Marion Woodman and the Wound of the Pseudo-Masculine
Jungian Psychologist Marion Woodman invites us to imagine the psyche as a plant with lunar roots and solar shoots. She also coined an amazing synonym for the patriarchy: “pseudo-masculine.”
If we imagine ourselves as a plant with lunar roots and solar shoots, then anyone whose psyche has been occupied by the pseudo-masculine overculture is carrying a wound: the wound of having had our lunar roots uprooted.
You see, the pseudo-masculine tends to believe that the answer to all problems is “more sun.”
Are you drying up? Hold your roots up to the solar light. See if that helps. Place the instinctual in a cage in the courtyard.
Not helping? You’re probably doing it wrong.
More Sun!
More Spirit!
Ascension!
Higher!
Higher!
More!
More!
Strive!
Do!
Push!
Reach!
Which is why Marion defines the pseudo-masculine as a culture obsessed with power in the pursuit of perfection.
Until we’ve reached for perfection for so long, and yet no healing comes…
No moisture to sooth our parched souls.
But of course no healing enters from this manic obsession with transcendence and fleeing upwards! How could it?
And so we are left holding a DEEP split, and an impossible impasse:
either the hierarchy is wrong about something… or I am broken.
So broken, in fact, that I can’t be fixed, not even by a perfect system, with perfect teachings, and a perfectly loving sky god. (And that sky god can be *anything.*)
But what if… what if… the solution isn’t more sun, more height, more perfection?
“Perfection massacres the Feminine,” Woodman writes. “It’s easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.”
What if there’s healing to be found in the matter of your own body, the dreams of your own psyche, the myths of your own chart, and the rich black soil beneath your feet?