the socioreligious scenario o f right and wrong, good
and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated
with shame and guilt. We are programmed by the culture
as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous
way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming
operates on every level o f choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and
how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility
o f women. Take any aspect o f behavior and one can
find the source o f the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable
in this context.
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Depth psychologists consider man the center of his
world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondary universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in
the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,
the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever
planetary power might be relevant and meaningful;
religionists consider God a surrogate man, created
precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father
to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the
natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct
(no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important
(no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and
that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply,
he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:
woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man
from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is
directly responsible for the current ecological situation
which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,
including human life. Man has treated nature much as
he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.
The phenomenological world is characterized by its
diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-
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tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world
consists o f finding the proper relationship to it.
In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem is
similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the
center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think
that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions
of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow o f
sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even
into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to
natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in
interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change
ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally
defined beings. We must find ways o f destroying the
cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must
discover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual being
and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent
natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.
Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world
we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;
prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,
governments contemptuous o f their people, people
filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,
rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition
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gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,
want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those
phenomena mark the distance between civilized man
and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social
patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced
way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how
it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment
when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable
humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence
was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and
social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then
imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had
with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even
know much of what happened before people made
pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps
would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have
(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part
of the natural world, not set over against it; when men
and women, male and female, were whatever they were,
not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into
castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined
whole.
In recent years, depth psychologists in particular
have turned to primitive people and tribal situations
in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of
male and female. The most notable effort was made by
Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable
as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers
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have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as
archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined
as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and
embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is