The Feminine Returned to the Body

A convergence in the post-Jungian literature: the claim that the recovery of the feminine is inseparable from the recovery of the body, and that both are the unfinished work of the tradition after Jung. marion-woodman is the primary voice of this thread. Her contribution, extending carl-jung‘s alchemical claim that the opus is conducted in materia, is to insist that the matter in question is the actual living body — and that no feminine consciousness can form apart from it. “Conscious femininity, I think we’re talking about light in matter, embodied light, the wisdom of the body, not a dark mass” (Woodman 1993, p. 62).

The thread intersects but is distinct from two others in the library. erich-neumann, whom Woodman accepts and extends, tracks the matriarchal-to-patriarchal development of consciousness in The Origin and Evolution of Consciousness; Woodman’s move beyond him is the insistence that the next step is neither a return to the matriarchal nor a continuation of the patriarchal but a third mode — the conscious feminine, which presupposes embodiment. james-hillman‘s soul-making rehabilitates image and imagination but leaves the body relatively unthematized; Woodman’s thread is his complement rather than his contradiction. The thread remains productive because the classical root that would fully ground it — the Homeric and pre-Socratic body of thumos, phrenes, and the middle voice — is the work of other figures in the Lineage. Woodman returns the feminine to the body; the return of that body to its Greek articulation is a task the tradition pursues through the philologists.

Sources

• marion-woodman: the feminine is “light in matter, embodied light, the wisdom of the body” (Woodman 1993, p. 62).
• erich-neumann: patriarchy was “a necessary evolutionary step on the road to consciousness” (paraphrased in Woodman 1993, p. 93).
• carl-jung: the alchemical opus is conducted in materia — extended by Woodman into the living body.