An audit before an argument

Robert H. Hopcke’s book opens with a count rather than a claim. Across the eighteen volumes of the Collected Works, homosexuality appears fifteen times; seven further references occur in the published correspondence, two in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and the rest in dream seminars and interviews. One reference merely duplicates a case already discussed, and every one of them sits inside an article whose real subject is something else. Hopcke treats that scarcity as evidence, not as an embarrassment to be managed. The audit is chronological and complete, and it is undertaken for a stated corrective purpose: to answer three claims circulating among analytical psychologists — that Jung said little about homosexuality, that what he said was insignificant, or that he held a single theory and a single attitude. None survives contact with the material. Hopcke also rules out the two postures the material invites. The point of examining Jung, he insists, is neither canonization nor execration, but learning from his clear-sightedness while identifying his shortcomings well enough to avoid repeating them. That refusal governs everything after it; the book argues without turning into a grievance.

Separating the attitudes from the theory

The decisive instrument is a distinction between Jung’s attitudes toward homosexuality and his theories of it — between the disposition he brought to homosexual patients and the explanations he offered for them. Hopcke identifies five attitudes and finds four still usable: that homosexuality is no business of legal authorities, that it must be read in historical and cultural context, that a person’s homosexuality is distinguishable from the rest of the personality, and, most consequentially, that an individual’s homosexuality carries a meaning peculiar to that individual. He refuses to inflate any of them. Jung’s opposition to criminal statutes rests on the unenforceability of such laws — utilitarian common sense rather than psychological insight or moral enlightenment. His habit of taking classical Greece as the reference point leads him to associate homosexual activity with societies he considered primitive and less psychologically conscious. The fifth attitude — homosexuality as psychological immaturity, and therefore as disturbance — is held back deliberately, because it is the attitudinal face of Jung’s principal theory. Its premise is that objective psychological maturity exists and treats heterosexuality as its measure. Attitude and theory stand together, so Hopcke dismantles them together.

The conflation that produced a consensus

Jung in fact advanced three theories: homosexuality as a particular relationship with the feminine, as incomplete detachment from the archetype of the Hermaphrodite, and as constitutional. Only the first was taken up by his followers, and it hardened into the one position that could fairly be called the Jungian theory. Hopcke shows that it fails on its own terms. It explains an exclusively masculine phenomenon in exclusively feminine terms, and it cannot handle lesbianism consistently — the symmetry it would require never appears. Underneath the incoherence lies a single error: Hopcke argues that Jung collapses gender, sexual orientation, and sex role into one variable. Once those three collapse into one concept, homosexuality can only register as a major failure in a man’s individuation, demanding etiology and cure, because by definition it violates a heterosexually biased conception of masculinity. The survey of Jung’s successors finds the conflation reproduced without examination — Erich Neumann’s assertion that male homosexuality reveals a matriarchal psychology with the Great Mother in the ascendant is representative. Hopcke’s verdict on the field is that neglect, more than judgmentalism or execration, is the form homophobia takes in analytical psychology.

A theory built to include heterosexuality

The constructive proposal sets its conditions before it states its content. A Jungian theory must be a theory of sexual orientation as such, not of homosexuality alone; it must be tied to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; it must resist reduction to causal explanation and work synthetically, with wholeness as its aim; and it must not repeat the conflation. Only then does the thesis arrive: sexual orientation is determined through a complex interaction of the archetypal masculine, the archetypal feminine, and the archetypal Androgyne. Its power lies less in what it grants gay men than in what it demands of heterosexuality, which has never had to explain itself. Contrasexual language, Hopcke observes, presumes conflict in the very term. “Heterosexuality, because it has been the dominant cultural value for millennia, needs no apologists” — and, by his account, has had quite enough theorists. Reframed this way, gay men’s sexuality becomes polyphonic, escaping a one-note flight from womanhood. He is exact about the limits: the focus on gay men follows his own experience, lesbians are left to speak for themselves, and he records his inability to redress that lack of attention as a regret, not a method. Claudette Kulkarni’s Lesbians and Lesbianisms later takes up what he leaves open.

Where the reading strains

The applied chapters are strongest where they hold the line on masculinity: the masculine imagery saturating gay male culture belongs to the archetype of the masculine, and assigning that rich masculinity to the feminine is both logically fallacious and pathologizing. The chapter on the berdache is where the reading strains, and it strains against Hopcke’s own reporting. He documents the Western suppression of Native American sexual diversity, notes that the term is a French word derived from an Arabic one for the passive male partner in sodomy, and concedes that the tradition is now most alive in the past. Yet the chapter’s stated purpose remains recovery for contemporary gay male Americans, while the cited chain contains no Native-authored witness and reaches the reader through anthropological and archival mediation. That sits badly beside his own conclusion that Jungian cross-cultural vocabulary — the primitive, the undifferentiated, participation mystique — betrays a European bias amounting to a benign though insidious racism. The tension is worth holding open rather than settling, and the book supplies the criterion for doing so: individuation does not unfold in a vacuum but in a psychosocial context that can distort the Self. Read beside Andrew Samuels’s Jung and the Post-Jungians, Hopcke’s audit shows what happens when someone inside a tradition reads its whole record on one question and reports what is there.