Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Some of the early women Jungian analysts explored what was meant by the idea of the feminine. Toni Wolff, seen by Jung as his primary intellectual collaborator, and whom he later called his ‘second wife’(!), discovered from her years working as an analyst with both men and women four basic feminine types.  Writing in the first part of the twentieth century, she called these types: maternal, hetaira, amazon and mediumistic. The maternal she saw as about cherishing all that is young and tender and growing, and where the negative side is the sort of ‘mothering’ that is rather a smothering. The hetaira is almost the opposite where the relationship with a man is to the fore. The amazon she saw as independent and self-contained, meeting men at a conscious equal level, and a type that is often feared and hated by men and sometimes other women. The fourth type the mediumistic acts as mediator, where the woman acts as a connecting link between different value systems. Wolff recognized that society usually prevents this feminine type from useful involvement in world events and traditional institutions:

‘There are occasional exceptions but on the whole they join the ranks of men adding their moral weight to his through numbers, not through any different quality of being.’

This adult dream by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, a Jungian analyst who studied with both Toni Wolff and Emma Jung, demonstrates how badly this quality of mediation of different value systems is needed in the institutional church:

‘In the dream I was a shy little girl aged six who went to visit the House of Lords. I opened the door and crept in. There they all were in a large square hall, dressed in black and all jabbering at once in Latin. I was much too small for them to notice, so I slipped around the edge of the hall and up the great wide stairs to an imposing gallery where sat still more rows of black-clothed men. I looked around carefully. Yes, there he was, the man I was looking for, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I ran towards him and flung myself upon his neck weeping with a cry of protest: “But the Queen doesn’t believe in God!” Indeed, she could not believe in the God of these black-clothed Latin-mumbling men, for the picture of the Queen, full-sized before my eyes, was not that of the reigning Queen Victoria, nor of my own mother, but a glowing, colourful Queen of Hearts.

Heart and intellect had different gods even at the age of six, and the child was in tears in her bewilderment. I woke from the dream in actual tears.

Heart and intellect, love and thoughts, prosaic reality and the poetry of mystical insights, were all opposites, hardly on speaking terms.’

De Castillejo believed that ‘woman as mediator’ can restore a lost world reminding us that there are different kinds of consciousness: patriarchal consciousness and matriarchal consciousness – the first is focused, and the second diffuse, and these types are clearly not limited by whatever sex the person is.

‘It is not a question of sex at all, but rather of a masculine or feminine attitude of mind, the possibilities of both being latent in every individual. Artists and poets of necessity have both.’