[Paul C. Vitz is Professor of Psychology/Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and Professor of Psychology Emeritus at New York University. He is our guest blogger for the month of January, and this is his second post].

            As described earlier in my previous blog for this month what is sometimes called “The Men’s Movement” has used Jung’s psychology to develop an understanding of male archetypes. Here I propose that there are analogous female archetypes which are very clearly exemplified in Christian and especially Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology and history. To the best of my knowledge these female archetypes have not previously been suggested.

            These four proposed parallel archetypes are: the Queen, the Wise-woman/Magician, the Defender, and the Lover. Some might find it surprising that women have archetypes so clearly analogous to those of men, but I believe they do, although they take a strong feminine gendered form.

            Let’s start with the Wise-woman/Magician and look at the great female saints. Many of them were famous in their time, and still are today, for extraordinary wisdom and prophet­ic gifts. Many of these saints were also miracle-workers. And all saints, male and female, are believed to have performed miracles after their death; this is, indeed, an important ele­ment of the Catholic canonization procedure. Three of the great female saints are honored as “Doctors of the Church”: Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux.

But the female saints understood them­selves to be pale exemplars of the extraordi­nary wisdom of the Virgin Mary, honored in the Litany by such titles as “Seat of Wisdom,” “Mother of Good Counsel,” “Virgin Most Prudent” and “Mirror of Justice.” In any case, the archetype of the Wise-woman is honored and found abundantly in the Catholic and Orthodox tra­dition and more recently in Protestant understanding as well.

(My references to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of Mary and female saints is quite weak and I welcome examples from that tradition. Recent Protestant examples are also most welcome.)

            As to the Defender (not Warrior), we need to reflect on what is meant by this female power as distinct from those exercised and practiced by men. Women have historically been defenders of their children, their family and sometimes their people, rather than attackers of the enemy or warriors against evil. But they have fought mightily in their capacity as defenders of those they love. As most people know, don’t ever mess with a bear cub. Why? Your might run into momma bear!

            Let’s look again at the saints and the Virgin.  Perhaps the best known female saint­ly warrior is Joan of Arc, who took up the sword to defend her people against foreign oppression. She carried a sword but never used it against an enemy although she led the French forces. Another very early French saint is Gene­vieve, Patroness of Paris, who is said to have defended Paris when it was besieged by the pagan Franks under Childeric in the fifth cen­tury; Genevieve made a personal sortie with an armed band to obtain provisions for the Parisians. Later she won Childeric’s respect, as well as that of Clovis. She is also credited with having kept Attila the Hun from attack­ing the city, through prayer and fasting.

But again the Virgin Mary is the very prototype of the archetype. The Battle of Lepanto, a major turning point in the defense of Europe against Islam-against the Ottoman Turks-in 1571, was put under the protection of Our Lady; the memory of that victory is still celebrated in part by honoring her. One of Mary’s titles is “Our Lady of Victory” which commemorates mili­tary victories achieved in various places under her patronage. But in her litany she has other similar titles, which emphasize both her power and her strong defense of her devotees: “Virgin Most Powerful,” “Tower of David” and “Tower of Ivory.” Catholic tradition affirms that Jesus refuses his mother nothing.

            As for the Queen, Mary has from early cen­turies been understood as the Queen of Hea­ven. Her litany confirms her queenly nature many times. Let us recall those magnificent titles that Catholics know: “Queen of angels, Queen of patriarchs, Queen of prophets, Queen of apostles, Queen of martyrs, Queen of con­fessors, Queen of virgins, Queen of saints, Queen conceived without original sin, Queen assumed into heaven, Queen of the most holy Rosary, Queen of peace.”

            The Lover is left. This is an easy one for this archetype fits women extraordinarily well. We all know about women’s capacity for love and devotion to others. We know the great number of Christian women whose love of God and of other people has deeply impressed the world. Love often takes different forms in men and women, but the basic archetype is the same. The last two archetypes of Lover and Queen are very powerfully summarized in the fifth Glorious Mystery-the Coronation. Here in heaven Mary is met in love by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and crowned a queen. And Mary, with her love and trust in God and her love for her Son, is the only human so honored; and she is the model of the soul’s journey for all Christians- women and men.

            Finally, these four great archetypes are, I believe, best summarized and integrated in the term and role of “Mother”-just as “Father” had the same function for men. A Mother is an archetype of the wise, the queen, defender of her fam­ily and lover of husband and children. And all women are called to be mothers, although like Mother Teresa of Calcutta they might have no natural children.

The Church as the Mother and Female Archetype

            In Christian imagery the Church is represented as feminine and the Church was also often pictured as Queen. Some of the early Church Fathers explicitly call Ecclesia- the Church and the Virgin as one-an immortal universal Queen. (See White, 1961) This claim then suggests that the four archetypes of Mary are also appropriate for the Church as well.

  In the writings of the fourth Gospel by St. John the Church is the Bride of Christ. St. Paul goes further declaring marriage not merely a metaphor for the relationship of Christ to the Church but an actual instance of what marriage is, the existence of “two in one flesh”(Ephesians 5:27). The well known hymn at Vespers for the Feast of the Dedication of the Church exemplifies this feminine character of the Church. “She is his new creation, by water and the word; from heaven he came and sought her, to be his holy Bride; with his own blood he brought her, and for her life he died.” Here in these images we see the complimentary nature of male and female grouped as to make a new unity.

It is relevant to note here that according to Victor White (1961), a Jungian analyst and colleague of Jung, the “virtual elimination of any feminine figure from religion(had), in Jung’s view, bought grievous impoverishment to the Protestant world, and set it serious psychological and social problems” (p 134).

Dangers with Archetypes

            One of the problems with archetypes is that as mental representations of natural concepts even instincts they can easily be projected, that is, to be understood as existing separate from the person and given a kind of external existence. One consequence of this tendency is to revive a pagan religious consciousness. Kelsey (1983) explicitly notes that the images and motifs of archetypes have a powerful appeal to the imagination and that they “act like spiritual beings with a life of their own” (p.76). Critics such as Satinover (1996) have also noted the tendency for archetypes to turn into projected deities.  In this process a polytheistic neo-paganism often gets revived. (This can be a danger sometimes even with Mary and the saints as Protestants have noted.)

The origin of the religious and gnostic foundation in Jung’s writings is well documented by Richard Noll in The Aryan Christ: The secret life of Carl Jung (1997). This issue with respect to Jung’s archetypes has become explicit. One prominent French Jungian analyst Ginette Paris in her book The Sacrament of Abortion (1992) has stated that she is a pagan and worships Artemis (Diana for the Romans). For Ms. Paris the ancient Greek goddess Artemis “chooses only to belong to herself” and to reject “fusion with another” in particular to reject “the connection between a mother and her young children.” She advocates extreme autonomy and as a consequence concludes that since a child inhibits this, that the child should be aborted. It is no accident that Artemis (Diana) is often shown as a huntress with a dead stag. No doubt part of the autonomy created by an abortion is freedom from the man responsible for the pregnancy. For such a worshipper the very idea of becoming “one flesh” would be a horror. Again we see the absence of any worked out much less convincing moral system for Jungian psychology.

In summary of both blogs, I propose that a deep understanding of Jung’s archetypes provides a good rationale for the basic or primal archetypes of father and mother for men and women, respectively. Father combines king, warrior, lover, and wise man magician.  Mother combines queen, defender, lover and wise woman. Furthermore, these archetypes are best morally and psychologically represented by Jesus (you have seen the Father) and by the Virgin Mary( Mother of the Church and all Christians).

References (for both “Jungian” blogs)

Arnold, P. (1991). Wildmen, warriors, and kings: Masculine spirituality and the Bible. NY: Crossroad

Bly, R. (1990). Iron john: A book about men. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley

Kelsey, M. (1983). Companions on the inner way: The art of spiritual guidance. NY: Crossroad

Moore, R and Gillette, D. (1990). King warrior magician lover: Rediscovering the archetypes of the mature masculine. San Francisco: Harper.

Noll, R. (1997). The Aryan Christ: The secret life of Carl Jung. New York: Random House.

Paris, G. (1992) (Trans.J. Mott). The sacrament of abortion. Dallas,TX: Spring.(Original French edition 1990).

Payne, L. (1995). The healing presence: Curing the soul through union with Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker

Rohr, R. (2004). Adam’s return: The five promises of male initiation.

Satinover, J. (1996). The empty self: C.G. Jung and the gnostic transformation of modern identity. Westport, CT: Hamewith Books

White, V. (1960). Soul and psyche. London: Collins & Harvill.