively activated by specific interpersonal dynamics.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927aside

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