despair over their condition. They feel alienated from their center because they are cut off from important parts of themselves. It is as though they have a mansion for their home but are only living in a few of the rooms.
The philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, helped me to understand in myself and in the lives of my clients the source of this alienation and despair. Kierkegaard, in Sickness Unto Death, analyzes despair as a disrelationship to the Self, to the source of being human.10 For Kierkegaard there are three major forms of despair: first, despair that is unconscious; second, despair that is conscious and which manifests itself as weakness; and third, despair which is conscious and manifests itself as defiance.
In the unconscious form of despair, the person is out of relation to the Self, but is unaware of it. Such a person, according to Kierkegaard, tends to live a hedonistic life, dispersed in sensation of the moment, having no commitment to anything higher than ego-impulses. This is the stage of aestheticism and Don Juanism. Here one can see a type of existence in which people do not consciously realize they are in despair, although, as Kierkegaard points out, the compulsiveness for infinite sensation and pleasure together with intruding dark moments of boredom and anxiety reveal that all is not well.
If the person allows the dark moments of boredom and anxiety to enter fully into consciousness, then comes the awareness of despair, the realization of disrelationship to the Self, and the feeling that one is too weak to choose the Self since that demands the acceptance of one’s strength to make that decision. Here the person despairs over weakness to commit to something higher than ego-impulses. I imagine that many puellas suffer intensely in the despair of weakness—wanting to be courageous and take the risk of actuality, the risk of commitment, yet somehow afraid and unable to take the leap.
But if the person penetrates more consciously into the reason for weakness, then comes awareness that the excuse of weakness was really only a way of avoiding the strength already there. What the person originally took to be weakness is now understood to be defiance, i.e., a refusal to commit! For Kierkegaard, the despair of defiance is a higher consciousness, a realization that one has the strength to choose the Self, or in Kierkegaard’s terms, to make the leap of faith which requires acceptance of the uncontrollable and transcendent, but that one chooses not to do so in stark defiance against the powers which transcend reason and man’s finitude. In defiance, one refuses to change! In the despair of defiance, one refuses possibility and infinitude. In the despair of weakness, one refuses actuality and finitude. To refuse one is to refuse both. The despair of weakness I see to be an aspect of the eternal girl. The despair of defiance appears to me to be an aspect of the armored Amazon. And yet in the end they are secretly the same—two poles of a split in the self.
Women who fall into the archetypal pattern of the puella, caught in the despair of weakness, need to become aware of their strength and shake off their victim identity. Women who are caught in the armored Amazon’s tendency to control need to see how control can be a false strength and to value the openness to what cannot be controlled. For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this leap one accepts at the same time one’s weakness and one’s strength, the intermixture of the finite and infinite realms in being human, and the realization that human beings must move between the opposites rather than identifying with an absolute.
Therapeutically, I found in the work of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung a great help in understanding this kind of situation which exists in many people’s lives. Jung thought that the life of each person was a complex and mysterious whole. But the particular course of their development, coming from personal family experiences, cultural influences, and innate temperament, tended to lead a person to emphasize one part of the personality and to de-emphasize the conflicting part. Yet, that other opposing, unaccepted side was there wanting to be acknowledged and often intruded upon the consciously accepted side, affecting the person’s behavior and disturbing his or her relationships. Jung thought the task of personal growth was to see the value of both sides and to try to integrate them so that they could work together in a fruitful way for the person. I find this to be important therapeutically for the wounded woman who finds herself in a conflict between these two patterns: the eternal girl and the armored Amazon. Each has its value. Each can learn from the other. And the integration of the two is a foundation for the emerging woman.
Although a woman may be wounded from an impaired relation to the father, it is possible for her to work towards healing the wound. We bear the influences of our parents, but we are not fated to remain merely the products of our parents. There is in the psyche, according to Jung, a natural healing process which moves toward balance and wholeness. In the psyche also are natural patterns of behavior which he called archetypes and which are available to serve as inner models, even when outer models are absent or unsatisfactory. A woman has within herself, for instance, all the potentialities of the father archetype, and these can often be reached if she is willing to risk coming in touch with the unconscious. So, even though the personal or cultural fathers initially may have shaped the conscious image of ourselves as women and what we can do in the world and in relation to men, there is within us as well the positive and creative aspects of the inner archetypal father which can compensate for many of the negative influences in our actual life histories. This potentiality to gain a better relationship to the father principle is one we all have within us. Dream images often reveal previously unknown sides of the father that we can experience in order to become more whole and mature. The following case illustrates this view.
One woman with whom I worked grew up under the authoritarian rule of a rigid father who did not value the feminine. Hard work and discipline, masculine occupations were what he stressed. Weakness or vulnerability of any kind was not allowed. So the daughter adopted these values and always kept very busy planning and controlling her life. She didn’t allow herself to relax or to show any weakness. But this put her at an emotional distance from others and at a distance from her own heart center. She came into therapy shortly after she developed a skin disease which became more and more visible to others. It was as though her vulnerability wanted to be acknowledged. She couldn’t hide it anymore, for there it was on her skin for all to see. In the initial dream she had at the start of therapy she was stranded high on the tower of a skyscraper. Up there she could see all the plan of traffic flow in the city, but she couldn’t get down to the ground to do anything. At last a fun-loving man climbed up the tower and helped her down to earth, and then she ran barefoot with him, playing on the grass. This dream showed the side of the masculine that had been missing in her development since it wasn’t provided by her stern and serious father. She needed to relate to an instinctual man who could play with her.
Early in the analysis she also had a dream which showed the influence of her father. In the dream she wanted to show her father her skin disease, but he refused to look at it. He refused to allow her any vulnerability and she had unconsciously adopted his attitude towards herself. This affected not only her emotional life but also her creativity. Although she had a great deal of artistic talent and creative potential, she went into one of the more rational sciences, and then never finished her studies. It was as though she was on her father’s path and not her own. In the course of analysis, she began to accept her vulnerable side and allowed herself to play. The man in her first dream provided an image to accept those areas of herself. On the outer level she then met a warm, spontaneous man with whom she fell in love, opening up her vulnerable side. She started school again, this time also in an area which she loved. Shortly after this, the image of her father changed in her dreams. In one dream she was told her father had died. Then she heard a bell calling her to the other side of the river. She started to go across on a bridge, but the bridge was not quite finished and so she slid into the water to get across. The death of the father symbolized the end of his rigid reign, and now she was called to cross over to the other side of the river to a new side of herself. The bridge to that new side was already partly built, but she had to get into the water to cross all the way. For her this meant to get into the flow of life and her feelings. As she did so, the image of her father changed in her dreams, and he became more accepting. In one dream she had lost something that belonged to him and instead of rebuking
