Dissecting feminine psychology

McClatchy Newspapers

Recently I won a bingolike game during one of the summer courses at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. I was the first to call out four corners — which meant I got first pick of several books spread out on a table. For my prize, I chose a thin paperback titled “She: Understanding Feminine Psychology,” by the psychologist Robert A. Johnson.

After class, the instructor’s husband, a defense attorney from the Buffalo, N.Y., area, whispered that I had picked the best book there.

Interesting paradox, right off. First, a book written by a man about understanding women. (Are we not sufficiently unpredictable to remain a collective mystery?) And second, another man saying “right on.”

OK, enough of the jibjab. Johnson is a noted lecturer in the teachings of the late psychologist Carl Jung, and this Buffalo defense lawyer is married to an expert on Jung and he, along with his wife, studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. The book “She” examines the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche and what it says about the universal challenges that women face.

My revised edition, published in 1989 by HarperCollins, is only 80 pages, so it didn’t take long to read. For me, not every point was easy to understand. But it was well worth getting through the occasional 20 difficult passages to discover the many precious nuggets of timeless wisdom.

Take this little tip as an example: “If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life.”

Or this: “For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity.”

The myth of Amor and Psyche is one of those stories you can spend a lifetime studying and still not uncover all the nuances. In the broadest sense, the story deals with the suffering that Psyche must endure to come into her own, be the authentic person she was meant to be, and reach her full potential in life. The process requires Psyche to meet challenge after challenge, until finally she must travel to the underworld. Yet as painful as her journey is, there is reward in the end. She ultimately marries Eros (or Amor, depending on your version of the story) and the two give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.

And the mystery of women? Near the end of the book, when he describes Psyche emerging from Hades, Johnson addresses this point:

“The deepest interior mystery for a woman may not be named or given any label,” he writes. “It is the essence of that feminine quality which must remain a mystery, certainly to men, and hardly less so for women. It is not less than the element of healing itself.”

Also, you might be interested in a couple of companion titles by Johnson: “He: Understanding Masculine Psychology,” and “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.”

XDiane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is president of DelMio.com, a new interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.