Resurrecting Medusa: Facing the Fierce Feminine

Abstract

This hermeneutic study explores the literary landscapes of epic myth and depth psychology to illuminate the Greek Gorgon Medusa as an autonomous figure of myth. Her archetypal symbolism represents a foundational substrate for the West’s relation to and understanding of the feminine. This study asks what aspects of the archetypal feminine are denigrated and demonized through their symbolic association with Medusa, and considers whether present-day ego-consciousness is capable of achieving rapprochement with and integration of any or all of those long-denigrated aspects of the archetypal feminine that she symbolizes.
To achieve this research objective, the study explores depth psychological interpretations of Medusa which anchor her symbolic meaning in an orientation to myth that understands the dragon fight motif as a depiction of the phenomenology of emergent consciousness. In this theoretical framework, the heroic ego is personified as the demi-god hero Perseus who vanquishes Medusa, whose monstrous and threatening personification expresses the archaic psyche’s terror of the state of unconsciousness from which it had emancipated itself. Neumann’s 1954 amplification of this theoretical metaphor asserts that the ego, in its waning participation mystique with the womb of the unconscious, experiences its own progression toward consciousness as an aggressive rejection emitting from its cosmic mother. This existential experience of rejection, according to the theory, inflicts the wound of the archetypal Terrible Mother upon the new-born ego, rendering the relation between masculine consciousness and the archetypally feminine unconscious forever adversarial from the first moment of consciousness. This study surmises that masculine consciousness’s projection of its own differentiating aggression upon the archetypal feminine is a necessary and inevitable concomitant of the phenomenology of its emergence.
The study’s conclusion outlines a pedagogical framework which offers a potential contribution to the expansion of individual consciousness through the recognition and release of negative projections upon the archetypal feminine. This research contributes to the field of depth psychotherapy by suggesting a means to foster expanded consciousness through integration of those denied and demonized aspects of the archetypal feminine which are attributed to Medusa’s symbolic valence.