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Masculine Shame from Succubus to the Eternal Feminine Masculine Shame Mary Y. Ayers Masculine Shame From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine Masculine Shame Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine explores the idea that the image of the succubus, a demonic female creature said to emasculate men and murder mothers and infants, has been created out of the masculine projection of shame and looks at how the transformation of this image can be traced through Western history, mythology, and Judeo-Christian literature. Divided into three parts areas of discussion include: • the birth of civilization and the evolution of the succubus • the image of the succubus in the writings of Freud and Jung • the succubus as child-killing mother to the restoration of the eternal feminine. Through a process of detailed cultural and social analysis this book places the image of the succubus at the very heart of psychoanalytic thought, as seen vividly in both Freud’s Medusa and Jung’s visions of Salome. As such this book will be of great interest to all those in the fi elds of analytical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Mary Y. Ayers , Ph.D. is the author of Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis: The Eyes of Shame (Routledge, 2003), winner of the NAAP Gradiva Award (2004). She currently works in private practice in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. where she specializes in analytic work with children and adults. Masculine Shame From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine Mary Y. Ayers First published 2011 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Copyright © 2011 Mary Y. Ayers Typeset in Times New Roman by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Paperback cover design by Andrew Ward All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ayers, Mary, 1960 – Masculine shame: from succubus to the eternal feminine/Mary Y. Ayers. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–415–39038–5 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–415–39039–2 (pbk.) 1. Demonology. 2. Parapsychology. 3. Subconsciousness. 4. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. 5. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875–1961. I. Title. BF1531.A94 2010 150.19'5—dc22 2010028857 ISBN: 978–0–415–39038–5 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–39039–2 (pbk) To the Eternal Feminine: may her restoration through this look into her eyes of shame bring about the harmonious balance of male and female forces and This book is dedicated to the memory of the late Roger Lyons, the man who helped me learn to think Contents List of fi gures ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii PART I The birth of civilization and the evolution of the succubus 1 1 The succubus, the evil eye and shame 3 Queen of the succubi 4 2 The historic unfolding of the image of the succubus 13 The birth of civilization 15 The succubus takes hold 20 PART II The image of the succubus in the writings of Freud and Jung 33 3 The split between Freud and Jung 35 Historical background 37 4 Sigmund Freud’s Medusa 41 Freud’s repudiation of the mother 42 Narcissism 47 Freud’s mother 48 viii Contents Freud’s act of matricide 54 The feminine in Freud’s theories 60 5 Siegfried to Salome: Jung’s heroic journey 66 The psychological birth of Jung: the Siegfried complex 67 Salome and Jung’s anima 78 Jung’s act of matricide 82 The restoration of Salome’s vision 87 Jung’s ascent 97 6 The blinded eternal feminine 106 The social construction of the patriarchal hero 108 The blinding of the maternal feminine 114 PART III From the succubus as child-killing mother to the restoration of the eternal feminine 119 7 The succubus of early infancy 121 Recognition 122 Recognition of the mother 129 The shift from object relations to object usage 133 Matricide and the absence of recognition 135 8 The evil female demon 141 Evil and masculine shame 142 The evil female demon 145 The death of the ego and the transformation of evil into shame 150 Archetypal images of the transformation of shame 160 Epilogue: Envisioning a return of the eternal feminine 166 The Revenge of Gaia 171 Bibliography 177 Index 183 Figures 1.1 Engraving by Gustave Dore for The Succubus in Balzac’s Les Contes Drolatiques 5 1.2 Garden of Paradise , c. 1500, oil on panel, by Hieronymus Bosch 9 2.1 Venus of Lespugue 14 2.2 Frieze of Inanna’s Eye Temple 18 2.3 Thracian gold ceremonial helmet from Romania 19 2.4 Sumerian bas reliefs from 2000 B.C. Lilith with bird feet, fl anked by owls and lions 24 2.5 Lilith in the form of an owl atop a human skull. The motto written in Middle German behind the owl reads “Ich Fyrcht Den Tag ,” or “I Dread the Day” 25 2.6 Medusa as La Syphilis , from Louis Raemaker’s L’Hecatombe 2 6 2.7 Mask of Shame. The long tongue and big ears symbolize gossip and nosiness. (Formerly on display in the Medieval Crime and Punishment Museum in Rothenburg, Germany.) 31 Those Thy lovely forms in the Three Worlds, And those Thy furious forms, Save us in all of them. (Devi-Mahatmya) May the eye not be turned to the outside Lest it simultaneously drive out the images. (Sister Elsbet Stagel of the Toss Monastery, fourteenth century) It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness (Adage) . But whate’er shall I be Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing . (Shakespeare, Richard III , V5: 38) Preface Midway along the journey of life I woke to fi nd myself in a dark wood For I had wandered off from the straight path. (Dante, Inferno , Canto 1) “If one understands shame, one understands humanity.” As I was incubating my ideas for a book that analyzed masculine shame through the image of the eye, this seemingly simple sentence obsessively pressed itself into my mind. I didn’t under- stand the thought, and so it opened up several questions. What can be understood about humanity through an understanding of shame? Does humanity mean human- kind, male and female, or does humanity mean the qualities of being good which can inform human action? Does the affect of shame encompass this kind of breadth and depth in the human psyche? This edition on shame is my refl ection on these questions. Differentiating masculine shame from feminine shame was a distinction that had been completely overlooked in my fi rst book (Ayers, 2003), and the source from which my current writing extends, mainly because by examining shame through its quintessential developmental and archetypal image – the human eye – I was scrutinizing shame like a tree in the forest. So of course I missed the forest through the trees. This oversight was brought to my attention by one of the anony- mous reviewers (to whom I am truly indebted), who commented that one of its obvious omissions was gender differences. Eager to get the book done, I added a few cursory paragraphs (2003: 76–77). But I did not escape the matter; left with an insistent, gnawing feeling, the importance of the distinction continued to grow daily in my mind. Little did I know then that my further attempts to address this omission would result in another book on shame, or that I would discover a ubiquitous dynamic that under- mines yet dominates relationships among men and women. My research led me into the “forest” of shame, a place of patriarchal dominance deep in the collec- tive unconscious where men as well as women live in absolute shame. This book, then, forms an attempt to translate the unknown darkness in this forest, xii Preface an articulation of shame’s archetypal pattern in order to create a new way of communicating about it in the fi eld of depth psychology. Thus far, I have learned that masculine shame is not male specifi cally ( just as feminine shame is not limited to females), but is, rather, a type of shame that belongs to the masculine engendered collective psychic reality called patriarchy and its consequent gender images of male and female. The core disturbance in this type of shame entails elimination through annihilation because the good maternal aspects of the feminine principle become absent in an early and deep psychic place. This developmental derailment naturally resonates with the repression of the maternal feminine on the collective, archetypal level. The dynamics resulting from this lie at the heart of why humankind is presently threatened with losing its humanity and true empathy, as well as the ability to love and relate. What maternal feminine absence combines to create for all of us is an untenable and dangerous psychic and social situation. On a personal level, we lose our ability to be and become, to give real value, meaning and direction to our existence.
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