Sex and Identity

Many dreams show how we gain much of our identity out of our sexual attractiveness, relationship, or lack of it. Men and women often feel they are inadequate or lacking in personal worth if they are not in a relationship where their partner is fascinated by them sexually. Our sense of personal value and positive existence, may be built on many things, but can ultimately become less dependent upon particulars such as physical attractiveness or sexual partnership.

Example: Here one must come to terms with the androgenous psychic nature of man. The anxieties of every human being who ever doubted his own sexuality are true; they point at a wrinkle of the mind which cannot be smoothed away. And therapists who try to calm patients’ fears with reassurances are whistling down the wind. Reassurances will never obliterate the doubt in every man’s mind that he’s not quite all male, or the parallel doubt in woman’s mind, simply because the doubt is psychically valid. Of course, objectively it’s not true at all. Although scientists have pointed out a certain overlapping between the sexes in vestigial organs and hormones, most men are obviously men and women are women. This knowledge of biological similarities hardly prepares men and women for the subjective experience of bisexuality, which can only be explained by the plasticity of the imagination and the sense of identity. In every man’s mind are areas of consciousness that proclaim, in effect, “I am a woman!” In every woman’s psyche occurs the reverse. This is not a matter of observation and analysis but a conviction at the very seat of consciousness.

Sex has it mystery in the depths of our being, in the sperm and egg, and these although they may not be easily reached by our conscious personality, are found in dreams, in visions and deep human experience. Psychically man will, man must return to his beginnings. If he denies sexuality he will return mystically. If he accepts sexuality he will seek to return by any means. For deep within the psyche reigns the mother and beyond her the edges of an instinctive infinity which is still herself. To this heaven man must never lose the path; to this heaven he will return at last.

It is the lack of recognition of this out of phase difference that keeps us seeking sex of one sort or another. It is also the cause of much of the misery the sexes create between them. Wholeness comes not by acting out or even physically trying to be the opposite sex, but by diving into oneself finding the wholeness that we all are. See Archetype of the Anima – Archetype of the Animus