• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Solar vs Lunar

Eric B

ⒺⓉⒷ
Joined
Mar 29, 2008
Messages
3,621
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
548
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Recently read Beebe's Integrity in Depth (and discussed its treatment of the Virginity mythos in relation to "integrity" here: Typology Central), and another concept I noticed was "sola" and "luna", meaning of course, "sun" and "moon", and which had often been linked to masculinity and femininity (like the image of the Woman in relation 12, standing on the moon, and clothed with the sun, the sun is supposed to be Christ, and the moon, something feminine such as "the bride" as it "reflects" the sun's glory).

p91

Perhaps there is something one-sided about Jung's masculinity. We can see a limitation of Jung's own integration in his late formulation of sol and luna as the masculine and feminine principles. To draw upon a recent formulation by Howard Teich, Jung's masculinity, both in his theory and in his personality, seems too one-sidedly solar. Teich has proposed that we should see solar and lunar, lights that have conditioned our view of gender, not as metaphors for the genders, but as perspectives in both masculinity and femininity. Rather than conflating masculine with solar, he has adduced clinical evidence to suggest that a whole masculinity will consist of both solar and lunar parts. By solar he means active and aggressive and by lunar, receptive and responsive. These parts appear alongside each other in many traditions as male twins. Teich feels that there is also a twinship for women involving solar and lunar femininity. In her poem "Integrity," Adrienne Rich calls this pair "anger and tenderness, my selves."

He then goes into how this was influenced by Jung's childhood experience with some man trying to seduce him, which led to a phallic dream.

p95

Everyone feels a rigidity in Jung's understanding of gender opposites. A reason Teich offers is that the masculine and feminine principles are not given their chance to develop polarities within themselves before they are asked to meet each other.
I think we would do well by integrity to take up Teich's suggestion; solar and lunar opposites exist within each gender and naturally hold each other's excesses in check, in the healthy regulation of the gender opposites. We might begin to move past homosexual panic in the way we relate to ourselves, recognizing lunar masculinity and solar femininity not as effeminacy or mannishness, but as complements to the solar masculinity and lunar femininity that Western patriarchy has emphasized.
Instead of training men to grow past their lunar masculinity and women to suppress their solar femininity in deference to men, we might help men balance solar and lunar masculinity, and women lunar and solar femininity, in the conscious leading of their lives.
These considerations should make us look more carefully at Jung's conception of the union of male and female opposites as wholeness.

n44 from p96 quote (below); p151

Solar conscience "extracts laws and norms" from the archetype dominant in the conscious attitude of the individual and in the collective consciousness of the society at large, speaking generally "for custom, cultural habits, social laws and expectations and for a group ethic. . . . It has a particular gift for elevating such norms into ideals of a highly abstract nature, ideals such as truthfulness, justice, purity" (Murray Stein, "A Polarity in Conscience: Solar and Lunar Aspects," Diploma thesis, C. G. Jung Institut-Zurich, 1973, pp. 22-24). Lunar conscience, by contrast "turns away from cultural and social dominants in the human environment as the source of the value-contents of conscience, to nature and instinct as their source, away from the steady certainties of right and wrong as laid down by the dominant archetype and codified in bodies of law, to the fluctuations of doubt in reflection and some odd paradoxes in certain ethical compulsions; away from a kind of conscience that would force the ego into the narrow trail of moral perfection, to a sort of conscience that insists on wholeness and completeness; away from a love of law, to a law of love" (Stein, p. 54).

p97

it appears that in our culture the anxieties attendant upon uniting male opposites are greater than those associated with the uniting of female opposites. We have assumed too long that this is a homosexual anxiety, greater in men than in women. It is really a moral anxiety, reflecting a failure on the part of solar masculinity to accept a brake on itself, and a failure on the part of lunar masculinity to honor its fear of solar masculinity by any other means than projection of that fear onto women.

p98

Men should take up this problem, not as so many think now, by activating the unclaimed portion of their solar potential that may still lie underground, but by allowing their very fear of that part of themselves to be their sign that another aspect of their maleness is in danger of violation. They should not rush Jung's goal of uniting genders within. The anima will wait for them to complete this preliminary work of meeting their phallic power with appropriate vulnerability. The anima, and also women. As Jane Austen's work signals, women have long been ready to unite the opposites within their gender. It is time for men to prepare to meet them with a similar integrity.

So all of this helps put a name on something that's always been hard to describe, and also explain stuff I've been going through.
Since the anima is shaped by a man's mother, and my mother is ISTJ, then that became the model of womanhood. She and others I know seem very lunar on the surface (caretaking, etc), yet have these strong solar elements that come out, such as a spunk that seems sexy, and a drive toward efficiency. They can become very cold, and this will be confusing to someone who falls for their lunar aspects.
My wife (ESFJ) seems to be totally lunar, at least to me.

My wife and I could never fully understand or explain the admitted appeal of a stronger, less "safe" woman to me and many other men. (The whole "men want the bitch" thing, yet I always knew I was too sensitive for them). But it's connected with what Jungian author Robert Johnson calls "the unlived life", and is made worse by my entering midlife, and moving away from the "safety" of the lunar "mother" aspects of the anima; so the more "dangerous" solar aspects become more of a curiosity.

It so far seems connected with E/I and T/F. I and F will be more lunar (receptive), and E and T will be more solar (aggressive). J/P might be more P=lunar (receptive); J=solar (aggressive), but I see where it could also be P= pragmatic (solar), J=cooperative (lunar). Not sure if there is a definite complete type correlation like this. Will have to think of everyone whose type I know.

So I identify with what these quotes about Jung say:

p96

The wholeness Jung sought initially through the mother archetype, and later through the anima, denies the split within his own masculine nature, a split that I think he was finally too proud to recognize. Today we are able to see the effects of this split as a partial failure of integrity, obvious in his personal and political dealings with other men as well as in what he asked women to carry for him. As Teich implies, Jung's failure to see the danger of not resolving first the opposites within the gender to which one belongs compromises his claim to understanding the integrity of personality as the coniunctio of developed gender principles. The moral consequences of any dissociation of either lunar or solar elements of personality are serious, for as Murray Stein was able to point out nearly twenty years ago, there is "a polarity in conscience" between "solar and lunar aspects."[SUP]44[/SUP]


As Stein demonstrated, patriarchal Western civilization is used to imagining these two styles of conscience sitting down together as father and mother debating how to discipline the children, and Jung's idea of the coniunctio has made this parental colloquy into a conversation which we should all strive to achieve within. But if we are to realize an ideal of integrity that is appropriate to a post-patriarchal age, the masculine and feminine principles must each be allowed to become less monolithic by developing the dialogue of solar and lunar conscience within each principle. The gender principles need to find the opposites within themselves before they turn to meet each other.
It is just this sense of internal twinship, of a comfortable tension between a solar masculinity that is aggressive and a lunar
masculinity that is receptive, that I miss in Jung. Indeed, as Teich has pointed out, Jung seems to project his lunar masculinity onto women, seeing them as natural receivers or containers. Teich's formulation validates and helps me to understand a sense I have had that Jung had difficulty sustaining receptivity to the ideas of other men; he could not relinquish control enough to be more than illuminated by another man's solar energy.

(Paralleling this, a person I was discussing Jung with pointed out that a woman's animus should really be connected with "eros", like a man's anima, instead of "logos" the way Jung assigned it. Again, Jung was projecting patriarchical assumptions onto women, but this basically followed society of the time anyway).
I've always felt that my solar masculinity was basically emasculated. Not because of any homosexual molestation, but more indirectly, through life circumstances, especially with a condition such as AS, with all the problems it causes with people. Yet since life seemed, by the process of elimination, to be forcing me into a lunar role, which I saw as "weak" and "feminine", I've resisted that as well. (So what does that leave me with? Just trying to gain some sense of solar power in the way most possible; from behind a computer screen, like in arguing Christian doctrine and politics online for years; but it just leads to burnout).
So I found that I have this wish to live vicariously through the "solar" aspect of women, and reap the niceties of their lunar aspects. But it just can't be done.
So I need to find my own "gold" to own, but I just don't know how to do it at this point.

Anyway, I thought the concept was very interesting, and explains more about the male/female dynamic, and a direction in growth.
Has anyone else ever heard of this, and does it help anyone understand things?
 
Top