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It’s not a new take. But it sure is unsettling.
Amid a widespread decline in maternal care in America, rising rhetoric about “childless cat ladies,” and assertions that people without children shouldn’t have equal voting rights, a prominent Jungian Analyst published an article last week suggesting that women may not be able to individuate if they don’t become mothers.
We are, after all, animals. The urge to have children is part of our deep, primal nature. Choosing to forgo this experience has profound implications that may be difficult to fathom. It is hubris to assume that we can consciously assess all aspects of such a decision.
::head slap::
As a purported defender of women, author and co-host of the This Jungian Life podcast, Lisa Marchiano, has remarkably regressive views about what it means to be a woman, and about gender in general. She has a long track record of inflammatory statements with which the trans community is painfully familiar, and this article is no exception. Full of casual statements and a bandied-about “just saying” tone, the piece overall serves to gaslight readers. She’s not saying that women must have children, she’s merely implying it over and over again. Taken as a whole, the article paints an antiquated picture of womanhood: to be on one’s true path as a woman is to bear children in one’s womb.
[N]urturing children satisfies an ancient impulse and fulfills our biological destiny. Jung noted that we cut ourselves off from our instincts at our peril.
But what is a “biological destiny,” pray tell? The very phrase sends shivers down my spine.
This is the kind of language that fascists use to inform racist, ableist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ policies. It’s the kind of thinking running rampant throughout the Republican party today and other right-wing groups worldwide. No matter what women want to do with their lives and never mind that they have brains, hands, and legs, they have wombs and are therefore biologically destined to be mothers.
Adding insult to injury, the quote that Marchiano employs to define individuation in this article comes from Jung’s Vision Seminars, which are based on the active imaginations of Christiana Morgan, a woman who herself had highly ambivalent feelings about motherhood. In the words of her granddaughter, Hilary Morgan: “I don’t think she ever wanted to be a mother.”
Here is Marchiano:
“Individuation,” Jung wrote “... is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one’s destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with.” For many of us, having children will be an important part of fulfilling our innate pattern.
But not for all of us. And not for Christiana Morgan. Why? Because this “primitive pattern” of which Jung speaks is found within each person’s psyche, not in their biology. This is why we look to the unconscious to help us find our path through life, not to our underwear.
The truth is that I’ve bit my tongue about Lisa Marchiano’s work for years, just as I have about Jordan Peterson’s, two people who use their platforms to equate “archetypal” and stereotypical perspectives of gender with psychology. I’ve bit my tongue because I’m not seeking a public fight. But there’s no doubt that much of their work is causing harm. Their anti-trans rhetoric and regressive ideas about women and men, and the masculine and feminine, are genuinely dangerous, drawing on people’s worst hunches and instincts, not the forward movement of psychic life. It’s hard to watch Jung’s work being used in such damaging ways; not for the sake of liberating people to live their individual lives as intended, but to reinforce the prisons of sex and gender as defined by others, equating genitalia with one’s psychological life just as eugenicists have, for centuries, equated skin color with intelligence.
Enough.
As a clinician, a student of Jung’s work, and a childless woman myself, I’d like to assert an alternate perspective, that it is a woman’s right to choose that helps her fulfill her path of individuation, not having children because of the mere fact that she was born with a uterus.
This is true for men too, who might soak up the alternate message from society that it is not in their biology to care for and nurture a child. It’s all nonsense. Regressive, pseudo-science nonsense.
Individuation is about clarifying for oneself, over and over, one’s path through life while detoxing from all the social conditioning—like Marchiano’s article—that tells us what we’re supposed to want.
The whole point of individuation is that it’s individual.
It is about the choice.
The choice to have children or not. The choice to love whomever you love and be able to spend time with that person without threat of injury, imprisonment, or death. The choice to explore gender and gender expression. The choice to wear skirts or pants, or a skirt one day and pants the next. The choice to marry or not marry, or to divorce and marry again. The choice to be a celibate nun and devote yourself to God. The choice to have lots of sex. The choice to use birth control. The choice to abort a pregnancy.
The choice to adopt. The choice to utilize IVF.
Because, you know, not all cis women can have children. It’s not clear, following Marchiano’s logic, what this might mean for their supposed “biological destiny.”
While she begins her article with an anecdote about a friend of hers undergoing IVF, she quickly retreats to a discussion of women who seemingly casually choose not to have children. (It’s very confusing.) One is left with the impression that Marchiano feels her friend is heroic for pursuing IVF in the attempt to become a mother, while women who don’t have children—because of, say, the dangers of carrying a child without real medical care in a post-Roe America, the profound lack of social support for mothers, the absence of a supportive partner, the lack of access to fertility treatments, or because they don’t want to—are just being a bit lazy and silly.
I can’t help but think of the words that Coach Walz used recently when speaking about his family’s IVF journey and the uninformed judgment of others: “Mind your own damn business.”
As Marchiano cherry-picks quotes from Jung, meanwhile, she does not speak to the fact that Jung could never have created the work he did if he’d been expected to carry his five children and serve as their primary caretaker. (He would have been the first to say this.) Nor does Marchiano name the fact that most of the women in Jung’s inner circle did not have children—Toni Wolff, Marie-Louise von Franz, Aniela Jaffé, and Barbara Hannah, to name a few.
Like many women before me, I am childless by choice and grateful. Had I not had this choice—an increasing reality for millions of girls and women in my country—I question if I would have survived my Quarterlife years. I struggled to get the support and understanding I needed from doctors throughout my twenties, just as many other cis women and trans people have struggled to get their basic medical care aligned with their self-knowledge.
My Quarterlife years were far more akin to the torment depicted in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar than the supposedly archetypal path of womanhood that Marchiano paints. Like The Bell Jar’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, I fantasized about a life of books and writing and was utterly unable to relate to the longing for babies that I observed in some of my peers. It was not that I thought I could only have one or the other and had to choose. I simply did not want children. I never did. Yet I was told all the time that I would regret it or that my biological clock would start ticking. Who knows how disoriented I might have become if I’d lived in the era in which Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath existed, or if I’d been steeped in even more messages that being a woman means, inevitably, being a wife to a man and a mother to children.
The reality is that I chose not to have children because my own deepest instincts made it clear that bearing children was not part of my life’s path. It was not because I was disconnected from “the feminine,” nor that I don’t know how to nurture or care for things, and certainly not because of social influence, “reassuringly bright rhetoric,” or “uplifting images from social media” as Marchiano strangely seems to believe are luring people towards the childless life.
Truly, has she ever met a woman who is childless by choice?
If Marchiano hopes for young girls not to question their gender, as her prolific anti-trans child activism emphasizes, she would do well not to add to the regressive burden of gender politics by emphasizing a painfully narrow image of womanhood.
Childless women have always existed. Just as trans people have always existed. The increased awareness of these populations today is not a result of social epidemics or wrong-headedness. Nor are the books and support groups around to attract people to a new “lifestyle choice.” No, the visibility is increasing because those who have historically lived with shame and grief outside of the standard white, colonial, hetero-normative, Christian images of “man” and “woman” are advocating for themselves, creating communities, and living less and less in the shadows.
In an era when gender apartheid is on the rise worldwide and gender-nonconforming people of all stripes are fighting for their lives, anyone with a platform would do well to resist fueling right-wing rhetoric with biological essentialist arguments and outdated notions of sex and individuation. Simplistic ideas about how men and women “should be” carry real-world power, cause disorientation and self-doubt, and ultimately threaten lives. This is true for cis men as much as cis women, as it is for non-binary and trans people. Biology is not archetypal. Motherhood is not for everyone. Sex is not destiny.
The journey of individuation is not universally defined.
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.
Sharing this anonymously from a reader, with permission.
“I'm 32 years old, a new psychotherapist with a long-standing interest in Jung, and currently in a discernment process regarding childbearing and motherhood. This past Friday, I tearfully described to my analyst Marchiano's article and the unsettling impact it had on me. While my analyst was supportive in reorienting me to a wider perspective (and in shrugging Marchiano off, intimating an over-identification with her role as a mother), reading your article provided a much needed counterpoint to what I am now seeing as a wildly limited Jungian perspective on the topic of motherhood. Not to mention bringing attention to Marchiano's anti-trans child activism, of which I was formerly unaware.”
Another email I'm sharing anonymously here, with permission.
"Lisa’s article had made me wonder whether I was selfish not wanting to have a child, and validated my guilt for not having my 'maternal instinct' kicking in while friends around are getting pregnant.
Your article give me faith that I am on the right path, my own path - thank you."