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Soul-makers
“But it is not only men who have accepted the patriarchal version of reality. Women also have been taught to idealize masculine values at the expense of the feminine side of life. Many women have spent their lives in a constant feeling of inferiority because they felt that to be feminine was “second best.” Women have been trained that only masculine activities, thinking, power, and achieving have any real value. Thus Western woman finds herself in the same psychological dilemma as Western man: developing a one-sided, competitive mastery of the masculine qualities at the expense of her feminine side. …
When a man develops the strengths of his inner feminine, it actually completes his maleness. He becomes more fully male as he becomes more fully human. … His masculine strength is augmented and balanced by his feminine capacity to be related, to express his affection and his feelings.
When one side of human nature grows out of balance with the other, it becomes a tyranny in the soul. It drives its complementary opposite into the unconscious….the greatest force in the psychic universe is the demand for completion, for wholeness, for balance. The feminine will return.”
~Robert A. Johnson
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….the American dream has…become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic…
