Margaret Meyer - Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages - University of Kent

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Margaret Meyer Enquiries:
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Neither … nor: Medial Woman and the politics of marginality 1227 827159
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● International Students Toni Wolff, an analysand of C.G. Jung’s and, famously, companion to him during the period of his mental crisis email
(1913-18) expanded Jung’s theories of the feminine with her own archetypal schema in 1934. Wolff’s Structural Religious
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Forms of the Feminine Psyche describes four forms: mother, companion (hetaira), amazon and medial woman. Studies
● Undergraduate Studies For Wolff these types represent the major ways in which women experience the world. Of the four, medial
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woman (or medium) is the most elusive; she is a Hermetic figure, one who is ‘in between, neither one thing nor Religious
18/06/2010 the other, universal, neutral, a mediator … immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the Studies,
School
MA in Applied Theology spirit of her times’.1 And yet Wolff endows medial woman with an important task: to express the meaning of the
❍ of European
collective unconscious, and to act as a go-between and bridge between the personal and impersonal, individual Culture
❍ MA in the Study of Mysticism and and collective, in so doing moderating the dynamic between them. and
Religious Experience Languages,
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❍ Research Degrees Wolff’s characterisation of medial woman has at its essence a tension noted by a number of commentators, who Kent,
❍ Researchers
query the archetype’s central indeterminacy. Estella Lauter, for example, asserts that medial woman ‘can exert a Canterbury,
positive influence on her environment only when she becomes a “mediatrix” who possesses the “faculty of Kent,
● Staff discrimination” or understands the limits of the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and the impersonal. CT2 7NF
● Research Environment […] I do not doubt that such a figure exists, but it still correlates better with well-known images of the muse who
inspires others than with the images of women who are themselves inspired or otherwise empowered to act’.2
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I am interested in the medial archetype because it offers an under-explored theoretical context for thinking about -
women’s subjectivity, and social and religious marginality. Though medial woman is discussed within popular © University
psychology, the archetype remains significantly under-researched academically. Two recent dissertations (2005) of
Kent
present only limited updating of the archetype. Older research excludes the feminist perspective. No significant - 18/06/2010
scholarship engaging with feminist archetypal theory appears after Lauter and Rupprecht’s influential Feminist
The
Archetypal Theory, 1985; there have been no attempts to theorise this archetype in relation to religious thought.
University of
Furthermore, I contend that even post-Jungian critiques of medial woman have consistently mis-read and Kent,
romanticised the archetype. In exploring the connections between ‘mediality’ and liminality as defined by cultural Canterbury,
anthropologist Victor Turner, I propose that the medial ‘narrative’ offers a new category for interpreting Kent,
experience. CT2
7NZ,
T:
My research takes Wolff’s archetype as its starting point and seeks to locate it in the context of feminism and the +44
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politics of religious subjectivity, in so doing illuminating the problematic of gender within symbolic and societal
1227 764000
orders. Arising from this I have develop a detailed critique of the characteristics germane to medial woman, one
by which the problems of mediality and marginality, both personal and political, can be identified and explored.

If the medial condition is in effect a portal for change, then medial women are uniquely placed to articulate both
the causes and effects of such change. In examining the connections between medial women and liminality, my
purpose will be to discover whether the latter as both a psychological condition and social ‘zone’ offers medial
women a distinct and potentially valuable cultural space, in and from which they may challenge, question and
subvert androcentric and male-dominated societies, knowledge and religious systems. In so doing I seek to
validate my critique of medial woman against the lives of actual medial women drawn from two historical
domains: mediums of the British Spiritualist movement and Jungian psychoanalysts, in particular antonia Wolff,
herself an exemplar of the medial archetype.

This project’s methodology is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on perspectives from religious theory, feminism
and psychology. By reading this archetype in these contexts, I hope to offer new insights into the nature of
medial or marginalised women in spiritual and psychoanalytic traditions.

Notes

1. Toni Wolff, Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (Zurich: C.G.Jung Institute, 1956), 9
2. Estella Lauter, ‘Visual Images by Women: A Test Case for the Theory of Archetypes’, in Feminist

http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/postgraduate/researchers/meyer.html (1 of 2) [9/23/2010 12:26:53 AM]

 Margaret Meyer - Religious Studies School of European Culture and Languages - University of Kent

Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of Jungian Thought, ed. Estella Lauter and Carol Schrier
Rupprecht (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 74
3. See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974)

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http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/postgraduate/researchers/meyer.html (2 of 2) [9/23/2010 12:26:53 AM]