Grounding psychotherapy in the feminine principle enables patients to reach into the unconscious in powerful ways that foster healing more effectively than is possible in the current system. This is possible because the therapist works in partnership with his or her own unconsciousness. Most of the professional literature offers distancing mechanisms and defenses to clinicians who fear losing themselves in a sea of emotion. This reflects a masculine bias of the head, objectivity and reason over the heart, engagement and empathy. Little in professional literature or training supports the therapist’s humane instincts. Traditionally, the ideal analyst has been cold, impervious, objective and scientific. This is not an ideal, but an image warped by the lack of balance between the masculine and feminine principles.

Regardless of their philosophical orientation, all forms of psychotherapy have been adversely affected by our culture’s over-valuation of the masculine principle and denigration of the feminine. Specifically, this bias puts a premium on masculine values like doing, assertiveness and control, while devaluing receptivity, nurturing and accommodation. It has fostered a warping of therapists’ understanding of their work to such an extent that most therapists ignore or disregard very significant healing elements in their clinical work with clients. The result is a therapy that works in spite of theories about how it should work.

Before examining how this is so, we should note that every society produces images of masculinity and femininity. Sorting humans into these two groups seems to be an inherent psychosocial phenomenon that has little, if any, relation to biology. Since this sorting is as ancient as it is universal, it has become part of the collective character structure of the culture, and, as such, has taken on an intrapsychic life within each person. Try as we might, we cannot escape viewing our world from the constructs of these intrapsychic energy patterns we label "masculine" and "feminine." Changing these constructs—embedded so deeply in our psyches—will be neither easy nor quick.

That such change is desirable can be seen in the dreams of people now grappling with healing the imbalance between the two principles. Two sample cases illustrate how both men and women suffer from deep wounds to their inner woman, and what it takes to heal them.

The first set of dreams are from a 30-year-old woman named Sydney. Her initial dream was central to her therapeutic work:

"I’m sitting with my feet in a bathtub, about two-thirds full of water, in a bathroom very like the one in the apartment where I grew up. My father is standing behind me. I’ve bled menstrual blood into the water. The clot of blood begins swirling around and separates into two clots. One clot, on my left, moves down toward the drain. It turns into a crab which scurries down the drain. The other clot, on my right, moves towards the surface of the water and turns into a woman, all white, a bloodless spirit, who rises up out of the water in a long flowing white gown and begins to float out of the window right above the tub. I’m terrified of losing the woman and want my father to do something to stop her from disappearing out the window. I want him to grab her and choke her. I’m not worried about the crab, that seems okay, safely tucked away someplace in the plumbing. My father is absolutely immovable, standing there as though turned to stone, with no expression on his face."

Here we see Sydney facing and attempting to deal with her psychological issues: the parental complexes; the ineffectual father; the bloody center of woman’s feminine side; the split in the feminine image (between the crabby, pre-verbal, pinching emotional side, and the bloodless wraith). Sydney’s feelings in the dream mirror our culture’s overestimation of the traditionally masculine spiritual world and its denigration of the body and its needs. The dream points up Sydney’s poor relationship with both the feminine and masculine principles: She splits herself just as Western culture, under the influence of Christianity, has rejected the body and revered the spirit.

A week after this dream Sydney had another, which indicated that changes were underway:

"I’m in the kitchen of my childhood home with my sister. We’re chatting, having a nice visit. My son, we know, is ill. While we visit we receive word that he has died. We are not in any way disturbed by this information, we just go on visiting. Then my father comes in, very upset. Now we’re in the bathroom. Father has heard that Daniel is ill. ‘How is Daniel,’ he asks, frightened. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ I reply, ‘Daniel is dead, he’s all dead.’ My father falls to his knees, tears streaming down his face."

Sydney recognized this dream as a follow-up to the earlier dream. But how different the activity: The father image is now alive and able to respond appropriately, with a feminine response (i.e. feelings). This feeling display comes only with the death of the boy (not as a response to Sydney’s wounded feminine nature, depicted in Dream 1—reflecting the cultural bias against women). Since this is Sydney’s dream, we see her capacity to feel for the masculine and its value, but not for the feminine and its plight.

Sydney worked on these issues of healing the wounded feminine for nearly 2 years before another dream revealed transformation was underway:

"I’m at the beach with Daniel. I know the Nazis are coming in amphibious tanks from the ocean. I make various attempts to get away but it becomes clear that this is impossible—they are going to get me this time. I do manage to get Daniel to safety, but I am trapped, with a high sand dune at my back. There is a slight rise between me and the ocean so I can’t see the shore line, though I can see some of the ocean. I see the tanks coming up out of the water. I am naked under my long brown woolen cape, and I kneel down in the path of the coming tanks with my arms out to the sides. [Here Sydney demonstrates, holding her arms straight out so that her body has the shape of a cross.] The first tank comes over the rise and sitting on its turret is a blond American G.I., looking like a picture of the Americans liberating Italy."

Sydney had been having dreams of Nazis (symbols of a disturbed masculine principle) for years, but now she no longer tries to escape. She realizes she must submit to her fate and takes a pose of sacrifice (i.e. the Cross). In this, she reflects a turning over of herself to her feminine receptive side. The result is not death, but liberation. This dream signaled the beginning of the healing of the split between her feminine and masculine sides.

The second set of dreams belongs to a man in his early 30’s, Stanley, who worked with a male analyst. The analyst had a strong masculine personality, with a good relationship to his feminine side. Stanley came into the analysis with a disturbing dream:

"I’m in a room: there’s a large fish tank with murky water. I’m fishing in the tank with a round stick. I pluck out a small octopus or squid. It looks like a baby clam. Mucouslike. Then I’m in a hospital setting: before me are two women lying on examination tables. They are alive but all the skin is off their bodies, you can see their muscles and veins. I’m horrified, repulsed, in terror. They are attached by flesh to the tables. I think I should stick my feelings down—this is a medical procedure going on. The little squid I had jumped off the stick and jumped up one of the women’s vaginas. Then a man comes in and reaches inside the woman’s vagina and pulls out a HUGE clear bag of some membranelike material, filled with old clothes and bloody body parts. The man berates her for trying to hoard these things. He is like a pimp—these things are worth money and she was trying to keep them to herself. Then I’m underneath a third woman who is suspended above me in the air, hanging from bars by pieces of skin. Her blood is dripping down on me."

Stanley’s dream images the wounded feminine at its most gruesome. Stanley came into analysis with considerable information, having read widely in the Jungian literature about the value of Being over Doing, the need for feelings and relatedness etc. But all his knowledge mattered little in terms of bringing him inner transformation. He hoped the analysis would provide an intellectual experience that would pull the emotional teeth of his dreams.

His dream is rich in images of the wounded feminine: the negative mother (octopus), flailed women; attempts to "stick down" his feelings; the hiding of the dismembered body; the hoarding woman; the bleeding woman suspended by her skin. Stanley was to discover, in many months of analysis, that his intellectual distancing defenses were ineffectual. To heal, he needed to experience his inner woundedness, symbolized, in this initial dream, by the blood dripping on him.

Stanley and his analyst saw glimmers of change nearly 2 years later, with this dream:

"My glasses were made of plastic and broke at the bridge. My left thumb got immense—like Pinocchio writ large—maybe a yard long. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s good all this is coming out.’"

The broken glasses alerted the analyst to the breaking up of Stanley’s intellectual defenses. Stanley interpreted the dream intellectually, but grew more frustrated as he did so, because, although all his interpretations were valid, he did not feel satisfied. The analyst agreed there was more to it, and Stanley began to let down his defenses. A year later, another dream revealed that Stanley’s distancing defenses were on the way out.

"It’s night, in this large room, like a retreat center/meditation hall. People are sitting on the floor. An area is marked off with light on the floor: an unraised stage. There are full-length windows leading out to a patio. Then African drums and African dancers start up. They are Zulus: painted, tattooed, and scarred. It is all men dancing in the center space. It has an aboriginal quality. There is a really noble, attractive feel to what first seemed primitive. The dancers are filled with power and dignity. I especially liked one man—he was spectacular. At the end of the dance a white man who looks like Rod Steiger, dressed in shimmering, radiant armor appears at the end of the runway. He is encased in a headdress like Ishtar’s that covers his entire body. The dancers begin moving toward him. They have a worshipful attitude toward him, he is their totem or icon. Then it is over. The lights come up. I find the man I’d been especially looking at is 81 years old. My wife comes in. I try to tell her about the dancers but she isn’t excited."

Note here how Stanley is now in an inner space established to foster inner exploration, on the same level as the action. The energy is intensely masculine, but filled with reverence for the power of the Great Mother (Ishtar). The feminine here is healthy and vital and the virile masculine partners her. Stanley cannot yet envision achieving this balanced relationship in reality (his wife is not interested), but he now has an inner understanding of the process.

"Feminine" and "masculine," two energetic patterns of being, are present in all people. We choose to see these as "opposites," rather than as complements or neighbors, due to the masculine consciousness of our culture, which splits the world into opposites. The result is that our humanness suffers. While feminists talk of women as victims, the major victim of patriarchal discrimination against the feminine is our human wholeness. If a goal of psychotherapy is wholeness, then clearly analysts have to redeem their own feminine side, and recognize the woundedness of their clients’ feminine.

The masculine and feminine principles have static and dynamic aspects, and each principle also has set of values:

All over the world, in every culture, the feminine principle has been depotentiated, drained of its life and power, seen as passive. This has had severe effects on the way therapists have come to regard the process of personal growth. Striving for autonomy, separation from others, self-control, and avoidance of death, depression and darkness—all masculine values—have colored the work of nearly all psychotherapeutic traditions, while simultaneously the feminine perspective has been ignored. But this approach—stressing attention and contemplation, guidance of the ego by the unconscious, work on one’s one ego (rather than the outer world), alignment with natural forces, and openness to the self—holds much that could enrich therapeutic practice, and its denigration has served to undermine much that therapists do.

The feminine perspective is not more valuable than the masculine: the two are equally necessary. The feminine is, however, the missing half of our humanity, which we need to be complete, and its loss impoverishes both human lives and the therapies that seek to heal them.

Therapists are part of American culture and like other "normal" members of society, have tried to belong to the valued, i.e. masculine, group, by practicing therapy using male norms and techniques: using clear diagnostic categories to sort patients; either/or thinking; and measuring outcomes with quantifiable techniques.

Therapists’ understanding of what they do has been distorted by this masculine bias that values rationality, logic and the "hard" sciences, and denigrates art, emotions and intuition. When investigators have tried to measure the effectiveness of psychotherapy by scientific procedures, they have failed, because there are no clear measures of success and failure in this work, and no way to control the myriad variables in any given case.

It is time, therefore, that we recognize that psychotherapy is closer to the humanities than it is to science. It is more an art than a science. It is more in the realm of the Feminine, and, as a field, it has more in common with literature than with any science (although modern physics is incorporating more aspects of the Feminine in both its technique and vision of the nature of reality).

In practice, psychotherapy does not behave like a science. It is not replicable, and the unconscious cannot be codified in masculine terms. Equally, a masculine approach makes it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the subject matter of psychotherapy.

Psychotherapists are fundamentally humanists and need to take this identity seriously and educate the public about the valuable contribution we, as humanists, can make to the late twentieth-century world. This flies in the face of current theory, which rests on a Freudian base. Freud, with his "drive theory" (that two drives—sex and aggression—form the entire basis of the psyche, in a closed system) set psychotherapy on a "scientific" footing. His model allowed a rational, clear, distinct orientation to the study of a separate object (i.e. the patient). He completely ignored (or perhaps refused to recognize) that the analyst and analysand are not separate and distinct, and that their unconsciousnesses mingle and merge.

By contrast, Carl Jung developed the "object relations orientation," an approach that is more feminine than masculine, and is rooted in the central value of the feminine principle: relatedness. Object relations theorists see the psyche as a primary reality (unlike Freud, who regarded it as an epiphenomenon deriving from the frustrations of life in the body). Psychotherapists taking an object relations approach include the British school (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Guntrip), the American Interpersonalists (Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, Thompson, Fromm-Reichmann), Jung and Kohut. Of these, Winnicott is especially relevant to developing a psychotherapy grounded in the feminine principle, for his focus on creating a "facilitating environment" for patients, and for his emphasis on the "holding" aspect of the therapeutic process.

As a form of cherishing, "holding" is a central element in mothering, and it had been almost completely neglected in the psychotherapeutic literature until Winnicott made it a major area of study. Any effective therapeutic venture will give much time and effort to holding, although the literature puts much more stress on interpretation and "curing," due to the conventional masculine bias.

Jung is another major figure contributing to a psychotherapy grounded in the feminine principle. He was not interested so much in "curing" patients of illness as in individuation and wholeness, by helping them find room in themselves for their inadequacies and wounds.

Jung did this by accepting the dark side of human nature. In this he is quite unlike most therapists who are caught in the masculine quest for perfection. To Jung a wholeness able to encompass our darkest aspects would radiate light.

Jung also reflected the feminine stance in other ways. For example, in his rejection of a heroic attitude toward one’s self and the outer world. His attitude was humble rather than arrogant. This is especially obvious in his valuation of religion. Freud rejected religion as an illusion. But Jung felt it was intrinsic to the human psyche. Another example is his stress more on the quality of the transference-countertransference relationship than on insight/interpretation or technique. Jung went so far as to insist that it is "the personality of the doctor himself [that is the] curative or harmful factor...". Jung believed that the therapeutic process was not working until the patient had become an emotional problem to the therapist.

Jung coined the term "archetype" to describe the innate foundations of the psyche. He postulated that these inborn potentialities structure one’s developing inner object relations, and that psychological healing follows an inherent pattern that emerges from the depths of the psyche.

An archetypal approach to therapy seeks first, not a diagnosis, but an understanding of where the patient’s life force is heading, where the patient’s native energies are pushing the therapeutic work. In this approach, the therapist’s role is to align himself with the direction of the life force. The patient’s psyche is regarded as the primary healer.

In archetypal psychology, the therapist often analyzes the patient from an archetypal perspective, e.g. as caught in one archetype or another (e.g. trickster, puer, senex). While these concepts are most familiar to Jungians, an increasing number of non-Jungian practitioners are now investigating archetypal processes and the archetypal layer of the psyche, often without using the Jungian terminology. Many therapists of the object-relations school illustrate how archetypes serve as a foundation in therapy, e.g.:

Joseph Campbell offered the monomyth of the universal hero, in which the hero (i.e. the patient in therapy) descends into the underworld (i.e. returns to his origins), confronts hostile and helpful forces (i.e. confronts his shadow side), experiences a variety of adventures, undergoes an ultimate ordeal (i.e. faces the reality of death), and gains his reward (i.e. experiences rebirth). Then he returns to the ordinary world, rejuvenated by the experiences of the world below. Jungians see this hero’s journey as a template for the individuation process.

Carl Jung saw in alchemy an archetype for the psychology of the transference between patient and therapist. Alchemical imagery potently captures what the modern patient experiences in deep therapeutic work, e.g. the coniunctio, or union of opposites; the joint immersion in the bath of suffering; the dissolutio, or dissolving of the distinction between self and other (when the patient’s suffering becomes the therapist’s as well); the "death," or therapeutic regression, with concomitant depression; the purificatio, or emotional cleansing, as the patient works through her complexes.

Donald Sandner developed a theory of structural pattern in all healing practices, based on his study of primitive healing practices world-wide. His archetype of healing has 5 stages: the purification (of both healer and patient); the evocation (in which symbolic images are presented and invested with numinosity); identification (when both healer and patient identify with the evoked powers); transformation (the healer banishes the disease); and release (both healer and patient return to their ordinary lives). These stages guide modern psychotherapy no less than they guide the practices of North American shamans and New Guinea medicine men. Purification establishes the analytic frame, creating a sealed temenos. Evocation occurs when the transference has been created. Transformation happens as the therapist carries the analysand’s projection. In the final stage, release, the patient reabsorbs the power of the transference.

Sylvia Brinton Perera describes, via ancient Near Eastern myths, the archetypal pattern underlying human development in the late twentieth century. In the journey to the underworld in these myths, an unraveling process is described, parallel to the experience of analysis, in which we are compelled to explore the unconscious and the infantile. The patient undertakes a regression emboldened by the therapist’s sense of security. In this process, the patient’s attitude toward the infantile parts of herself shifts from rejection and disgust to acceptance and respect. The therapist "holds" the patient by trusting the life force as the therapeutic agent. As the patient moves through the putreficatio stage, she experiences the rotting of her body (i.e. familiar ego identity) with an intense suffering that the therapist does not try to guide, control or alleviate, but rather witnesses. She allows the work to happen. The key attitude here is one of trust and recognition of confusion, rather than domination or an arrogant assumption of expertise. Regression—to Jung, Sandner, and Perera—is a central part of the therapeutic process, a "teleological attempt to grow up again," as Jung put it.

Michael Balint shares with these Jungians an appreciation of the role of regression in psychological healing. He sees the crux of neuroses and psychological dis-ease in the patient’s initial environment, which failed in some way consistently over time, to meet his needs adequately. This gave rise to a pattern of adapting to the environment that distorted the patient’s essential nature. The healing work is achieved at the level of soul, with which the therapist must connect if he is to help the patient. The analyst then becomes a "primary object" for the patient. The therapist’s role is to remain centered in his willingness to witness, but not to gratify. Balint’s goal is Jungian: not perfection or "cure," but wholeness.

D.W. Winnicott sees healing work predicated on the patient’s developing trust in the therapist’s reliability and good-enough-ness, which then allows the patient to regress to the infantile level of need. Winnicott encourages his patients to play, via images, memories, affective states, painting, sculpting—whatever achieves that abaisement du niveau mental that Pierre Janet recognized as an inner openness to one’s self. Jungians see parallels to play in their stress on the use of active imagination: entering a transitional space between conscious ego dominance and the level of dreaming. The key to allowing sufficient play and free-ranging imagination is the therapist’s attitude: Winnicott is firm that "the patient’s creativity can be only too easily stolen by a therapist who knows too much."

Heinz Kohut founded another school of psychoanalysis, Self Psychology. A neo-Freudian, Kohut has had considerable influence on American Jungian thought. Like Jung, Kohut regarded the psyche as the primary reality of therapeutic work. He also recognized the imperfections and inadequacies of the therapist as part of the process, since it disturbed the selfobject transference and slowly assisted the patient in strengthening his sense of self.

All these theorists share the view that therapy recapitulates development, i.e. the patient regresses to an early stage and relearns a new, healthier, more appropriate pattern of responses to life. Healing occurs in a place of deep regression or descent full of infantile emotional experiences.

The coniunctio, or healing transference, grows out of a participation mystique between analyst and analysand, with a crucial loss of boundaries. The two individuals lose their edges and mingle with each other on the soul level, the deep level at which we find the archetypal layer of the psyche. The regression to infancy is not so much a personal return, as a connection to layers archetypally infantile, layers we all share by virtue of being human. In this approach, the key therapeutic agent is the analysand’s experience of the living reality of the psyche, as seen in dreams and the transference.

Most psychotherapy, as it is now practiced, is grounded in the masculine principle: Its training is built on a medical model, with diagnosis, cure and analyst’s expertise regarded as essential. It is oriented to Doing, not Being. It is predicated on separation and distance from the patient (which the diagnosis helps to achieve). It assumes the analyst is, and stays, in control. Its focus is on interpretation: the therapist gives the patient something, or does something to him; the patient, meanwhile, is seen as inert. Little attention is given to interpretations that patients come up with themselves.

How different is psychotherapy grounded in the feminine principle:

• It begins not with control or expertise, but with a recognition of not knowing.

• Its focus is on Being and experiencing, not Doing or curing.

• It looks to the patient as the source of how she will work out her dilemmas.

• It takes a receptive approach built on the belief that everything the patient needs is inside his own psyche.

• It regards the therapist’s role as one of helping the patient mobilize and actualize his own health.

• The therapist does not act on the patient, but rather tries to receive from him what his psyche is trying to produce.

• The major challenge for the therapist is to be her own authentic self in the analytic encounter.

• Her role is to be the champion of the reality of the psyche, to cherish the patient’s perceptions and experiences, and to maintain interest in the patient’s current state of being.

• There is no "objective" separation between analyst and patient, but rather an immersion in the world of the patient, so as to offer a counterbalancing experience of parenting to compensate the lack of parental presence that the patient suffered as a child (when the parents failed to share his experience, causing a disavowal of his true self). By having an unswerving commitment to the primacy of the patient’s inner state, the therapist permits the patient to repossess his true being.

• Such an approach is essentially "soul" work ("psyche" is Greek for "soul"). Since our culture is not favorably disposed to putting its faith in the soul, the analyst must stand firm so the patient can come to know the truth.

• The analyst must also maintain a firm faith in the value of the analytic process, even in the face of repeated failure. This faith is akin to the faith found in fairy tales (storehouses of archetypal stories of soul work), where some magical transformative power overcomes some hopeless situation. Just so does the psyche contain a healing magic.

• The therapist models a spiritual attitude that the patient can introject toward his own soul. The analysis thus becomes transformative as both analyst and analysand hold this religious attitude toward the work.

• A feminine approach seeks the fecund compost of wholeness, not the aridity of perfection beloved of the masculine model. Knowing that perfection is impossible, the analyst accepts the patient as he is. This then frees the patient to move to a healthier state.

• The goal here is not "cure," but a condition of psychological functioning in which the patient is able to continue growing on his own, having learned how to work with his inner pain, and to work toward being a whole person.

• The analytic work is seen as a process of providing a container within which the patient finds the strength to face and handle increasing quantities of legitimate suffering.

• The therapist offers the patient an expanded container within which he can experience himself, by allowing merger between them (so the analysand can share the analyst’s greater ego strength). By offering empathy, the analyst enhances the patient’s ability to withstand pain, and to identify with his own true infantile self.

• In this process the healing elements are regression and merger—quite different from the order, boundaries, control and expertise valued in the masculine approach.

• Other values are likewise different. A psychotherapy grounded in the feminine principle, for example, values: submission to the transference experience; the regression; the therapeutic merger; the therapist’s recognition of his own woundedness, imperfectability, confusion and inadequacy; all the defenses human beings put up against their own growth (hysteria, obsession, borderline behavior, narcissism); disintegration in the service of rebirth; ego strength and the impulse to heal, as determinants of prognosis, more than the masculine diagnosis.

• A psychology grounded in the feminine principle takes a non-judgmental viewpoint, recognizing that we all experience borderline states at times of strong emotional expression.

• Prognoses of who will heal and who will not are not dependent on diagnosis but rather on the therapist’s ability to receive profoundly disturbing material and the patient’s capacity to deal with it.

• It is not the therapist’s job to "cure," or even to heal. Such thinking is an inflation caused by identifying with the archetype of healer. Given how little we understand about the workings of the psyche at this point, we must not assume that we can even try to do things to people in the realm of psychology.

• Rather than seeking to cure, we try to orient ourselves to the patient’s individuation process.

• We see resolution of parental complexes not as the end of the analysis, but as the beginning of a state of becoming that lasts for the rest of the patient’s life.

• Hence the focus in a psychology grounded in the feminine principle is on process, rather than content. This process seeks not objective understanding of the patient but an empathic understanding grounded in closeness, identification and merger. It teaches the therapist as well as the patient and provides an experience of aliveness for both.

• The process is not easy: The analyst must reflect back to the patient his inner state, meaning the analyst must share it and the sharing exercises one’s inner being.

• While the masculine approach holds power, prestige and social sanction, the field of psychotherapy needs to turn away from power, doing, control, toward love, being and acceptance of life as it really is.

But this is not to say that masculine concerns have no place. They do, particularly in providing the vas bene clausum, the well-sealed vessel in which the healing work can occur. Some of these concerns include:

• the fixed frame, with set meeting time and place, a fee and format.

• confidentiality

• adequate supervision of the analyst

• devotion to the patient: sticking with the analysand until he or she terminates treatment; and being for (supportive of) the patient

• abstinence from the patient’s erotic impulses, with the analyst working to be as clear as possible about his or her own limits and motives

• trust in the patient by the analyst, allowing for breaks in the analyst’s anonymity

• the agreement between patient and therapist to seek a purely psychological solution to the patient’s difficulties (rather than the use of drugs)

In these ways the feminine work is contained and supported dynamically by masculine rationality and statically by the masculine fixed frame.

In such a schema, interpretation (so central to the masculine approach) serves only to let patients know the limits of our understanding. Reason is useful in those rare moments when a self-destructive pattern seems entrenched and unlikely to shift, but even here it often fails.

Archetypes have been mentioned previously. Jung defined "archetype" as "an inherited organization of psychic energy... which not only gives expression to the energic process but facilitates its operation," and as "forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action." They also are the wellspring of our life energy, providing channels through which that energy can flow.

Like the physical body, the psyche has universal patterns. These are the archetypes. One example is the experience of "mother." Everyone has a mother, so the pattern exists in each person’s unconscious. In this context, the term "complex"—as in "mother complex"—is not used pathologically. We all have complexes, and this does not make us "sick."

The psyche and body act in dynamic interaction. The psyche is as real as the body, something our materialistic culture finds hard to believe. But not only is the psyche real, it carries the power to affect the material outer world (as holistic health practitioners are discovering more and more, in their studies of the mind’s affect on health). Part of the healing work of psychotherapy is to allow the psyche to exist in the material world of the patient.

More than being real, Jung (like Edgar Cayce) believed that the psyche (soul) was primary, i.e. more fundamental than the physical plane. This challenges the precepts of our masculinist culture on more than materialistic grounds. For example:

• It forces us to face the fact that life is limited and we are impotent before the power of the collective unconscious.

• It recognizes the spiritual and affiliative forces grounded in the psyche.

• It acknowledges that archetypes rule our psychological lives; we are subject to their direction, much as earlier peoples felt subject to the "gods" (in earlier eras, the archetypes were called "gods").

Jung was not unique in his delineation of the archetypal layers of the psyche. Other psychologists who have done so include Spitz, with his psychic "organizers;" Klein, with his hypothesis of unconscious fantasies; and Piaget, with his "innate schemata."

The ruling archetype of the psyche, its center and totality Jung called the Self. It is visible in dreams, which may be regarded as x-rays of the soul.

Counter-transference is not less important to healing work than transference. Healing is achieved through the patient’s own constructive energies, which has little to do with the analyst, and very little to do with her counter transference on to the patient. But attitude is not irrelevant: Too much liking or disliking, and the analyst loses her ability to be there for the patient (because she turns off, or begins to use the patient for her own gratification). Only by attending to the neurotic component of the countertransference difficulty can the analyst hope to resolve it. This means the analyst must model for the patient an openness to his or her own madness.

In this process the patient’s complexes are constellated in (projectively identified into) the therapist and vice versa (although ideally to a far lesser extent). It then falls to the therapist, when the analysis is stuck, to achieve some inner change which gets things moving again.

A psychotherapy grounded in the feminine principle does not regard projection as purely pathological. It is also the basic relationship-creating mechanism, forming a bridge to understanding, when it functions constructively. When projections occur in the analysis, they can help both parties see what they dislike in themselves. Hence projections can serve the mutual growth of both analyst and analysand.

Objectivity is a myth, because we are in relationship not only with the patient, but also with our own inner neuroses and borderline states. As Jung noted, analysis is working only when the two people in it have become a problem for each other. Because no two analyses are alike, this opens the door to constant growth and self-discovery, when psychotherapy is done from a grounding in the feminine principle.