Through a Jungian Lens

A walk down a country road came up with this harvest photo.  This swather had taken down two rows of lentils and was parked at the edge of the field, just behind a ripening field of Durham wheat.  With the approach of harvest, the regular rhythms of life are abandoned by those who are connected to the land.  It becomes a race against nature to see just how much of the crop can be harvested before frosts degrade the quality of the crop.  Who would have ever thought that I would know any of this, growing up a city kid and only exchanging the city for life in small towns when I became a teacher?

I am going to try to spend more time looking at masculine and feminine and relationship here.  Before I babble too much, I want to return to some basic ideas from Carl Jung so that you can, perhaps, better understand where I am coming from when I make statements.  Here are a few words from Jung taken from his work called Mysterium Coniunctionis.

For purely psychological reasons I have, in other of my writings, tried to equate the masculine consciousness with the concept of Logos and the feminine with that of Eros.  By logos I meant discrimination, judgement, insight, and by Eros I meant the capacity to relate.  I regarded both concepts as intuitive ideas which cannot be defined accurately or exhaustively.  From the scientific point of view this is regrettable, but from a practical one, it has value, since the two concepts mark out a field of experience which it is equally difficult to define. (Carl Jung, CW 14, paragraph 224)

Logos and Eros, two opposites.  Logos is represented alchemically as Sol, the sun.  Eros is represented as Luna, the moon.  One rules the day, the other the night, again the opposites of day and night, light and darkness, come into play.  That which we “know” is that which is exposed to the light of day and is called consciousness.  That which we don’t know is that which is hidden in darkness and is called unconsciousness.  These opposing principles, the masculine Logos and the feminine Eros, are not gender bound.  In the real world, we experience males who appear to operate from the principle of Eros as well as women who operate from the principle of Logos.  There are masculine women, a feminine men.  This is important to note as otherwise, it becomes too difficult to even begin to approach understanding anything about the union of opposites, of relationship.

To be continued …