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Mary Esther Harding
Mary Esther Harding
British-American physician and analyst, first-generation Jungian, and foundational voice in the analytical psychology of women. Trained as a physician at the London School of Medicine for Women, Harding went to Zürich in 1922 to analyze with carl-jung and in 1924 emigrated to New York, where with Kristine Mann and Eleanor Bertine she established the institutional life of analytical psychology in the United States. She co-founded the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, and the Kristine Mann Library.
Harding’s contribution to the lineage is the first sustained Jungian phenomenology of the feminine psyche. She mapped the woman’s life-arc — girlhood, the ghostly-lover projection, friendship, marriage, maternity, the devouring-mother, middle life, old age — as an individuation process with its own archetypal structure, not as a derivative of the masculine individuation Jung had already described. Jung wrote the introduction to her the-way-of-all-women, crediting her with a picture of the feminine psyche that, in extent and thoroughness, surpassed all previous work in the field (Harding 1970, Introduction).
Her earlier Woman’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern (1935) grounded the feminine in the lunar mythologies of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean — the moon goddesses, the virgin goddesses, the figure of the one-in-herself — and opened the line that erich-neumann extended in neumann-great-mother and that marion-woodman inherited a generation later. Psychic Energy (1947) continued Jung’s work on the libido and its transformations; The I and the Not-I (1965) took up the ego’s confrontation with the objective psyche.
Harding stands in the Lineage as the first analyst to insist that the feminine is a psychic reality with its own structure, its own gods, and its own arc — not a function of biology, not a social role, not a complement to the masculine.