The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology

Name: The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology
Author: Ann Belford Ulanov

The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology is a work by Ann Belford Ulanov (1971).

Core claims

Ulanov’s central achievement is demonstrating that “the feminine” is not a content to be defined but a structural category of psychic life that both Jungian psychology and Christian theology have systematically mishandled — psychology by reducing it to the anima, theology by exiling it from the Godhead.
The book exposes how Jung’s anima theory, while revolutionary in recognizing the feminine as psychically operative in men, inadvertently collapses woman’s subjectivity into a function of male individuation — a critique that predates and shapes virtually all subsequent feminist Jungian scholarship.
Ulanov argues that Christian theology’s exclusion of the feminine from trinitarian formulations is not a cultural accident but a symptomatic expression of the same one-sidedness Jung diagnosed in the modern psyche, making the theological problem inseparable from the psychological one.

How does Ulanov’s 1971 critique of the anima as instrumentalizing the feminine compare with Hillman’s later de-gendering of anima in Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985), and do these two moves ultimately converge or contradict?
In what ways does Ulanov’s argument that the Trinity is psychologically incomplete parallel or diverge from Edinger’s treatment of quaternity symbolism in Ego and Archetype and The Christian Archetype?
How does Ulanov’s concept of the feminine as receptive consciousness relate to Marion Woodman’s somatic approach in Addiction to Perfection, and does Woodman’s clinical emphasis resolve or displace the theological dimension Ulanov insists upon?