libido away from her mother and toward her father, who had
one.)- A woman who is as sexually active as men are supposed to be
cannot, in the Freudian view, be enjoying her sexuality and ex-
pressing her sensual nature. Instead, she is behaving in a com-
pulsive way, trying to allay anxieties about castration.
C. G. Jung’s theory of women’s psychology5 was much “kinder”
to women than Freud’s in that Jung did not perceive women as just
defective men. He hypothesized a psychic structure that correspon-
ded to the different chromosomal makeup of men and women. In
his view, women have a feminine conscious personality and a mas-
culine component—called the animus—in their unconscious, while
men have a masculine conscious personality and a feminine anima
in their unconscious.
For Jung, receptivity, passivity, nurturing, and subjectivity char-
acterized the feminine personality. Rationality, spirituality, and the
capacity to act decisively and impersonally Jung considered mascu-
line attributes. He saw men as being naturally endowed in these
areas. Women with similar personality traits, however well de-
veloped, were handicapped because they were not men; if a woman
thought well or was competent in the world, she only had a well-
developed masculine animus that, by definition, was less conscious
than and thus inferior to men. The animus could also be hostile,
power-driven, and irrationally opinionated, characteristics that Jung
(and contemporary Jungians) tend to emphasize when describing
how the animus functions.
Although Jung did not see women as inherently defective, he did
see them as inherently less creative and less able to be objective or
take action than men. In general, Jung tended to see women as they
served or related to men, rather than as having independent needs
of their own. For example, in regard to creativity, he saw men as the
creators and saw women as assistants in men’s creative process: “A
man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner
feminine nature” and “The inner masculine side of a woman brings
forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine
side of the man”
6The Virgin Goddesses: Artemis, Athena, and Hestia