Читать книгу The Wounded Woman - Linda Schierse Leonard - Страница 9

Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air

Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy

daughters!

Shakespeare

Every week wounded women come into my office suffering from a poor self-image, from the inability to form lasting relationships, or from a lack of confidence in their ability to work and function in the world. On the surface these women often appear quite successful—confident businesswomen, contented housewives, carefree students, swinging divorcees. But underneath the veneer of success or contentment is the injured self, the hidden despair, the feelings of loneliness and isolation, the fear of abandonment and rejection, the tears and the rage.

For many of these women, the root of their injury stems from a damaged relation with the father. They may have been wounded by a bad relation to their personal father, or wounded by the patriarchal society which itself functions like a poor father, culturally devaluing the worth of women. In either case, their self-image, their feminine identity, their relation to masculinity, and their functioning in the world is frequently damaged. I would like to take the example of four women, each with a different relation to her father, each with a different lifestyle. What they have in common is inadequate fathering and a resulting way of life that obstructed their ability to form relationships and their capacity to work and to live creatively.

Chris was a successful businesswoman in her late thirties. The oldest of three daughters, she had been a hard-working, straight-A student in school. Upon graduation from college, she found a good job with a thriving company. She put so much effort into her work that by the time she was thirty Chris had risen to a top managerial position. About that time she began to experience tension headaches, insomnia, and complained of continual exhaustion. Like Atlas, she seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, and soon she became despondent and depressed. She had a series of affairs with married men whom she met in different professional contexts, but she could not seem to find a meaningful relationship. And Chris was beginning to long for a baby. She began to feel hopeless about the future, for her life had come to be merely a continual series of work obligations with no relief in sight. In her dreams were images of children who were either injured or dying. By the time Chris came into therapy, she felt trapped by a compulsion to be perfect in her work and by an inability to let go and enjoy life. She remembered her childhood as unhappy. Her parents had wanted a son, not a daughter, and her father especially expected great things from his children. If they were not the first in their class, the children soon learned they would receive disapproval from their father. To please her father, Chris had worked hard. Instead of playing with her friends, she studied and eventually went into her father’s profession. Since Chris was the oldest, her father seemed to expect more of her. And when she did well, he rewarded her by taking her to his office and spending time with her there. When she reached adolescence, he was very strict, seldom allowing her to date and criticizing her few boyfriends. Her mother accepted the father’s authority, completely seconding all his decisions.

In reality, Chris was living her father’s life and not her own. Though she had rebelled against some of her father’s values by having sexual affairs and smoking pot, in essentials she was still trying to live up to his ideal of hard work and achievement. In effect, she was still living the life her father’s “son” might have led. Realizing this in the course of therapy, Chris was gradually able to let go of her compulsive perfectionism. She began to explore her own interests and started writing short stories, an activity which her father criticized as “impractical” and “indulgent.” She began to meet new people, and although she still had to struggle with her tendency to be perfectionistic, she began to feel energetic and hopeful about life. For Chris to differentiate herself from her father’s expectations is an ongoing process, but the more she does so, the more her own natural path continues to emerge.

A different pattern resulting from an impaired relation to the father is illustrated by the case of Barbara. When I first met her, Barbara was a student who wanted to enter graduate school. She was in her late twenties, twice divorced, with a string of abortions, a history of drug abuse, a weight problem, and a poor relation to money. Although bright and talented, her ability to work and discipline herself to study was undeveloped. Every semester, instead of finishing her course requirements, she asked her teachers for an “incomplete” grade. Soon her bill for analysis had run up to several hundred unpaid dollars. Feeling guilty about the debts and incompletes, she suffered a series of severe anxiety attacks.

Barbara had had no model for self-discipline or success. Her father had been away in wartime when she was a young child. Later, he moved from job to job and gambled, never able to settle down into anything permanent. Her mother was pessimistic and depressed and told Barbara that if she didn’t succeed in marriage the first time, she would never succeed. With this combination—an unreliable father and a depressed, pessimistic mother—Barbara had no adult model for success. Her dreams were frightening. Pathologically murderous men were trying to kill or cripple passive young girls. Sometimes she herself was the victim. With her loose and unstructured lifestyle, Barbara was repeating her father’s pattern. She was also fulfilling her mother’s negative projections that a woman could not succeed.

Once Barbara became aware that she was repeating her father’s pattern and her mother’s projection of failure, she began the slow and gradual process of separating herself from these patterns and finding her own path. First she learned to manage money, paid off her analytic fees, and even was able to save a sizeable amount for her future studies. To do this required giving up the drug that was eating up so much money. Eventually she was able to do her school work on schedule and wrote an outstanding dissertation. And, finally, she learned to control her eating patterns and lost twenty-five pounds. These achievements gave her a sense of her own power and the ability to accomplish what she wanted. In the course of this process the images of men and her father began to change. From destructive, murderous images, they changed to men who were helping the women figures in her dreams. In one dream her father gave her an expensive, elaborately embroidered robe, a tribute to the strength of her emerging feminine image.

Quite often women who have had easy-going, indulgent fathers who were not successful in the world will compensate for the father’s lack by trying to succeed for him. Susan’s father loved her very much. The two reveled in their relationship, which was playful, teasing, and flirtatious. The father put more energy into the relationship with his daughter than into the relationship with his wife. Susan’s mother was a very ambitious woman who had expected great worldly achievements from her husband. That he was a simple man who enjoyed life so much that he was not at the top of his profession disappointed her deeply. Susan unconsciously had picked up this disapproval from her mother and compensated by becoming exacting and perfectionistic herself. Her father, who was dominated by his wife, did not actively oppose his wife’s ambitious expectations for the daughter, and so Susan lived out her mother’s unlived ambitions. Caught by her mother’s ambitious, controlling, perfectionistic attitude, Susan lost her relationship to her relaxed, easy-going, child-like side. The resulting tension brought her neck and back strain during the day, insomnia and teeth grinding at night. No matter what she did, it was never good enough. Although Susan loved her father, she feared that men were weak and incapable. Like her mother, Susan wanted a man who was ambitious and a highly successful moneymaker, but she was attracted to fun-loving men like her father, who in the end proved to be too unreliable for a committed relationship. Just as nothing she did was good enough, neither were her lovers able to satisfy her perfectionistic standards. Now in her forties, she remained unmarried. She also attempted to control things in the areas of work and relationships, with a resulting depression and boredom. Resenting the joylessness of her life, she was taken over by a martyred attitude of hopelessness. At the same time she began to feel she couldn’t meet one more commitment in her professional life, that she would collapse under all those demands. Her dreams, however, brought up some positive images that showed another approach. In one dream, after she had chosen the hardest and fastest way to get where she was going, a voice told her to slow down and take an easier path, assuring Susan she would get there in her own good time. In other dreams she found herself floating peacefully down a river.

Susan began to realize that much of her push, drive, and urge to control belonged to her mother rather than herself. She also became aware that the depression she felt when she did not succeed was much like the depression her father fell into when criticized by his wife. She also saw that in many ways she had acted the role of her father’s “lover,” and that this cut her off from relationships with other men. Consciously, she began to counter the inner voice that critically judged herself and others. She became more open to men and tried to know them without judging them first. Eventually she met a warm, affectionate man, but for some time she was tempted to end the relationship because he wasn’t earning as much money as she thought he should. When she was able to recognize these criticisms as part of her mother’s voice, Susan was able to allow the relationship to live.

In this case the mother was the more dominant figure; the father’s negligence consisted of not opposing the mother’s compulsive ambitions. In a way, he loved his daughter “too much” and so kept her tied to him. Susan needed to recognize this to break the tight bind to her father and to see the effects of her mother’s influence.

Sometimes, as in the case of Mary, a daughter rebels against an overly authoritarian and rigid father. Her father was in the military and required military performance even from his children. Mary, whose temperament was friendly and spontaneous, rebelled against her father’s authoritarian attitude. As a teenager she took LSD and ran around with a fast crowd. Although she had artistic talent, Mary let it slide and then quit college in her sophomore year. Despite her father’s authoritarian and perfectionistic tendencies, he had a chronic disease which forced him to show vulnerability and weakness. Since he never admitted his vulnerability Mary experienced her father as though he were two different people—the strong, authoritarian judge, and the weak, sick man. The men in her dreams also appeared in these opposing ways. There were men with tiny phalluses who were impotent, and there were violent men trying to stab and kill her. Mary felt that the impotent men symbolized her tremendous lack of self-confidence, and that the violent, attacking men were the voice of self-depreciation. Mary’s mother was much like herself, a warm, outgoing woman, but she did not oppose her husband, Since Mary had a good relationship with her mother, she first turned to an older woman for support. But in this relationship she tended to play the role of pleasing daughter, while the older woman often criticized her in an authoritarian manner similar to that of Mary’s father. In the course of analysis she began to gain confidence in herself and recognized the double pattern of rebelling against the authority of the father, yet submitting to it by pleasing the older authoritarian woman. Eventually she was able to assert herself in relation to her older woman friend. Then as the threatening men and the impotent men began to disappear from her dreams, she began a relationship with an emotionally mature man whom she later married. She now had enough confidence in herself to accept the challenge of returning to her love of art and began to study a career in this field. With her new-found strength she was even able to have a meaningful talk with her father, who, in a moment of crisis due to his illness, acknowledged his vulnerability. This enabled a closer emotional relationship between father and daughter.

These are only four examples of wounded women who have suffered from injured relationships with their fathers. There are many variations on this theme. The following dream reveals the general psychological situation of a wounded woman who suffers from an impaired relation to the father.

I am a young girl trapped in a cage holding my baby. Outside is my father riding freely on a horse over green pastures. I long to reach him and try to get out of the cage, sobbing deeply. But the cage topples over. I am not sure whether my baby and I will be crushed by the cage or whether we will be free.

This dream images the separation between father and daughter and the imprisonment of the daughter and her creative potentialities. There is the longing to reach the free energy of the father. But the daughter must first get out of the cage, and this requires a risk. She and her baby may be crushed in the process, or they also may go free. While this is the dream of only one woman, I believe it portrays dramatically the way many other women have been imprisoned by a poor relation to the father, alienating them from a positive relation to fathering in themselves.

On the personal level, there are many ways the father-daughter wound can occur. The father may have been extremely weak and a cause of shame for his daughter; for example, a man who can’t hold a job or who drinks or gambles, etc. Or he may be an “absent father,” having left home by choice as does the man who “loves ’em and leaves ’em.” The absence may also be due to death, war, divorce, or illness—each of which separates the father from his family. Still another way a father can wound a daughter is to indulge her so much that she has no sense of limit, values, and authority. He may even unconsciously fall in love with her and thus keep her bound to him in this way. Or he may look down upon and devalue the feminine because his own inner feminine side has been sacrificed to the ideals of macho-masculine power and authority. He may be a hard worker, successful in his profession, but passive at home and not really actively involved with his daughter, i.e., a detached father. Whatever the case may be, if the father is not there for his daughter in a committed and responsible way, encouraging the development of her intellectual, professional, and spiritual side and valuing the uniqueness of her femininity, there results an injury to the daughter’s feminine spirit.

“The Feminine” is an expression that is currently being re-discovered and re-described anew by women out of their own experiences. Women have begun to realize that men have been defining femininity through their conscious and culturally conditioned expectations of women’s roles and through their unconscious projections on women. In contrast to the notion of femininity defined from a cultural or biological role, my approach is to see “the feminine” symbolically as a way of being, as an inherent principle of human existence. In my experience the feminine reveals itself primarily via images and emotional responses and I draw upon these in the course of this book.¹

The father-daughter wound is not only an event happening in the lives of individual women. It is a condition of our culture as well.² Whenever there is a patriarchal authoritarian attitude which devalues the feminine by reducing it to a number of roles or qualities which come, not from woman’s own experience, but from an abstract view of her—there one finds the collective father overpowering the daughter, not allowing her to grow creatively from her own essence.

Whether the father-daughter wound occurs on the personal level or the cultural level, or both, it is a major issue for most women today. Some women try to avoid dealing with it by blaming their fathers and/or men in general. Others may try to avoid it by denying there is a problem and living out the traditionally accepted feminine roles. But both these routes result in giving up responsibility for their own transformation, the one via blame, the other via adaptation. I believe the real task for women’s transformation these days is to discover for themselves who they are. But part of this discovery entails a dialogue with their history, with the developmental influences that have affected them personally, culturally, and spiritually.

As a daughter grows up, her emotional and spiritual growth is deeply affected by her relationship to her father. He is the first masculine figure in her life and is a prime shaper of the way she relates to the masculine side of herself and ultimately to men. Since he is “other,” i.e., different from herself and her mother, he also shapes her differentness, her uniqueness and individuality. The way he relates to her femininity will affect the way she grows into womanhood. One of his roles is to lead the daughter from the protected realm of the mother and the home into the outside world, helping her to cope with the world and its conflicts. His attitude toward work and success will color his daughter’s attitude. If he is confident and successful, this will be communicated to his daughter. But if he is afraid and unsuccessful, she is likely to take over this fearful attitude. Traditionally, the father also projects ideals for his daughter. He provides a model for authority, responsibility, decision-making, objectivity, order, and discipline. When she is old enough, he steps back so she may internalize these ideals and actualize them in herself. If his own relation to these areas is either too rigid or too indulgent, that will affect his daughter’s relation to these areas as well.³

Some fathers err on the side of indulgence. Because they have not established limits for themselves, because they do not feel their own inner authority and have not established a sense of inner order and discipline, they provide inadequate models for their daughters. Such men often remain “eternal boys” (the puer aeternus). Men who identify too strongly with this god of youth stay fixated at the adolescent stages of development.⁴ They may be romantic dreamers who avoid the conflicts of practical life, unable to make commitments. Such men tend to dwell in the realm of possibilities, avoiding actuality, leading a provisional life. Quite often they are close to the springs of creativity and are sensitive searchers for spirit. But since their interior year centers around spring and summer, the depth and rebirth which comes from fall and winter is lacking. By disposition, this type of man tends to be impatient. He has not developed the quality to “hold,” to bear through a difficult situation. Positively, he is often charming, romantic, and even inspiring, for he reveals spirit in the form of possibility, the creative spark, the search. But negatively considered, his tendency is not to carry anything through to completion since he avoids hard times and the down-to-earth work and struggle required to actualize the possible. Some extreme examples of these men who remain eternal boys can be found in addicts who remain forever dependent on their addiction, men who cannot work, Don Juan men who run from woman to woman, men who remain passive sons to their wives, and men who seduce their daughters by romanticizing them. A few are dazzlingly successful for a brief period, such as the movie star James Dean and the rock star Jim Morrison, only to succumb to their self-destructive tendencies, leaving a legend and even a cult behind, emphasizing the archetypal character of their fascination.

The daughters of these eternal boys grow up without an adequate model of self-discipline, limit, and authority, quite often suffering from feelings of insecurity, instability, lack of self-confidence, anxiety, frigidity, and, in general, a weak ego. Moreover, if the father was overtly weak (as in the cases of the man who doesn’t work or the addict), the daughter is likely to suffer from a sense of shame. And if she was ashamed of her father, she is likely to carry this sense of shame over to herself. In such cases, she often unconsciously builds up an ideal image of man and father, and her life may become a search for this ideal father. In seeking the ideal, she is likely to be bound to a “ghostly lover,” i.e., the ideal man who exists only in her imagination.⁵ Hence, her relationship with men, especially in the sphere of sexuality, is likely to be disturbed. The lack of commitment she experienced with her father is likely to produce a general lack of trust in men which may extend also to the whole realm of spirit, i.e., metaphorically speaking, to “God the Father.” At the deepest level, she suffers from a religious problem since, for her, spirit was not provided by the father. How, then, is she to find it? Anaïs Nin, who had such a father, has expressed it: “I have no guide. My father? I think of him as someone my own age.”⁶

Other fathers err on the side of rigidity. Hard, cold, and sometimes indifferent, they enslave their daughters through a strict authoritarian attitude. These men are quite often exiled from the vitality of life, cut off from their own feminine sides and from feeling. Their emphasis tends to be on obedience, duty, and rationality. And they insist that their daughters have the same values. Obedience to the established order is the rule. Departure from society’s norm is looked on with suspicion and distrust. These fathers are often domineering old men, frequently embittered, cynical, and sapped of life. Because their emphasis is on control and doing things right, frequently they are not open to the unexpected, to the expression of creativity and feelings. And they tend to treat such things with sarcasm and derision. On the positive side, their emphasis on authority and duty provides a sense of security, stability, and structure. On the negative side, it tends to squash “feminine” qualities of feeling, sensitivity, and spontaneity. Some extreme examples of fathers who function as domineering old men can be found among the old patriarchs who retain control of all the money, dominating their wives and children financially, fathers who make all the rules and require obedience, fathers who expect their daughters to achieve inordinate success in the world, fathers who demand that their daughters follow the conventional feminine roles, fathers who cannot acknowledge any sign of weakness, sickness, or even difference from themselves.

In later life the daughters of these domineering old men often find themselves cut off from an easy relation to their own feminine instincts, since their own fathers could not truly acknowledge their femininity. Since these women experienced strictness and harshness from their fathers, they are likely to be hard either on themselves or others. Even if they rebel, one often feels in that rebellion something relentless and sharp. Some daughters knuckle under to the authoritarian rule and never live their own lives. Others, though they may rebel, stay bound to their father’s control, living always in reaction to him. These daughters, too, like those of the more indulgent fathers, tend to be cut off from a healthy relationship to men and to their own creative spirit.

So far, I have described two extreme tendencies that may exist in a father’s relationship to his daughter. But most fathers are a mixture of the two. And even if a father has lived out his life in only one of these two extremes, he often acts out the other extreme unconsciously.⁷ There are many examples of rigidly authoritarian fathers who suddenly fly into irrational, emotional outbursts which threaten all the security and order they have established, instilling a terrible fear of chaos in their daughters. Since the feeling realm is not consciously acknowledged by the father, but instead seems to overwhelm him from time to time, it seems all the more threatening to his children. Sometimes these rages have sexual overtones as well—for example, the father who physically punishes a disobedient daughter in such a way that she becomes threatened on the sexual level. So, while the father’s conscious emphasis may be on duty, rationally toeing the line, in the background may be puerile moods and impulses which pop out unconsciously at unexpected moments. In the same way, indulgent fathers are likely to have in the background of their lives the sneering cynicism of the rigid judge. Such a father may suddenly turn on his daughter, criticizing her for those impulsive qualities he dislikes in himself.

Obviously, the role of the mother is another important factor in the daughter’s development.⁸ Since my purpose in this book is to focus on the father-daughter relationship, I do not go into the mother’s influence in any breadth or depth, but only hint in that direction. Quite often one finds certain pairs in a marriage. The father who is an eternal boy often has a “mother” for a wife. In these cases, the mother often rules the home and is the disciplinarian for the family. Through her alone come the values, order, authority, and structure that is usually provided by the father. Sometimes such a mother can be more rigid than the most rigid of old men fathers. And together with that comes the force of her female emotions. When the father is weak and indulgent and the mother strong and controlling, the daughter has a double problem. Not only is the father not able to provide her with a masculine model, but he does not stand up to the mother and help the daughter differentiate herself from her mother. The daughter may remain bound and identified with the mother. In this case, she is likely to adopt unconsciously the same rigid attitudes as her mother. In addition, when the mother has to function as the father, sometimes the daughter receives neither genuine fathering nor mothering.

A contrasting pair is the rigid old man father who has a girl for a wife. In this case, both mother and daughter are dominated, and the mother in her passive dependence does not provide a model for genuine feminine independence. So the daughter is likely to repeat the pattern of feminine dependence, or, if she rebels, she does so out of a defensive reaction against paternalistic authority rather than out of her own feminine needs and values.

It is also possible for both father and mother to be eternal youths, in the fashion of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and then there is usually little stability, structure, or authority provided by either parent. In these cases, the commitment of both parents is often tenuous and the marriage and family may dissolve, leaving the daughter in chaos and anxiety. Or, it may be that both father and mother are rigid elders, both ruling with tight reign. And then the daughter is cut off on both sides from the sources of spontaneity and feeling.

In myself and in my female clients, I have found two opposing patterns that frequently result from a wounded relation to the father. And these two conflicting patterns frequently exist together in the psyche of a wounded woman, doing battle with each other. One pattern I call “the eternal girl” (or puella aeterna).⁹ The other I call the “armored Amazon.” Here I want only briefly to describe each pattern in broad strokes, since each is described in more detail in later chapters.

The “eternal girl,” or puella, is a woman who psychologically has remained a young girl, even though chronologically she may be sixty or seventy years of age. She remains a dependent daughter, tending to accept the identity others project upon her. In doing so, she gives over to others her own strength as well as the responsibility for shaping her identity. Quite often she marries a rigidly authoritarian man and becomes the image of woman he wants. Often she looks and acts innocent, helpless, and passive. Or she may rebel, but in her rebellion remains the helpless victim caught in feelings of self-pity, depression, and inertia. In either case, she is not directing her own life.

In the dreams of such women, I have found several recurrent images. One dream theme is the loss of one’s pocketbook, with all one’s identity cards and money. For example, one woman dreamt that her man friend had left her, and when she tried to go home, she realized she had no money. The only means of transportation she could take was a school bus for children. Another frequent dream theme revealing a basic dependence is not to be driving one’s own car, often sitting in the back seat feeling helpless and out of control while the father drives. Still another frequent image in the dreams of women who psychologically remain young girls is that of a mean old man chasing, threatening, and sometimes brutally dominating them. One young woman with whom I worked dreamt she was on a high diving board while a sadistic old man kept demanding she do increasingly more dangerous dives. Unless she stopped following his commands, she was in danger of losing her life. These dream motifs reveal the danger of losing one’s own source of energy and identity (symbolized by the loss of money and pocketbook), the danger of losing direction over one’s own life (symbolized by not driving the car), and the danger of not asserting oneself against unreasonable commands (following the sadistic man’s orders).

Quite often the woman who remains an eternal girl has failed to identify with and integrate the qualities a positive father can help her develop: consciousness, discipline, courage, decision-making, self-valuation, direction. Many women in our culture today have found themselves in this position because the “cultural fathers” have not encouraged women to develop these qualities. And frequently women have actually been discouraged from this development. The result is disastrous, leaving the woman feeling weak and helpless, without resources, afraid to strike out on her own, and under the rule of old-fashioned, domineering, patriarchal principles. I have seen these patterns operate in myself and in the lives of many women who remain stuck in the puella pattern of the eternal girl. It is as though the masculine side of a woman is split into two opposites: weak young boy and perverted, sadistic old man. This combination keeps a woman from developing, since in the unconscious these two male figures secretly work together. The voice of the perverted old man says, “You cannot do it—you’re just a woman.” And the weak, sensitive boy gives in to those feelings of weakness which keep her from getting out of the destructive pattern. How many times must this happen to women in our culture when they give in to helpless and negative feelings which say they cannot create, or that all men are rotten and will only betray them. It is then that they have lost their spirit!

The “armored Amazon” is a contrasting pattern in the lives of many women. Developmentally, I find that this pattern arises as a reaction against inadequate fathering, occurring either on the personal or cultural level. In reacting against the negligent father such women often identify on the ego level with the masculine or fathering functions themselves. Since their fathers didn’t give them what they needed, they find they have to do it themselves. So they build up a strong masculine ego identity through achievement or fighting for a cause or being in control and laying down the law themselves, perhaps as a mother who rules the family as though it were a business firm. But this masculine identity is often a protective shell, an armor against the pain of abandonment or rejection by their fathers, an armor against their own softness, weakness, and vulnerability. The armor protects them positively insofar as it helps them develop professionally and enables them to have a voice in the world of affairs. But insofar as the armor shields them from their own feminine feelings and their soft side, these women tend to become alienated from their own creativity, from healthy relationships with men, and from the spontaneity and vitality of living in the moment.

In my office every day I see women who are successful in the world, accomplished in their fields, financially independent. To the outer eye they seem secure and confident, powerful and strong. But inside the safety of the therapist’s office they reveal their tears, the confessions of weariness and exhaustion, the great loneliness. Many times the image of armor comes up in their dreams. One woman dreamt of a weak little man, tired of life and about to die, who was dressed in a protective coat of armor and helmet, shield and sword. Later on in the course of analysis, as she let go of the unnecessary armor, she dreamt she found a diamond treasure hidden in a pile of open oyster shells. Her emphasis now was on being in the moment and open to relationships, and she felt softer and more mellow. The shell was now open and the genuine diamond strength accessible.

In another woman’s dreams, the armor theme came up in the image of heavy winter coats. In one dream, it was summer and as she left her childhood home, she realized she was carrying several heavy wooden hangers for winter coats, but the coats were gone. She felt she had lost her protection. As she left this house, two young men were behind her. They were lighthearted lads, full of fun and tricks, and she was afraid of them. So she speeded up her pace to get away from them, but they skipped lightly by and one untied her shoelace. Now she was terrified and, in trying to escape, ran into a forbidding-looking house full of paralyzed and crazy women. Needless to say, she awoke in horror. In reality this woman needed to drop the winter coat protection and learn to play with the lighthearted lads, but she was still frightened of them.

The woman dressed in Amazon armor is as cut off from her own center as is the eternal girl. In fact, in most women, these two patterns tend to exist together. In my own experience, the Amazon armor came first. But behind that was the frightened little girl who finally emerged and then flew off unable to settle here or there, unable to commit herself to a place or a person. Other women have started out as compliant, charming wives and turned into actively angry fighters. In most women, the two patterns are there alternating, sometimes from moment to moment. For example, one woman who did a lot of public speaking still felt like the fragile girl who was afraid she might faint before everyone, yet side by side within her were feelings of competency and authority as a speaker. She was amazed to find that other people, and especially men, experienced her as strong and competent when inwardly she felt shy and scared.

Why one woman initially follows the path of the eternal girl while another takes the route of the armored Amazon is for me still a big question and remains to be explored. My hunch is that a variety of factors contribute to which way a woman takes. Innate temperament and one’s position and role in the family seem to be major factors. The relationship to the mother is another. Body-type, racial, and socioeconomic class differences are other significant aspects. Quite often I find that the oldest daughter tends to take the Amazon route while the younger daughter becomes the eternal girl. But this is not always the case. Whether one identifies with the father or mother, and repeats or rebels against whomever is the dominant parent is another factor. In my experience these two patterns (the eternal girl and the armored Amazon) are present in most women, although one may be lived out more consciously than the other.

Both the eternal girl and the armored Amazon quite often find themselves in despair over their condition. They feel alienated from their center because they are cut off from important parts of themselves. It is as though they have a mansion for their home but are only living in a few of the rooms.

The philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, helped me to understand in myself and in the lives of my clients the source of this alienation and despair. Kierkegaard, in Sickness Unto Death, analyzes despair as a disrelationship to the Self, to the source of being human.¹⁰ For Kierkegaard there are three major forms of despair: first, despair that is unconscious; second, despair that is conscious and which manifests itself as weakness; and third, despair which is conscious and manifests itself as defiance.

In the unconscious form of despair, the person is out of relation to the Self, but is unaware of it. Such a person, according to Kierkegaard, tends to live a hedonistic life, dispersed in sensation of the moment, having no commitment to anything higher than ego-impulses. This is the stage of aestheticism and Don Juanism. Here one can see a type of existence in which people do not consciously realize they are in despair, although, as Kierkegaard points out, the compulsiveness for infinite sensation and pleasure together with intruding dark moments of boredom and anxiety reveal that all is not well.

If the person allows the dark moments of boredom and anxiety to enter fully into consciousness, then comes the awareness of despair, the realization of disrelationship to the Self, and the feeling that one is too weak to choose the Self since that demands the acceptance of one’s strength to make that decision. Here the person despairs over weakness to commit to something higher than ego-impulses. I imagine that many puellas suffer intensely in the despair of weakness—wanting to be courageous and take the risk of actuality, the risk of commitment, yet somehow afraid and unable to take the leap.

But if the person penetrates more consciously into the reason for weakness, then comes awareness that the excuse of weakness was really only a way of avoiding the strength already there. What the person originally took to be weakness is now understood to be defiance, i.e., a refusal to commit! For Kierkegaard, the despair of defiance is a higher consciousness, a realization that one has the strength to choose the Self, or in Kierkegaard’s terms, to make the leap of faith which requires acceptance of the uncontrollable and transcendent, but that one chooses not to do so in stark defiance against the powers which transcend reason and man’s finitude. In defiance, one refuses to change! In the despair of defiance, one refuses possibility and infinitude. In the despair of weakness, one refuses actuality and finitude. To refuse one is to refuse both. The despair of weakness I see to be an aspect of the eternal girl. The despair of defiance appears to me to be an aspect of the armored Amazon. And yet in the end they are secretly the same—two poles of a split in the self.

Women who fall into the archetypal pattern of the puella, caught in the despair of weakness, need to become aware of their strength and shake off their victim identity. Women who are caught in the armored Amazon’s tendency to control need to see how control can be a false strength and to value the openness to what cannot be controlled. For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this leap one accepts at the same time one’s weakness and one’s strength, the intermixture of the finite and infinite realms in being human, and the realization that human beings must move between the opposites rather than identifying with an absolute.

Therapeutically, I found in the work of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung a great help in understanding this kind of situation which exists in many people’s lives. Jung thought that the life of each person was a complex and mysterious whole. But the particular course of their development, coming from personal family experiences, cultural influences, and innate temperament, tended to lead a person to emphasize one part of the personality and to de-emphasize the conflicting part. Yet, that other opposing, unaccepted side was there wanting to be acknowledged and often intruded upon the consciously accepted side, affecting the person’s behavior and disturbing his or her relationships. Jung thought the task of personal growth was to see the value of both sides and to try to integrate them so that they could work together in a fruitful way for the person. I find this to be important therapeutically for the wounded woman who finds herself in a conflict between these two patterns: the eternal girl and the armored Amazon. Each has its value. Each can learn from the other. And the integration of the two is a foundation for the emerging woman.

Although a woman may be wounded from an impaired relation to the father, it is possible for her to work towards healing the wound. We bear the influences of our parents, but we are not fated to remain merely the products of our parents. There is in the psyche, according to Jung, a natural healing process which moves toward balance and wholeness. In the psyche also are natural patterns of behavior which he called archetypes and which are available to serve as inner models, even when outer models are absent or unsatisfactory. A woman has within herself, for instance, all the potentialities of the father archetype, and these can often be reached if she is willing to risk coming in touch with the unconscious. So, even though the personal or cultural fathers initially may have shaped the conscious image of ourselves as women and what we can do in the world and in relation to men, there is within us as well the positive and creative aspects of the inner archetypal father which can compensate for many of the negative influences in our actual life histories. This potentiality to gain a better relationship to the father principle is one we all have within us. Dream images often reveal previously unknown sides of the father that we can experience in order to become more whole and mature. The following case illustrates this view.

One woman with whom I worked grew up under the authoritarian rule of a rigid father who did not value the feminine. Hard work and discipline, masculine occupations were what he stressed. Weakness or vulnerability of any kind was not allowed. So the daughter adopted these values and always kept very busy planning and controlling her life. She didn’t allow herself to relax or to show any weakness. But this put her at an emotional distance from others and at a distance from her own heart center. She came into therapy shortly after she developed a skin disease which became more and more visible to others. It was as though her vulnerability wanted to be acknowledged. She couldn’t hide it anymore, for there it was on her skin for all to see. In the initial dream she had at the start of therapy she was stranded high on the tower of a skyscraper. Up there she could see all the plan of traffic flow in the city, but she couldn’t get down to the ground to do anything. At last a fun-loving man climbed up the tower and helped her down to earth, and then she ran barefoot with him, playing on the grass. This dream showed the side of the masculine that had been missing in her development since it wasn’t provided by her stern and serious father. She needed to relate to an instinctual man who could play with her.

Early in the analysis she also had a dream which showed the influence of her father. In the dream she wanted to show her father her skin disease, but he refused to look at it. He refused to allow her any vulnerability and she had unconsciously adopted his attitude towards herself. This affected not only her emotional life but also her creativity. Although she had a great deal of artistic talent and creative potential, she went into one of the more rational sciences, and then never finished her studies. It was as though she was on her father’s path and not her own. In the course of analysis, she began to accept her vulnerable side and allowed herself to play. The man in her first dream provided an image to accept those areas of herself. On the outer level she then met a warm, spontaneous man with whom she fell in love, opening up her vulnerable side. She started school again, this time also in an area which she loved. Shortly after this, the image of her father changed in her dreams. In one dream she was told her father had died. Then she heard a bell calling her to the other side of the river. She started to go across on a bridge, but the bridge was not quite finished and so she slid into the water to get across. The death of the father symbolized the end of his rigid reign, and now she was called to cross over to the other side of the river to a new side of herself. The bridge to that new side was already partly built, but she had to get into the water to cross all the way. For her this meant to get into the flow of life and her feelings. As she did so, the image of her father changed in her dreams, and he became more accepting. In one dream she had lost something that belonged to him and instead of rebuking her for her failure, he accepted her. In another dream her father was working for a creative rock musician and she was proud of him. It was as though the dreams and her life were dancing together, each making new movements in turn so that she was able to move into a new rhythmic way of being. Through her pursuit of self-knowledge and relating to her dreams in therapy, she was able to connect with her playful, flowing feeling side, and her femininity and creativity were released. When she experienced the compensatory energies of the father archetype within, the old wound coming from her stern, rigid, and unaccepting father began to heal.