Self-realization of woman through her archetypal and social introjects from the perspective of Jungian analytic psychology

Abstract

Due to the different functioning of her brain compared to men, a woman is more focused on how the environment responds to her. Furthermore, her maternal role requires a higher degree of empathy and understanding of her child’s emotional states. The need for empathy in her relationships is also evident in women who are not mothers biologically, but who have developed their archetype as mothers in their profession or other life interests. The expectations of the environment, initially mainly of the parents, develop differently in women. She is also influenced by the difficult formation of the animus complex (masculine traits in every woman) through the social and cultural influences of several generations and the anima (feminine traits in every man) in her father and later in her partner. Both of them strongly shape a woman's sense of what is expected of her, and so it is much harder for her to explore what she really wants, let alone fight for it and live it. The challenge for a woman is above all to find this primal contact with herself, with what she, as a woman, really wants. Unlike Campbell's "hero of a thousand faces," who is essentially not sexually determined to be a male hero and fights various objectively "externally" experienced "dragons" on his individuation path, the challenge for a woman with a functioning animus seems to be different on her heroic individuation path – through cycles of passivity, self-orientation, introversion and revison of her attitude towards her femininity or a genuine sense of what she is, by allowing the transcendent function of the psyche to transform what it needs to and accepting it.