Historically in most cultures matter and spirit have been classified as two separate categories. An inexorable split in the human psyche has been created as a consequence of viewing reality in this way. Matter is seen, for the most part, in such categories as Mother, Earth, flesh, incarnation, realism, sensuousness, intuition, impulse, emotionality, Eros, mercy and the personal. Spirit is envisaged as Father, sky, space, invisibility, transcendence, abstraction, discipline, rationality, the principles of law and order, Logos, justice and the impersonal or transpersonal.
These aspects are archetypal. The feminine principle includes relatedness, the interior, feeling, intuition, cooperation and nurturing. The masculine is associated with aggression, cognition, rationality, structure competition, and hierarchy. Bonding, empathy and attachment are the basis for female development. Jung believed that for individuation (Self-transformation) each sex has to develop their contrasexual aspect, i.e. the anima in men and the animus in women.
“Mother” in Latin is mater, from which we get the Latin word materia, or “matter” in English. If we do not allow her to express through us the Eros principle of instinctual friendliness, bonding and oneness with all creatures and plants and the Earth herself, she manifests in our psyches with a vengeance as compulsive and enslaving materialism and addictive consumerism, which really is a display of how much Logos-power we can wield.”
Our out-of-balance patriarchal societies today are explained by the out-of-control expression of the false self in our global communities. “In the case of a boy developing his masculine ego-consciousness, his feminine side is by and large left undeveloped and undifferentiated along with the inferior function of consciousness, both remaining in the depths of his unconscious. [The opposite occurs with a girl.] Sooner or later those compensatory elements buried in the unconscious will have to be elevated into consciousness, accompanying the movement toward wholeness instigated by the Self, a process Jung called individuation.”
“To recapitulate, overemphasized Logos [masculine] produces an unrelated kill-joy personality, one-upmanship, competitiveness and the desire to have power over others. Over-accentuated Eros [feminine] produces foggy thinking, co-dependency, lack of self-identity and vague ego boundaries, as well as extreme passivity in the face of life’s challenges.”
In a patriarchal P-B the masculine identity calls for a striving for perfection which involves competition. The natural feminine ideal is completeness involving cooperation. In recent years the feminine identity has begun to shift, embracing perfection as an ideal which has caused women to experience internal conflict. When women refuse to listen to their inner prompting urging an expression of the True self, then her identity begins to collapse, to become neurotic. Imbalance between the masculine and feminine ideals leads to the neurotic and paranoid society we have in the global village today.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
