Jung Said What??

I'd rather read Colette

As a woman, I find that reading a book by a man takes more energy than reading a book by a woman. In the latter case, writer and reader start right off with the same worldview.

I’ve excused this presumptive attitude of mine by telling myself, “I can learn more from a woman.”

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s 1963 memoir The Blue Lantern; Carl Jung’s 1933 Modern Man in Search of a Soul

So why do I often feel like an outside observer in a man’s book?

Let’s begin with the woman’s book. My mother gave me a copy of Colette’s The Blue Lantern when I was 23. I used to wish I’d had a French mother (mine was Hungarian) so she could teach me women’s secrets about fashion, flirting and je ne sais quoi. But just this minute I’ve realized that since my (real) mother introduced me to Colette, my wish did come true.

Colette’s French woman is: her confident true self, unafraid to be inventive and responsive, and open to the natural world. She’s Gigi, she’s Lea, she’s Sido. She’s Colette.

I read her books to find something of myself in each of these women.

Colette the actress in 1909; I like that she’s not taking herself too seriously!

To get back to my author problem. I was reading Modern Man in Search of a Soul for insight from the early 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The book’s title seemed to speak to Americans in 2022. Maybe Jung could tell me how to find my soul in times like these.

Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; Back row: Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi; Clark University, 1909

But page 87 stopped me short. I realized Jung had not been talking about modern mankind as I had assumed, but about modern man.

As a woman, I felt disqualified. Here’s why.

In the passage below, Jung has just said that the infant science of psychology fails because its mental-type theory cannot embrace the great variety of people on earth. Agreed.

But the Professor insists on teaching it anyway. So Jung confronts him with three examples of outlying “mental types”.

I cannot refrain from confronting the Professor of Psychology with the mentality of women, of the Chinese, and of Australian Negroes. Our psychology must embrace all life, otherwise we simply remain enclosed in the Middle Ages.

Note “…the mentality of women…” in this odd list. I put the book back on the shelf, wondering if Jung thought that a woman had a soul to be in search of.

My copy of The Blue Lantern by Colette was translated from the French by Roger Senhouse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1963; originally Le Fanal Bleu, 1949

My copy of Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C. G. Jung was translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1933

This photo of Colette can be found in Colette: A Passion for Life by Geneviève Dormann, Abbeville Press, NY, and Thames and Hudson, Ltd., London, 1985

Photo of Jung and colleagues at Clark University in 1909