“First and second wave feminism founded their psychological premises of gender on Jung’s ideas and so evolved the reasonings for a push towards the social feminization we know today.”

“Whether or not there’s merit to Jung’s ideas, there’s little doubt of the impact they had on fem-centrism. Early feminists saw Jung’s theory as the perfect springboard to further a pretense of ‘gender equality’; thus making individual gender balance (i.e. androgyny) a new idealized goal state.”

“The prevailing feminist wisdom clings to the Jung inspired notion that gender is a just social creation and one that sustains a Patriarchal hierarchy.”

If the above statements were true, they would be trivially easy to verify by consulting the standard histories of feminism and anthologies of its key works, such as these:

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, ed. Margaret Walters

Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir

Feminist Political Theory: An Introduction, ed. Valerie Bryson

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, ed. Rosemarie Tong

The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, ed. Sarah Gamble

If Jung were as important to feminism as Rollo claims, there would be a chapter, at least, in each of these books, but they don’t even mention Jung. Far from being foundational to feminism, Jung is irrelevant to the movement’s history.

Indeed, this irrelevance is occasionally noted by feminists, such as Susan Rowland, who wrote Jung: A Feminist Revision in 2002 arguing that “Feminism has neglected Jung to its own detriment.” Has Rowland initiated a feminist reappraisal of Jung? To judge from Amazon’s Books that Cite this Book statistic, the answer is “no:” only eight books cite it, one of which is another of Rowland’s

To sum up:

• A representative sampling of histories of feminism and anthologies do not even mention Jung.
• When a feminist writes a book trying to get other feminists interested in Jung, after 10 years, her book is cited seven times- a miserable failure in terms of influence.

This raises the question: why are feminists so uninterested in Jung?

Probably because he says things like this:

Jung in 1912 on tragic American marriages:

“The women are the mothers of their husbands as well as of their children, yet at the same time there is in them the old, old primitive desire to be possessed, to yield, to surrender. And there is nothing in the man for her to surrender to except his kindness, his courtesy, his generosity, his chivalry.”

“To-day the American woman is still confused. She wants independence, she wants to be free to do everything, to have all the opportunities which men have, and, at the same time she wants to be mastered by man and to be possessed in the archaic way of Europe.”

“You think your young girls marry European husbands because they are ambitious for titles. I say it is because, after all, they are not different from the European girls; they like the way European men make love, and they like to feel we are a little dangerous. They are not happy with their American husbands because they are not afraid of them. It is natural, even though it is archaic, for women to want to be afraid when they love. If they don’t want to be afraid then perhaps they are becoming truly independent, and you may be producing the real ‘new woman.’ But up to this time your American man isn’t ready for real independence in woman. He only wants to be the obedient son of his mother-wife.”

“No one can get around the fact that by taking up a masculine profession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature.” Jung 1970b page 117 Jung ‘Woman’ C G Jung,‘Woman in Europe’, in his Civilization in Transition 2nd edn., trans. R F C Hull, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

In a letter to his then-friend Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung wrote, “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.” (January 30, 1910.)

“the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one’s own background, and one’s real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman.” Woman in Europe 1927 Coll. Works, vol. 10 p 243

“Woman always stands just where the man’s shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.” Woman in Europe 1927 Coll. Works, vol. 10 p 236

Having sampled the above, it should be clear why Jung was never a significant influence on feminism.

Only worth changing because what you’ve written is so much worth the reading: great stuff.

It´s true that there are many factors that brought about this situation in the west but one can safely argue that feminism if not a direct cause of West’s maladies, hasn´t alleviated the social consequences of a decaying economy, it just exacerbated its effects.