From opposition to dialogue: why Jung and feminism stopped listening to each other
Wehr begins with a deadlock she refuses to resolve by verdict. On one side, Jungian writers—Ann Belford Ulanov, Bruno Bettelheim, June Singer, Sue Halpern—charge feminists with taking private psychological injury and projecting it outward onto social arrangements. On the other, feminist theologians—Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly—charge Jung with supplying the intellectual base for a male “feminism” that installs men’s projections where women’s humanity should be. Wehr’s judgment is that both charges land, because each side aims accurately at the other’s weakest point. What forecloses learning is not the accuracy but the form: sweeping condemnation, delivered as if the whole system stood or fell on its worst passage. Her stated method is bridge-building—“my aim in this book is to build bridges in several senses”—which is neither adjudication nor synthesis reached by watering both positions down. The framing move that makes the rest of the book possible comes early: she treats Jungian psychology and feminism alike as ideologies that function religiously, commanding their adherents’ deepest loyalty and making it correspondingly hard to think outside their parameters. Once that is granted, the sociological critique she runs for the remaining chapters is not an external assault but the only available leverage.
Internalized oppression and the contextless psyche
The book’s central diagnostic instrument is internalized oppression: patriarchy’s definition of women taken inward and experienced from within as an accusing voice. Wehr assembles it from sources that are not interchangeable—Doris Lessing’s self-hater, Jean Baker Miller’s analysis of dominant and subordinate groups, Mary Daly’s psychic embed—and the differences among them remain visible as distinct positions. Against this she sets what she calls the near-contextlessness of Jungian anthropology, where archetypal factors transcending time and space, rather than social structures, are treated as the primary forces shaping personality. Drawing on Peter Berger’s sociology of knowledge, she proposes a dialectic instead: society and psyche produce each other continuously, and a theory that locates the source of a woman’s self-accusation wholly in the archetypal layer has misplaced the evidence. From this she derives the operative criterion of the whole book, adapted from William Grier and Price Cobbs’s guideline for therapy with Black patients—any psychological theory and practice that fails to take sexism and internalized oppression into account, and to oppose them unrelentingly, is not a freeing therapy for women. That is a standard, not a slogan, and she applies it to Jung with some consistency.
Jung’s psychology as a religion — and why that immunizes its claims about women
The book’s central argument is that Jung’s psychology is itself a religion, and that this is exactly what makes its gender assumptions resistant to criticism. Wehr builds the case from inside Jung’s own texts: his definition of religio as careful observation of the numinosum, and his near-equation of God with the unconscious. She then arrays the interpretive positions, preserving their range—Martin Buber’s charge that analytical psychology proclaims a religion of pure psychic immanence, Hans Schaer’s more sympathetic reading, Naomi Goldenberg, Peter Homans, and James Heisig marking out the intervening range. The consequence she draws is structural. The system presents its symbols as discoveries revealed to the founder, with invention excluded from the account. Sacred standing follows, and sacred standing is not argued with. Set that beside Jung’s parallel insistence that he was proceeding empirically, and his pronouncements about the feminine become shielded on both flanks at once: too holy to dispute, too factual to interpret. Wehr is explicit that this is not debunking. The spiritual depth is, in her account, among the system’s genuine drawing cards, which is precisely why the immunity it confers is worth naming.
The anima problem: men’s projections written up as the psychology of women
Her most pointed textual critique concerns a slide she documents repeatedly. Jung announces a discussion of the anima—a component of male psychology, a figure in men’s inner life—and then, without acknowledging the transition, begins issuing pronouncements about actual women. Two agendas blur, and men’s projections are published as women’s nature. Wehr reads his passages on woman’s magic authority, emptiness, indefiniteness, and passivity alongside Edward Whitmont’s world of the absolutely other and Ernest Becker’s account of the mother’s sheer physicalness, and finds in them a consistent structure: fear of embodiment, dependency, and vulnerability, displaced by Western men onto the feminine. The asymmetry she names is tragic in the strict sense. The anima is imagined as overwhelmingly powerful while the women who bear the projection experience powerlessness—and the imagined power supplies a standing motive for keeping actual women out of actual power. Yet she credits the concept rather than discarding it. Naming the anima projection is what makes the distortion visible at all; without the concept there would be no vocabulary for the criticism she is making.
Revising individuation: annihilation of the ego, the derivative animus, and a de-ontologized archetype
The final chapter turns critique into three specific revisions. First, individuation’s demand for annihilation of the ego presupposes an ego that already takes itself for master in its own house—a situation men occupy under patriarchy and women largely do not. Reading Jean Baker Miller, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Christ together, Wehr argues that many women need stronger boundaries, and proposes that what women must die to is the false self patriarchy imposed, not the ego as such. Second, the animus is derivative: deduced from the anima and from the symmetry of the balance model, with no observation of women’s lives at its origin. Jung’s animus-possessed woman consequently performs the same disciplinary work as Freud’s castrating woman, reinforcing the very message that a woman cannot think clearly. Wehr’s counter-proposal is to re-read so-called animus possession as internalized oppression speaking, and she credits Emma Jung’s more experientially grounded account while refusing to overlook the unlocated misogyny running through it. Third, the general remedy: strip the sacred legitimation and place the images in social context. Once de-ontologized and contextualized, the anima and animus may still serve women and men. What survives is a psychology whose spiritual seriousness stands as a real corrective to merely materialist accounts—once it stops claiming to have received women’s nature from beyond history.