Jungian psychoanalyst Marie-Louise von Franz talks about female aggression as a manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation and about where false pity based on absolute stupidity leads.
“A world in which no rigidity is allowed is unsustainable, and here we come to the typical problem of femininity. The more feminine a woman is, the less aggressive her Animus (the unconscious male part of a woman’s personality. – Approx. ed.), the more she will be inclined to submit to her surroundings. Perhaps you know such polite daughters in the family who always do what the father or mother who is not married wants. They take care of their parents until they die, and then they begin to take care of other people’s children. If such a daughter wants to get married, everyone else will be against it, complaining that she does not feel sorry for them at all.
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Such women, along with all their subtlety and femininity, are simply killed, run over by a truck, and they remain the same fools. There used to be many such women. In Berlin, it was customary to refer to “Tante Einspring” (aunt “Whatever you want”). It was an organization that almost all families called if someone fell ill and the family needed a person at full disposal – and then a poor elderly woman servant was immediately sent to the call, whom everyone looked down on, while using her as they pleased . Although it would be good for a woman not to be aggressive, there is always the danger of becoming too soft, as a result of which she will be pushed to the sidelines of life, and she will be left out of work.
Therefore, the issue is precisely the integration of masculinity into the world of femininity, but in a way that does not go too far, and this is a serious problem. A woman “waking up” after being too passive and too feminine is faced with the possibility of being too aggressive. But no one hits the target right away; practice is required.
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- Pity: is there anything good in it?
Women often abuse maternal care; I call them the Sentimental Salvation Army. To immediately rush to the aid of someone helpless and mired in problems, someone backed up against a wall and in a corner, is to behave in accordance with the archetype of maternal instinct, because such situations usually make people pity. But any excessive virtue is directed against instinct and can turn into its own opposite. Time after time we see women unconsciously suffer as a result of their virtuous pity.
Pity can have a completely detrimental effect, leaving a person in an infantile state. Women need to watch their natural maternal impulses and develop in themselves a certain measure of objectivity and detachment that will allow them to see what is really good for another person.
A woman may have a husband or lover – a man of a neurotic, suicidal or sadistic type with a negative mother complex. But every time a woman thinks she’s had enough and wants to tell the man the truth and make things clear, she’s overcome with pity for the poor guy and can’t “let him go.” As a rule, in such a case there is a projection of the malefic female Animus onto the male. Even if there is no real man who torments her, a woman can get him from the inside, because when she is alone, her Animus assures her that she is lonely and that no one, nothing, ever, will ever come from anywhere – this is what the inner sadist tells her. Consequently, this couple enters into a relationship again, for it is better to have a sadist from the outside than to have one inside.
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- Yuri Norshtein: “Out of pity, I must be cruel…”
I remember one family where there were several sons. Both father and grandfather were drunkards, and the sons, with the exception of one, also drank a lot. The non-drinking son had a very strict wife, and the first time he came home drunk, she told him that if this happened again, she would divorce him. She was the only one who saved her husband from a fatal family addiction. All the rest had softer and more good-natured wives, but they showed false pity, which contributed to the death of their husbands. Some maternal women act like they’re “hatching an egg” but the result is one stink! During this key period of a woman’s individuation, she must get rid of the manifestation of false pity.
A woman with a very developed sense of motherhood loves to nurse a young man – a misunderstood genius – giving him motherly love, which he never received at home. A woman in her fifties living alone in her apartment picked up a young man in his twenties who had a difficult childhood and who immediately began to pocket her money and forge checks. She was filled with pity for this poor boy, because he had such a terrible childhood, and allowed him to live at home for free. She gave him a position in her business, and there he again deceived her, leaving fifty thousand francs of debt in her bank account. But this was not enough: she still did not turn to the protection of the law, but continued to forgive and cover him up, because he sobbed and said that he was very ashamed of everything he had done. Then for some time he lived in her house with a girl, and then he began to put arsenic in the hostess’s food.
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This is a striking example of an inappropriate display of pity – pity based on absolute stupidity. She was a very intelligent woman, but unhappy and unmarried, who did not know where to put her maternal feelings, and therefore wasted them on this creature. In such a case, the values of the positive animus, which the woman could use if she were more objective, were wasted; it’s about her greatest values and her ability to understand… It must be assumed that the woman who spent her money on a swindler and a murderer had such an Animus herself. People outwardly are so blind and look so glorious that it takes a lot of police work, in fact, to reveal such a figure inside.
It becomes clear that a very subtle type of self-deception is going on, for all the instinctive warnings about the thief have been ignored. It is impossible for a normal woman to live next to a man like this and not have any suspicions … When analyzing such cases, sooner or later the cards are laid out on the table, and the woman has to face the fact that she lies to herself and does not listen to warnings.
For more details, see M.-L. von Franz “Femininity in fairy tales” (Klass, 2010).