--- title: "Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A Post-Jungian Perspective" description: "Claudette Kulkarni stays inside analytical psychology in order to dismantle contrasexuality, grounds the work in Gadamerian hermeneutics, and lets six interviewed women refuse to resolve into a single lesbian psychology." author: "Claudette Kulkarni" year: 1997 shelf: the-psyche purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Lesbians+and+Lesbianisms+Claudette+Kulkarni" content_type: book-commentary related: - hopcke-jung-jungians-homosexuality - downing-myths-mysteries-same-sex-love - wehr-jung-and-feminism collections: [] key_takeaways: - "The critique is structural, not corrective: because complementarity, contrasexuality, and the animus require an anatomically opposite Other, they cannot be adjusted to accommodate lesbian individuation and must be deconstructed instead." - "Kulkarni supplies analytical psychology with the research methodology Jung never wrote, borrowing Gadamer's foregrounding — prejudices made visible rather than bracketed — so that theory is grounded in experience instead of experience being fitted to theory." - "Her recovery reading of M. Esther Harding's 1933 chapter on friendship finds a first-generation Jungian arguing toward a paradigm freer of biological determinism than Jung's, then capitulating — an unfollowed implication the Jungian community never took up." references: - "Kulkarni, Claudette. Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A Post-Jungian Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 978-0-415-15511-3." glossary_terms: - individuation - animus - gender - sexuality - identity scholar_prompts: - "If contrasexuality is deconstructed rather than revised, what remains of Jung's account of individuation through the union of opposites?" - "What does Gadamer's foregrounding require of an analyst or researcher that phenomenological bracketing does not?" - "How should a reader weigh Kulkarni's recovery of Esther Harding's argument against Harding's own retraction of it?" last_updated: 2026-08-23 seo_title: "Lesbians and Lesbianisms by Claudette Kulkarni" seo_description: "Kulkarni's post-Jungian study of lesbian experience: Gadamerian method, six interviews, and a structural case against contrasexuality and the animus." --- **A post-Jungian position built by staying, not by leaving** Kulkarni's first problem is procedural: what does a clinician do with a founder whose theory has harmed the people she works with? Her answer takes its shape from Andrew Samuels, who coined "the post-Jungian" to indicate both connectedness to Jung and distance from him, and who broke the deadlock over Jung's anti-Semitism by conceding the charge outright. Samuels refuses the attacker/defender split and works on the flaw itself. Kulkarni transfers that procedure to heterosexism. She does not claim Jung has been misread, and she does not propose to discredit his work altogether; she proposes to liberate his concepts from their patriarchal and heterosexist moorings, a renewal conducted from inside by someone the tradition has injured. Her name for the position is grammatically exact: she calls herself a feminist Jungian rather than a Jungian feminist, leaving Jung substantive and feminism the worldview that filters him. Staying leaves complaint about tone unavailable to her. The bias, she argues, is so enmeshed and embedded in the Jungian framework that nothing short of total deconstruction of the concepts supporting it will even begin to rectify the situation. **Contrasexuality is the load-bearing wall she removes** The key concepts are complementarity, contrasexuality, and the animus, and the charge against them is structural, not attitudinal. If individuation requires an anatomically "opposite" Other, she asks, then what is a lesbian to do? The defect is not that Jung made disparaging remarks but that the model renders lesbian individuation unthinkable in advance — and the damage is not confined to lesbians, since a theory routing every woman's development through a contrasexual partner is problematic for all women. She builds the case from inside the house. Samuels prefers to leave questions of gender in suspension, even in some confusion, as the necessary antidote to gender certainty. Lyn Cowan argues that Jung's animus theory is more stereotype than archetype, forcing a woman into split consciousness in which she must attribute to the animus what more properly belongs to her ego-identity — patriarchy introjected and then renamed psyche. Kulkarni then pushes past the reformers she has been citing. Demaris Wehr's integrated animus and Robert Hopcke's account of orientation as an interaction of archetypal masculine, archetypal feminine, and archetypal Androgyne both keep the conversation gendered, and so concede the ground she means to take. Her alternative comes from Jung's own alchemical sources by way of Cowan, who is willing to remember that alchemical conjunctions may happen between sames as well as between opposites. **Reading M. Esther Harding against her own ambivalence** The book's most original scholarly act is a slow reading of the "Friendship" chapter in M. Esther Harding's *The Way of All Women* (1933), presented in detail because Kulkarni believes it illustrates both the promise and the pitfalls of a Jungian take on sexuality and sexual orientation. Harding hedges continuously to keep her observations inside Jungian theory, and the hedging is where the interest lies. She distinguishes two divergent life aims, biological and psychological, and grants that relationships between women serve the psychological one; she concedes that some women must separate from men in order to individuate; and she holds that in judging any sexual relationship, homosexual or heterosexual, the quality of the emotion involved is the criterion of value; the accompanying physical expression is secondary. Kulkarni draws the conclusion Harding leaves lying: from the point of view of individuation, repressing an attraction toward another woman would be an act of regression. Harding has effectively produced a different Jungian paradigm and a more complex view of individuation, one freer of biological determinism than Jung's, and Jungians did not take it up. At the chapter's end Harding capitulates — but, Kulkarni insists, not before struggling, and through that struggle suggesting alternative ways of seeing. The reading is not a rescue operation; it works a compromised 1933 text for the argument it half-made without pretending Harding meant it. **Gadamerian hermeneutics as the missing Jungian method** Underneath the theoretical argument sits a methodological one: Jungians do not have a research methodology as such, because Jung was not particularly interested in either research or methods. Kulkarni's proposal is that Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics supplies the philosophical grounding for what Jung already did in practice — and she declines the overclaim, disavowing any interest in proving that hermeneutics was Jung's only methodology or that he was essentially and only a hermeneut. The operative term is foregrounding rather than bracketing. Where phenomenology asks the researcher to suspend her presuppositions, foregrounding assumes that neutrality is impossible and that the extinction of one's self is inadvisable; prejudices become conditions of understanding, not obstacles to it, and the researcher stands on the same critical plane as her subject matter. The yield is a study capable of "grounding theory in experience rather than trying to make experience conform to theory" — hermeneutical research being, in the terms she borrows from Packer and Addison, exploratory and discovery-oriented, aimed at generating theory, not testing hypotheses. It also changes what an interview is. Interviewing becomes a matter of being: Gadamer's partnership of conversation, whose outcome neither partner controls. **Six interviews that refuse to become a single lesbian psychology** The evidence is six conversations opened by one question — what is it like for you to love another woman? — presented chronologically, each carrying Kulkarni's reflections, and validated by the participants, with no appeal to objectivity. She names recurring themes: context-giving, choice, contrast with men, sense of self, community, the desire for acceptance. Then she refuses to essentialize them, noting that the list is not exhaustive and represents only a set of themes identifiable by her, given her horizons and these particular participants. Her strongest finding is lexical: across the interviews, the women reach for individuation's language — core, whole, center, self, struggle, choices. In Sandra's case, Kulkarni records "core" as spontaneous; she had been careful not to mention it beforehand. That supports her stated intent to examine lesbianism as a legitimate route through individuation. The limits go into the same ledger. Her sample is not really diverse; there is only one non-white interviewee, and the contrivance of that inclusion is left visible; the experience of being a lesbian of color, she writes, has dimensions of oppression she can only imagine or theorize about. She adds that none of the accounts truly does justice to the lives of these women. By entering its own shortfall as findings, the study refuses the single psychology it set out to reject: one told about lesbians without them.