When a woman is guided by a masculine, violent vision of success, she keeps scoring own goals
Kalina Mróz: How did you come across Maureen Murdock's "The Heroine's Journey" and why did you find it so fascinating?
Marta Niedźwiecka: For a long time I have been interested in the description of mental reality taken from the analysis by Carl Gustav Jung. Maureen Murdock's book was written in the 1990s. I read it in English for the first time over a decade ago. Even then, I was very impressed by it, because the author broke my way of thinking about the female psyche. For a very long time, for psychotherapists and even psychologists, a woman was a worse man. For some time the androcentric model was not evident as in the case of Freud. But it revealed itself differently rather as a subcutaneous mindset, a style of asking questions. This can be seen, for example, in the book by Caroline Criado Perez “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, recently published by Karakter. Science describes women by creating models invented for men, so the conclusions and observations have nothing to do with our needs and our mental reality.
How does this work in practice?
Let me give you a very simple example. Dummies used to study the effects of traffic accidents were modelled according to the shape and size of the male body. As a result, the female mortality rate in a head-on collision was 40 percent higher than that of men. Why? Because women have a differently built chest and more delicate bones. The forces that impacted their bodies during an accident went unnoticed because what happened to the dummies was measured. And the dummies were "male". For a long time, science did not treat femininity on equal terms with masculinity. Many things were analysed from a male perspective.
Does Murdock reverse this perspective?
She collects threads, shows how it works, and serves up a good idea to get out of the situation. Since she is a therapist working in the Jungian trend, she has collected analytical reflection, office experience and extensive anthropological material. This was reinforced with a portion of her opposition to Campbell's model who in 1949, in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" described the archetypal path of individualisation of the hero. Murdock said what works for men won't be good for women who develop differently, have different dilemmas, and go through different stages of mental development.
Any examples?
Let's take the fairy tale about the youngest brother. We have three brothers. The oldest is greedy, the middle one is brutal, and the youngest, is the good one. Thanks to his wisdom, good heart and cleverness, he can overcome adversities and receive the princess's hand in marriage and a kingdom to rule as a reward. The problem is that the princess is only a trophy in this description.
And what does Murdock do with it?
She starts from the same point as Campbell, which is the starting point for all Jungians. It is the belief that myths and stories constitute the oldest reservoir of archetypes and patterns of behaviour. When there were no therapists yet, these myths showed us how to live. On the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual levels, they modelled behaviour. Unfortunately, almost all of them were about men. The roles for women were very limited. A woman can, like Penelope, wait for her hero who comes from an expedition. Like Antigone, she can sacrifice her life for the greater good, or like Joan of Arc, although heroic, militant and efficient, she becomes completely devoid of female features, desexualised.
"The Heroine's Journey" is therefore supposed to create a chance for women to become active participants in their own lives, on their own terms, and not following the male path.
So what does the female path look like?
Each woman will embody a model created by Murdoch differently. The path is a circular model, which is also a break with the linear, cause-and-effect description characteristic of masculinity. Things can stem from one another and come back to similar points, some questions will have to be answered many times in our life. Many times in our life, we will experience similar events – e.g. going down to the underworld. Facing these stages is necessary in order to pursue one's fullness, to develop, to consciously seek one's identity and narrative. But the whole thing is done in accordance with the rhythm of female life. The stages are not determined by us, but by the mentioned archetypal stories, myths and fairy tales. They are an indispensable element in shaping a mature mentality and striving for wholeness.
Meaning?
Fullness does not mean happiness, a perfect life, or success in the material world. Fullness appears when a person becomes mentally integrated, contains those qualities we need for a life filled with meaning.
Thirty years ago, Murdock wrote in the context of the desacralisation and vulgarisation of the female body: “In the current climate, we are witnessing an undeniable attack on women's reproductive rights. A young woman recently asked: why do they hate us so much?". This is surprisingly true in Poland.
The Polish translation of "The Heroine's Journey" was published at the perfect moment. Now is a good time to read it and answer a lot of questions. This will help us to act effectively and will also allow us to understand that the movement of limiting our rights to our bodies is not about any morality, but about reducing the female body and sexuality to the role of an object, subordinating it to the principle of authority. A similar pattern of the madonna and the whore works well in Polish culture.
If you obey the rules – you give birth to children, behave decently, express yourself nicely, because nice girls do not swear – then you are accepted and you have a place in society. But if you want to sleep with whoever you choose, you want to have an abortion, you want to decide about yourself, it means that you are a whore and do not belong in society. Many women suffer from mentally difficult states because the voice of the patriarchy does not weaken in them. So, despite their feminist views, they experience numerous dilemmas, a sense of guilt and the need to control their body or sexuality. Or they follow the idea of success and failure based on a very masculine, violent role model.
Meaning?
Some women believe, for example, that success is a promotion to the CEO of a corporation and managing subordinates with a firm hand. And if you are a teacher who opened the world to beauty and tolerance to twenty children, that's no great achievement.
Because it doesn't have anything to do with prestige, money, domination and so on?
Exactly. And when our work gains momentum at the workshops I run according to "The Heroine's Journey", it takes a lot of space to deal with the internal patriarch. It is our inner voice that hates our delicacy, our vulnerability, our dreams and what brings us to tears with emotion. We have to be effective and responsive.
The women I work with often say all of this sounds beautiful, but it's just theory. They like these models of communication and cooperation based on community and respect, not domination and violence. However, they cannot imagine how to be successful in the world, being such a "wimp". Cognitively and emotionally, this is one of the more difficult moments because many women have been shaped to be identified with the male principle of power. They just don't believe that behaviour not based on force can have any effect.
They looked at their mothers, often passive, dependent, mistreated, and thought: "I don't want to be like her". They looked at their fathers, often idealised because they were not at home, and thought: "He is so powerful, if I am like him, I will decide about myself, I will have the life I want". And this identification with the male principle of power means playing with the wrong end of the stick.
But it does not mean that a woman should be passive and gentle.
It doesn't mean that at all. By actively working with this content, we can free ourselves from this unfortunate distinction between male and female, and our attachment to any of these groups. We live in a world where masculinity is defined as rational, based on understanding, strong, causal and active. The feminine was assigned caring, emotionality, passivity, and receptivity. If we believe this dichotomy, we will complicate our lives a lot. The aim of the work is not to deepen this opposition, but to go beyond it. The question is not whether a woman should be emotional or rational, but when and on what terms she is to use all the resources she has – both from the heart and the mind.
And it isn't about staying home and having children?
Absolutely not. Murdock takes motherhood very seriously but takes it as one of many female activities. It is up to each woman what she will do with her maternal energy, with the ability to care. One will save dogs, another will do art, and yet another will teach English to children in Ethiopia. And another one will give birth to a child because she wants to.
What happens when a woman unknowingly follows the male path?
She can feel a sense of the futility of her own efforts, for instance. So she has the children that she wanted to have, and then what? Nothing. She is an activist because she wanted to change the world. And she is tired of the frustration of failure. She has achieved success that she does not enjoy. More items from better brands do not fill the mental void.
I like Simone de Beauvoir's sentence that we are becoming women. We need to understand our own femininity, especially since not all of us are born as women. Some were also raised to be like boys. Some have lost their understanding of what sustains them somewhere.
It's hard to take care of yourself when you don't know your own needs. It is impossible to take care of your own femininity if you do not understand how it works, but only replicate male patterns, most often toxic also for men. Murdock writes a lot and shamelessly about the soul, that is, the immaterial, transcendent piece of us that cries out for liberation in women. Which asks questions about how you fulfil yourself, what your life force is, where you fulfil yourself.
When the participants of my workshops ponder whether they want to serve a system that imposes numerous forms of oppression on them, commands them to behave contrary to reason and feeling, or whether they prefer to go their own path, they hit another snag.
They learn that they will have to part with something, and there is often a lot of friction. “How come? I can't have this and this at the same time?”. Meanwhile, searching for the truth about yourself means that something will have to die. Maybe an illusion of an ideal life, maybe a vision of success based on unrealistic assumptions. I appreciate "The Heroine's Journey" very much, because it constantly brings out the truth about who we are and has the ability to remove our masks, deconstruct the game we play with ourselves.
What can change in life after this change of thinking?
One of the workshop participants is a co-owner of a modern company. She had thought about how to incorporate other principles in the business before, but after the process changed her, she became certain that this was the right direction. A year after the workshop, her company received a significant award for companies supporting female power in business. But not all profits are unambiguous and come when we want them. One of the participants, dealing with art, went through a long phase of incubation, withdrawal, in order to return to the world with new content, adequate to her system of values. It was not a nice time for her, as always when we need to face our inner world.
And what about difficult cases?
There are some, as I said, "The Heroine's Journey" is not only a journey for joy and glitter. Women begin to doubt everything they've done. They have been good wives, mothers, and employees, and they suddenly realise that they have always lived for others. They lived up to the expectations of the whole world, which in the end does not care. And it's not like when you touch Murdock's book, it suddenly all gets more beautiful and easier. It gets real, and the truth is brutal.
What I like about "The Heroine's Journey" is that Murdock allows you to "go down to the underworld". And it's not about clinical depression.
It's like the second phase of the hormone cycle – sometimes we are down. Some women hate it because they think that they are unproductive, irritable, things fall from their hands, they are not focused. They realise various things that they normally ignore. The journey down, the little one every month and the big ones when really difficult things happen in our lives, reminds us that the female psyche is based on cyclicity. It needs to get through winter. It needs not to give birth, withdraw its energy, regenerate its strength, crawl into the inner process and go over this in silence. For women, the rhythm of life consisting in constant activity and exploitation ends with mental exhaustion and diseases, including physical diseases. And it's not that we're too weak. We are powerful, we just don't understand the rules or we ignore them. We neglect what is a natural part of tuning our psyche. As Murdock writes, many depressive states could have been avoided if women had respected their rhythm of life.
And they don't respect this rhythm because they broke off their relationship with their mother and followed in their father's footsteps?
Some women are ready to admit that their relationship with their mothers was strained or very difficult. And some are stuck with denial. I got messages like: "Murdock's book is great, but one thing is wrong. I have a great relationship with my mother. I just hate women because they gossip, you can't get along with them, they're not fit for work, so I only hang out with guys." Unfortunately, if you have a problem with your or someone else's femininity, it started with a problem with your mother. The mother-daughter relationship is extremely burdened in general, because our mothers lived in a reality that was very brutal for them, frustrating, limiting their freedom, emotional and spiritual expression. So they are often the keepers of the patriarchy and tell us: "respect yourself", "have a husband" and they don't understand us at all. Or they treat us as a project that is to be as perfect as possible and constantly win. Even though we want to be a singer or do woodwork. Clearing the relationship with the mother is a job for a long time, because for a woman the mother is the first role model of femininity. We wonder why we do not accept our bodies and then remember that our mothers used to pinch their tummy tuck all their lives, or starved themselves and smoked so as not to eat. We are reaping the fruit of all this.
The workshops you run according to the Maureen Murdock model are a bit of a survival camp?
I choose places where there is no mobile phone coverage, isolated and in nature. We have a specific pace of work, which sometimes surprises the participants who think that they are on holiday. And there is a lot of work, because trying to follow the heroine's path, we need to face each of the marked out areas. There are points that we need to accomplish for the process to surprise us – the encounter with the femininity that mothers have left us and that has been shaped by culture. With negative masculinity, that is, identification with the element of power. We have to go down to the underworld, get out of it and see what has happened. Finally, there is an approach to reinventing yourself in new terms. Integrating the experience that happened. So that the participant could develop a kind of signpost that will lead her through her personal journeys also in the future. Because there is no universal path for all women. An important goal of this process is that a woman does not have to go around asking: "How should I live?" And that she does not listen, for example, to the inner voice of the patriarchy.