Margaret Meyer - Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages

 

Margaret Meyer - Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages - University of Kent

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Margaret Meyer

Religious Studies

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Neither …  nor: Medial Woman and the politics of marginality marginality Toni Wolff, an analysand of C.G. Jung’s and, famously, companion to him during the period of his mental crisis (1913-18) expanded Jung’s theories of the feminine with her own archetypal schema in 1934. Wolff ’s Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche describes Psyche  describes four forms: mother, companion (hetaira), amazon and medial woman. For Wolff these types represent the major ways in which women experience the world. Of the four, medial woman (or medium) is the most elusive; she is a Hermetic figure, one who is ‘in between, neither one thing nor the other, universal, neutral, a mediator … immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her times’.1 And yet Wolff endows medial woman with an important task: to express the meaning of the collective unconscious, and to act as a go-between and bridge between the personal and impersonal, individual and collective, in so doing moderating the dynamic between them. ’

Wolff  characterisation of medial woman hasEstella at its essence a tension noted by a that number of commentators, whoa querysthe archetype’s central indeterminacy. Lauter, for example, asserts medial woman ‘can exert positive influence on her environment only when she becomes a “mediatrix” who possesses the “faculty of discrimination” or understands the limits of the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and the impersonal. […] I do not doubt that such a figure exists, but it still correlates better with well-known images of the muse who inspires others than with the images of women who are themselves inspired or otherwise empowered to act ’.2

Enquiries: +44 (0) 1227 827159 or email   email Religious   Religious Studies   Studies Religious Studies, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

Religious Studies I am interested in the medial archetype because it offers an under-explored theoretical context for thinking about © University women’s subjectivity, and social and religious marginality. Though medial woman is discussed within popular psychology, the archetype remains significantly under-researched academically. Two recent dissertations (2005) of Kent present only limited updating of the archetype. Older research excludes the feminist perspective. No significant - 18/06/2010

scholarship engaging with feminist archetypal theory appears after Lauter and Rupprecht’s influential Feminist  Archetypal Theory , 1985; there have been no attempts to theorise this archetype in relation to religious thought. Furthermore, I contend that even post-Jungian critiques of medial woman have consistently mis-read and romanticised the archetype. In exploring the connections between ‘mediality’ and liminality as defined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, I propose that the medial ‘narrative’ offers a new category for interpreting experience.   experience.

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: My research takes Wolff ’s archetype as its starting point and seeks to locate it in the context of feminism and the +44 (0) politics of religious subjectivity, in so doing illuminating the problematic of gender within symbolic and societal 1227 764000

orders. Arising from this I have develop a detailed critique of the characteristics germane to medial woman, one by which the problems of mediality and marginality, both personal and political, can be identified and explored.

If the medial condition is in effect a portal for change, then medial women are uniquely placed to articulate both the causes and effects of such change. In examining the connections between medial women and liminality, my purpose will be to discover whether the latter as both a psychological condition and social ‘zone’ offers medial women a distinct and potentially valuable cultural space, in and from which they may challenge, question and subvert androcentric and male-dominated societies, knowledge and religious systems. In so doing I seek to validate my critique of medial woman against the lives of actual medial women drawn from two historical domains: mediums of the British Spiritualist movement and Jungian psychoanalysts, in particular antonia Wolff, herself an exemplar of the medial archetype. This project’s methodology is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on perspectives from religious theory, feminism and psychology. By reading this archetype in these contexts, I hope to offer new insights into the nature of medial or marginalised women in spiritual and psychoanalytic traditions. Notes 1. Toni Wolff, Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (Zurich: Psyche (Zurich: C.G.Jung Institute, 1956), 9 2. Estella Lauter, ‘Visual Images by Women: A Test Case for the Theory of Archetypes’, in Feminist

http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/postgradua http://www.kent.ac.uk /secl/thrs/postgraduate/researchers/mey te/researchers/meyer.html er.html (1 of 2) [9/23/2010 12:26:53 AM]

 

Margaret Meyer - Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages - University of Kent

 Archetypal Theory: Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of Ju Jungian ngian Thought , ed. Estella Lauter and Carol Schrier Rupprecht (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 74 3. See Victor Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society  (Ithaca:  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974)   ● 

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http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/postgradua http://www.kent.ac.uk /secl/thrs/postgraduate/researchers/mey te/researchers/meyer.html er.html (2 of 2) [9/23/2010 12:26:53 AM]