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"Somehow in the Wizard of Oz, that the pretensions of patriarchy are exposed, it allows the feminine in the form of that little girl to come forward and the good to assert the power of the feminine.

"And I think the whole drama turns on an intuition that American culture was getting inflated in a masculine direction and going much too much into power and development, and it needed to keep itself balanced and remember feminine values."

Introduction:    

That was the voice of my return guest, Dr. John Beebe.  John Beebe, MD, is co-author, along with Virginia Apperson, of the new book, The Presence of the Feminine in Film.  You may recall that Dr. Beebe was my guest on show #140, which dealt with Jungian typology. 

Dr. Beebe is a Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco.  He received degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago Medical School, and he’s past President of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where he’s currently on the teaching faculty as well as Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco. 

He’s a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.  An avid film buff, Dr. Beebe frequently draws upon American movies to illustrate how the various types of consciousness and unconsciousness interact to produce images of self and shadow in the stories of our lives that Jung called “individuation.” 

Dr. Beebe is particularly well known for his elaboration of C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological types. 

Now, here’s the interview.   

Dr. Dave:     Dr. John Beebe, welcome back to Shrink Rap Radio.   

John Beebe:  Hello.  Thank you for having me. 

Dr. Dave:     Yes, well, I’m really pleased to have you.  You’ve recently brought out a new book that you co-authored with Virginia Apperson, titled The Presence of the Feminine in Film. 

And so that’s going to be the focus of our discussion today.  And let’s start out by letting me ask you, what do you and your co-author mean by “the feminine”? 

Beebe:  Well, the honest answer is that if we could tell you, we wouldn’t have needed to write a book of over 250 pages and still wonder if we’ve begun to define the territory. 

So let’s be honest.  The feminine might be defined negatively as “that which cannot be defined,” since definition – at least in the school of thought Virginia and I were trained in, Jungian analytical psychology – is, definition is precisely a masculine concept.

Dr. Dave:     (laughs)  

Beebe:  Putting a very strong definition around things is masculine.  That masculinity these days is not confined to biological men, but we all try to nail things down, and it’s precisely what can’t be nailed down that we ought to be thinking about in some other way, and that other way, Jung had the wit to call the feminine.   

Dr. Dave:     Okay.  I sort of knew that I was probably going to be stepping into a morass with that question. 

Beebe:  “Morass” is a good word, because one of the opening chapters where Virginia particularly does the best possible job of showing us, in all the manifest forms that she can, the essential and elusive nature of the feminine. 

The film she chose is Wide Sargasso Sea and in that film, based on the novel by Jean Rhys, the great, strange English novelist of the dilemmas of women and of the feminine in the twentieth century... looked back to tell the story of the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre before she became the madwoman. 

And in this story, she grew up in the region of the wide Sargasso Sea, somewhere en route to the Caribbean from the Atlantic Ocean, which is just an endless morass in which the most comfortable and fertile creatures are the eels, so that begins to give you an idea of a metaphor for the feminine – just a very large, undefined, rather wriggly thing. 

And of course, Rochester, who courts and marries Antoinette, is an Englishman who is at first fascinated and then absolutely terrified by that feminine world that his wife is introducing him to. 

And he proceeds to brutalize her until she descends into it in a negative form, the form of madness. 

And that’s often what happened to the feminine under very strong masculine and strong colonial colonizing, patriarchal initiatives, that the feminine turned into alcoholism and insanity and decadence and degeneration. 

And that’s the form in which we’ve known it, and it’s been seen as something we need to rise above to build our wonderful civilization.  Well, we’re certainly changing our view about that, aren’t we? 

Dr. Dave:     Yeah, you know what?  It just struck me, an interesting conjunction here that was quite unconscious on my part, but I did an interview yesterday for this series with a fellow who’s written a book called Irritable Male Syndrome.   

Beebe:  (laughs) I’ve had it most of my life, although writing this book was sort of a breakthrough because I never was more irritable, and I never have been less irritable since I finished it.  So probably I did myself a favor. 

Dr. Dave:     Interesting.  Now, I did read in that chapter, that initial chapter, there was a kind of circling around the concept that reminded me of Jung’s part of Man and His Symbols where he takes his kind of very circular approach to the topic that he’s talking about, kind of circling around it and developing a sense of it.  Let me ask you... 

Beebe:  Jung has a lovely phrase for that, by the way, that comes up often in the Jungian literature.  The word is “circumambulation.” 

Dr. Dave:     Yes, right. 

Beebe:  Jung loved to speak in sort of medieval church Latin, so it would come out as “circumambulatio”...   We’d change that by adding an “n” and then pronouncing it “circumambulation.”  But it’s to walk around something... 

And rather than interpret and try to nail it and define it, you sort of just walk around it and look at it from one angle after another.  And that’s a very pleasing way to creep up on the feminine; that’s sort of an eely way of going around it, you know? 

Dr. Dave:     Yeah, I think as I get older, I’m beginning to get a bit more comfortable with that.  I think my nature is more to try to nail things down a bit.  So you’ll pardon my, (laughs) my questions if they drift in that direction. 

Beebe:  The main thing to know is the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are very loose, approximate concepts, and in a way, they should be used sparingly. 

What we chose to do in this long – you might say it’s a series of interlocking essays written at different times that end up being sort of one long meditation on what the feminine might be. 

But using the medium of film, we have a chance to say how different filmmakers, men and women, have imagined it to be and have shown it to be, so that we use the films as a way of walking around the topic... to say, well, it looks like this to him and that to her...                                                                     

And this to this screenwriter, and that to that director, and this to that actress and that to this actor...  And gradually, you get a sense, well, if this many people have approached something similar in these ways and there are these regular patterns, perhaps we can speak of a something that we can call the feminine, because that’s how it seems to be symbolized. 

Dr. Dave:     Yeah.  Well, let me ask you this:  When you talk about the feminine, is that synonymous with the anima, or do you intend something broader? 

Beebe:  I think it’s broader.  For one thing, the original image of the feminine probably, in most cultures, is the mother. 

And Jung does make a difference between the anima, which appears as an archetype for both men and women, surprisingly enough, often in relation to the world of the father, so that we are dealing here with a different, perhaps developmentally later development. 

We know in history, the anima comes into history pretty much as an idea out of Islamic culture, around the 12th century, if one believes Denise De Rougemont’s (ph) wonderful book, Love in the Western World. 

For all intentional purposes, the anima – the idea of the anima as we use it today – was an invention of Islamic poets and philosophers who were steeped in Platonic thought but had that peculiar Islamic twist to it. 

And they were often – maybe even largely – homosexual in their actual sexual expression. 

But out of this came up this idea of something about women as something to be idealized, and it sort of made its way into Europe in the 12th century in the famous courts of love and the notion of courtly love that pervades the Arthurian stories, where you have a Lancelot smitten by Arthur’s wife, Gwinevere. 

Well, she is... Arthur is very much a patriarch; Gwinevere, his wife, is the patriarchal anima; and then Lancelot is the young, ardent lover who falls in love with, and has this terrible conflict because Arthur is his best friend. 

He’s his knight, and yet he’s in love with Gwinevere.  And that’s so beautifully realized in John Boorman’s film, Excalibur. 

Now, all of that is the culture of the anima, and I don’t think that is the same as the mother.  But then we have a whole other set of stories about the mother and the meaning of the mother. 

And so at the very least, you’ve got two terms, the mother and the anima. 

Then you begin to add in things like the witch – there’s a witch, also, in the Arthurian stories. 

And we add quite a few in our book.  A new one that people are now paying more attention to is the female trickster.  A woman named Ricki Tannen has written a beautiful book called The Female Trickster. 

We’re looking at that, because we’ve always thought of the trickster as sort of a male archetype.

> Continued on Page 2

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