Jung and Lesbian Writings

For 25 years I have been practicing as a psychotherapist. While my philosophies have been eclectic and my repertoire broad, I have found Jungian psychology to be the most fascinating. In short, I have drawn from his ideology and found my own ways of presenting his ideas in my work more that any other methodology.

What has disturbed me most about his writings is how little he wrote on male homosexuality and even less on lesbianism. This seems odd because in both Jung and his immediate followers, female homosexuality occupied a place of some focus.

The equation of homosexuality with male homosexuality is perhaps the best evidence for the rightness of the feminist criticism that psychology, analytical psychology included, uses men’s psychology as normative human psychology and ignores female experience as much as possible or considers it only in comparison to men’s psychology.

The gay liberation movement’s distinction between the gay male community and the lesbian-feminist community may also contribute to this situation. Many contemporary women who love women do not define themselves as homosexual, preferring to identify themselves instead as lesbian, a term that, like gay used for male homosexuals, implies a consciousness of how homosexual orientation carries political, social, and communal meanings. So you could ask, could it not be that contemporary Jungian writers may be making a similar distinction—using homosexual to denote male homosexuality and reserving lesbian for female homosexuality?

Unfortunately, a perusal of the Jungian literature for specific references to and discussions of lesbianism yields woefully little. Despite the burgeoning literature on women’s experience and psychology form a host of talented, insightful, and creative women in Jungian circles; the literature of contemporary women’s experience from a Jungian perspective remains largely a literature of heterosexual female experience. Even in books where you might expect to find discussions of women’s sexual relationships with other women, such as some of the most popular and widely read Jungian books on contemporary feminine experience—Sylvia Brinton-Perera's Descent to the Goddesss: A Way of Initiation for Women, Linda Leonard’s The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship, Nancy Qualls-Corbett’s The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspects of the Feminine, Christine Downing’s Psyche’s Sisters: Re-imagining the Meaning of Sisterhood, Ann Belford Ulanov’s The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian Theology, Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddess in Everywoman, Sibylle Birkhauser-Oeri’s The Mother: Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales—there are only brief mentions of lesbianism, usually in the context of heterosexual women’s lesbian feelings.

Two exceptions to this near silence on lesbianism are to be commended, despite their brevity and limitations. Betty De Shong Meador, a Jungian analyst in Berkeley California, describes in great detail an erotic countertransference reaction she experienced toward a female client in an article in Chiron Publications entitled “Transference/Countertransference between Woman Analyst and Wound Girl Child” Given the scarcity of frank discussions concerning countertransference in the literature and the even more serious absence of nearly anything on lesbianism, you can understand why Meador couches her clinical report in the form of an impersonal fairy tale concerning two women. Like-wise, Marion Woodman in The Pregnant Virgin discusses the lesbian imagery of a number of dreams of women she has treated.

The major limitation of both these creative and even courageous contributions to the literature lies in the fact that these discussions are not on lesbianism at all but rather on heterosexual women’s experience of same-sex attraction. Lesbians, women whose primary (or even exclusive) sexual orientation is toward other women and, who define themselves socially and politically by this orientation, remain an unknown population for Jungian writers. Is there a specifically lesbian psychology with its own archetypal themes and experiences? The Jungian literature remains silent and provides no answer—indeed, the question itself has not yet been raised.

So far, it seems, this question may be too anxiety provoking to answer by exploring the real nature of lesbian experience, except in the context of heterosexual women’s brief flirtations with lesbian relationships. One hopes a fuller and more satisfying view of “the importance of women loving women” is forthcoming from the many talented women that populate the Jungian community today.