Across the depth-psychology corpus, femininity operates as one of the most contested and generative terms, simultaneously a psychological principle, an archetypal structure, a historical burden, and a therapeutic imperative. Three broad positions can be traced. The first, rooted in Freudian and pre-Freudian biologism — surveyed extensively by Hillman in ‘The Myth of Analysis’ — constructs femininity as defined by anatomical lack, constitutively inferior, and irreducible to anything beyond reproductive function. The second, Jungian and post-Jungian, relocates femininity from biology to psychic structure: in Woodman, Harding, and Hillman’s archetypal revisionism, femininity names the receptive, containing, soul-bearing principle operative in men and women alike, suppressed by patriarchal culture and awaiting conscious reclamation. The third position, represented by Berry and Samuels, interrogates both preceding stances, warning that ‘the feminine’ may itself function as an ideological category — invented by masculine projection or inflated by feminist counter-idealization — and calling for greater terminological precision. The central tension throughout is between femininity as archetype (a transpersonal, psychically real principle) and femininity as social construction (a category that disciplines and constrains). Woodman’s project of ‘conscious femininity’ attempts to resolve this tension by grounding the principle in bodily and spiritual experience, while Hillman’s archetypal psychology ultimately argues that the acceptance of femininity constitutes the very telos of the analytic process.
The end of analysis coincides with the acceptance of femininity. Our theme has thus led us to the crucial question
Hillman argues that the repudiation of femininity is the bedrock of neurosis and the fundamental obstacle in analysis, such that psychological cure is coextensive with the integration of the feminine principle.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Masculinity and femininity have nothing to do with being locked into a male or female body… It is a matter of psychic rather than biological differentiation.
Woodman articulates the post-Jungian position that femininity and masculinity are psychic principles distributed across all individuals regardless of biological sex.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982thesis
Conscious femininity gives us the courage to trust in the moment without knowing what the goal is.
Woodman defines conscious femininity as the developed capacity to tolerate uncertainty and trust the self-healing process of the psyche, distinguishing it from passive or unconscious feminine functioning.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993thesis
Femininity is a category invented by men to keep women inferior and pliable, fulfilling men’s needs.
Berry presents the feminist-critical position — that ‘femininity’ is a prescriptive ideological construction serving patriarchal power — as a serious psychological standpoint that must be taken into account alongside affirmative accounts of the feminine.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
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 demonstrates that scientific and medical constructions of femininity reproduce masculine projections rather than describing an objective psychic reality.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
It has become difficult to speak of the anima as inferior femininity since we are no longer certain just what we mean with ‘femininity,’ let alone ‘inferior’ femininity.
Hillman, from the vantage of archetypal psychology’s later development, acknowledges the conceptual instability of femininity as a term, calling into question the classical anima-as-inferior-femininity formulation.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis
A female child has, of course, no need to fear the loss of a penis; she must, however, react to the fact of not having received one. From the very first she envies boys its possession; her whole development may be said to take place under the colours of envy for the penis.
Hillman cites Freud’s anatomically-grounded account of femininity-as-deficiency, which his entire third essay on ‘Psychological Femininity’ is aimed at historicizing and dismantling.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
I must question whether the basic thesis of the work is flawed; whether there is not too great an emphasis on the innately feminine with the consequence that ‘the feminine’ is idealised.
Samuels offers a critical meta-commentary on post-Jungian feminine psychology, warning that the valorization of an ‘innately feminine’ principle risks replacing one essentialism with another.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
It’s his femininity that is ravished by archetypal energy. So the container has to be strong and at the same time very flexible.
Woodman articulates femininity as the containing, receptive function in both men and women — the psychic vessel that must be sufficiently strong to receive archetypal energy without being overwhelmed by it.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting
By our denying woman anima and giving her animus instead, an entire archetypal pattern has been determined for women’s psychology.
Hillman argues that the classical Jungian allocation of anima exclusively to men structurally deprives women of a cosmic psychological principle, with consequences as significant as the psychoanalytic theory of penis deprivation.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
Perhaps the perfection of love begins through faith in and work on the feminine within us, man or woman, since the feminine ground is the embracing container, receiving, holding.
Hillman, in an earlier work, identifies the feminine within as the precondition for the agapic love that he regards as essential to therapeutic and religious life.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting
By showing saturnine traits, senex femininity presents unpleasant, even maleficient, aspects of the anima.
Hillman identifies a specific ‘senex femininity’ associated with Saturn’s earthly, material, and hoarding aspects, demonstrating that archetypal femininity is not uniformly nurturing but encompasses maleficent and shadow dimensions.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
Rather than dissociated femininity, this archetype shows a female counterpart—Lua, Dame Melancholy—which mirrors, and is thus indistinguishable from Saturn himself.
Hillman refutes the cliché that the senex archetype is cut off from femininity, showing instead that Saturnine consciousness carries its own integrated, earth-bound feminine mirror.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
It is the woman’s nature to hold herself in the background, to maintain a passive attitude, and, psychologically speaking, to veil herself and her reactions.
Harding describes the instinctual modesty and receptivity she regards as constitutive of feminine nature, a position that illustrates the essentialist premise underlying early Jungian feminine psychology.
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
He uses a medical, paternal tone—always a condescension of male superiority toward female inferiority.
Hillman’s historical survey of neurological arguments for feminine inferiority exposes the ideological function of scientific discourse in naturalizing the subordination of the feminine.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
The word ‘hysteria’ appears first in the Hippocratic On the Diseases of Women… As a disease of the womb (bystera, in Greek), hysteria could occur only in women.
Hillman traces the etymological and historical equation of femininity with pathology through the concept of hysteria, grounding his argument about the cultural repudiation of femininity in medicine.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Only within intimate situations will men reveal this inner femininity, this sensitive, delicate, touchy spot.
Hillman observes that men’s inner femininity typically surfaces only in intimate relational contexts, noting self-pity as one of its characteristic and least-acknowledged manifestations.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967aside
gender behaviour (conceived by Stoller as mainly learned from the time of birth onwards) plays a vital part in sexual behaviour which is, of course, markedly biological.
Samuels introduces Stoller’s sex/gender distinction as a framework for thinking more precisely about the biological and learned components that depth psychology often conflates under ‘femininity.’
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside
if women are to progress further in the man’s world of work, they must recognize it is a case of ‘This ought ye to have done and not to have left the other undone.’
Harding argues that professional women must integrate rather than abandon feminine values, an early formulation of the double-demand placed on women navigating between feminine and masculine modes.
, the way of all women, 1970aside