The central pillar of Jungian psychology is his notion of archetypes, which he discovered by analyzing his patients’ dreams and a careful study of myths, archaic symbols, and even fairy tales.  Jung defines archetypes as follows:

“. . .there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious but nonetheless active — living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that perform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions.”

These archetypes are part and parcel of the psychic baggage we all bring with us into the world. Just as from conception to birth our embryos pass through a series of developments that echo human evolution, so also do our psyches, or what the Greeks called our “souls.” In a word, Jung was convinced that our inner selves, despite our outwardly sophisticated, civilized twenty-first century appearance, are fundamentally primitive, psychically undeveloped. This is Jung’s notion of the collective unconsciousness: we all share the same primitive self deep within our individualized, modern selves. And that unconsciousness is filled with a variety of archetypes, which we share in common. They appear in our dreams and stories and are what enable us to communicate with one another and to understand the deeper meanings of the symbols that have been used by various cultures throughout the ages. It’s an intriguing notion. It is especially intriguing when we reflect on that most powerful of archetypes, the Earth Mother, the eternally feminine.

Notions such “the eternally feminine” are today regarded as politically incorrect, but I venture to suggest that political correctness may have rendered taboo one of the most important concepts we have that might enable us to understand the modern temper. By denying that there is such a thing as the distinctively feminine, by insisting that differences between males and females are merely cultural, we deny the fundamental truth (as Jung sees it) of the duality in all human psyches, a duality that requires balance in order to achieve mental health. Not only do we bring with us into the world a vast storehouse of archetypes that enable us to come to grips with the terrors and delights of living and growing, we are, all of us, both male and female — Yin and Yang, as Eastern religions would have it. The denial of this duality, this fundamental difference, destroys our ability to come to grips with our fundamental humanity, Jung would insist.

Worse yet, the denial of the feminine as a distinctive and vital element within each soul has coincided historically in the West with the denial of our connection with the earth itself which many cultures teach us is, indeed, our mother. And if Henry Adams is to be believed, the Western rejection of the feminine, more specifically the Protestant rejection of the honored place of the Virgin Mary in the Christian panoply of divinities, has brought about the slow death of Christianity itself, until there is nothing left but a hollow shell. In rejecting the Virgin Mary, Adams insists, the Church broke the vital, personal connection ordinary men and women felt with their Church and their God: it rendered the Church more distant, denying, among other things, the connection we all have with the feminine, intuitive, affective side of ourselves.  As Jung would have it, the Earth Mother represents her “cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths.” By denying the distinctive nature of the feminine, and our deep need for that psychic balance, we deny the possibility of mental health.

The reason Adams in convinced that the Virgin Mary was central to Christianity, especially during the medieval period, is because she represented love and pity — or Jung’s “cherishing and nourishing goodness,” —  which is the central concept in the New Testament itself. She was available to all, regardless of social position, and she forgave all when, as we are all prone to do, they sinned. She was the one divinity that ordinary people could feel close to, as Adams noted.

“Whatever the heretic or mystic might try to convince himself, God could not be love. God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; he could not be human and imperfect, nor could the Son or the Holy Ghost be other than the Father. The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; She alone was Favor, Dualism, Diversity. Under any conceivable form of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the middle ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity either separately or together, it must be in the Mother.”

Now Adams couldn’t have read Carl Gustav Jung, since Jung came later. But the sense they both shared of the essential relationship between the Virgin Mother and the health of the human soul is most striking. Indeed, they would almost certainly agree that the most serious mistake (if we can call it that) of the modern age is the reduction of the feminine to the masculine, the denial of mystery, the insistence upon knowing everything in terms of logic and categories, measuring and quantifying, rational certainty replacing the intuitive, imaginative, grasp of the female within each of us that our masculine society insists upon denying. Just as society demands political correctness by denying the fundamental differences between the male and the female, by exploiting the earth relentlessly in the blind pursuit of profit our culture exhibits its lack of feeling connected to our Mother; with our attention turned exclusively toward banking and business and ignoring poetry and the beauty that surrounds us, we plod ahead in our linear fashion, building more powerful weapons and machines, determined to conquer the earth and arrogantly pronouncing ourselves masters over that which cannot be known or commanded, denying mystery and our own ignorance. Instead of seeking harmony with that which is a fundamental part of ourselves, we grope in the dark and experience anxiety and fear.