The Female Trickster

The Mask That Reveals, Post-Jungian and Postmodern Psychological Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Culture

Ricki Stefanie Tannen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317724339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The Female Trickster presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture.

Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women's imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include:

• imagination and metaphor
• the traditional trickster
• law and the imagination
• humour: Eros using logos
• the postmodern female trickster.

This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies.

Part I

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Introducing the female Trickster

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Chapter 1

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Introduction

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A pile of rocks ceases to be a rockpile
when someone contemplates it with the
idea of a cathedral in mind.

Anonymous

A female Trickster is among us. She stands, visible, at the crossroads of feminism, humor, depth psychology and postmodernism, ready for us to unpack her bag of multiple meanings. This postmodern female Trickster possesses the characteristics which define all Tricksters. She manifests the capacity to transform both an individual life and the collective consciousness of the culture she becomes visible to. She appears at the crossroads in a culture's psychic development, always cloaked in the appropriate drag. As with all Tricksters, she is not recognized as the transformative shape-shifter of the unconscious she is. Like all Tricksters, she makes us laugh.

Trickster energy is the archetypal energy of individuation – for a culture as well as an individual – and can not be ignored, yet like all Tricksters, this female Trickster is not recognized as the shape-shifter of the unconscious that she is. Like all Tricksters, humor is the energy which propels her movement through the collective consciousness yet unlike previous Tricksters she is embodied as a female who refuses to be a victim of a collective consciousness which restricts female psychological authority, bodily autonomy, and physical agency. Like all archetypal energies, this Trickster is a new incarnation of an eternal verity but this female Trickster brings revolution and not the revolt of previous Trickster incarnations.

In this book, I investigate the mystery of what happened 4,000 years ago to this female Trickster when she was legally and socially excluded from the western collective consciousness, and what has occurred in the last 400 years which has triggered the appearance of the female Trickster in western collective culture. In Part I, “Introducing the female Trickster,” I explore the synergistic phenomena of female sleuth literature and the simultaneous emergence of critical discourses in feminism, ethnicity, gender and postcolonial studies. In Part II, “Calling upon the ancestors,” I investigate the ways in which women's imaginal realms were enclosed within patriarchal consciousness 4,000 years ago. I analyze what happens when the imagination is legally enclosed, and what is necessary from a psychological perspective for a flowering of the autonomous psyche through the imaginal realms and metaphor. In Part III, “Honoring the traditions,” I dissect the variations of traditional Trickster manifestation demonstrating how Trickster utilizes the erotic energy of humor to integrate the dark and disassociated aspects of culture. In Part IV, “Re/ storation,” I focus on women's humor, and recent sightings of the female Trickster in other media as an example of Trickster's constellation as the divine comedy of being.

Definitions

Throughout this book I use words as terms of art and for those readers who do not have a Jungian psychoanalytic background, I offer the following definitions as guides.

Archetype

Jung in Man and his Symbols found an archetype to be a “tendency” to form representations from a motif “that can vary in great details without losing their basic pattern.” (Jung and Franz 1964: 67). Marion Woodman's articulation of archetypal energy captures the essence of my use:

If we accept, as Jung believed, that there are what he called “archetypes” in our unconscious, then we can read myths and fairy tales with an open mind. If we do not accept the existence of archetypes, then we have no way of explaining the superhuman surges of energy that magnetize us toward someone or something – or repel us. The word does not matter. What matters is our recognition of the power of these energy fields in our unconscious; they can dictate our destruction (if our ego is weak) or they can be our greatest gift in life… we project images onto these energy fields. The goddess may be the Virgin Mary, eclipsed by Lilith, eclipsed by Julia Roberts.

(Woodman and Dickson 1996: 126)

Archetypes as I use the term are images from the unconscious that energize the individual and the collective, and can be found in any imaginative cultural artifact such as stories, myths, films, and cultural pop icons.

Reading as active imagination

Reading is a process of active imagination which is capable of changing how an individual's imagination functions, thus it has the capacity to transform consciousness. The active imaginal reading process is a dialogic relationship between text and reader which can transform both the surface and the deep structural levels of the psyche.

Psyche

When I refer to psyche I am speaking about the “totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious” (Jung Collected Works (CW) 6: par 797).¹ Psyche thus includes the entire continuum of psychological activities and processes; in the individual it can be glimpsed from the way the soul manifests itself in conscious personality (ego) to the deepest unconscious realms where numinous energy resides.² In the collective culture, psyche manifests itself in cultural artifacts and historical movements. Jung thought that the psyche was a self-regulating mechanism which sought to keep itself in balance. When the psyche, whether individual or world, is out of balance another corresponding energy will be constellated for integration, thus restoring balance to the psyche.

Liminality

Limen is Latin for threshold. Victor Turner described liminality as the psychic space where new energies could manifest before being transported into the consciousness of a community (Turner 1967: 106). Murray Stein elaborated upon Turner's thesis, explaining that liminality represents

a cultural, social psychological interstitial space between fixed identities and “locations” which predominates during transitional periods in the life-cycle.

(Stein 1980: 2)

John Beebe elaborates upon the concept in relation to the Trickster:

Archetypalists speak of a love of inhabiting spaces between psycho social regions established by convention as “liminality” and “liminality” is a hallmark of the Trickster.

(Beebe 1981: 34)

Trickster makes her appearance, whether as female sleuth, pop icon, court jester, or clown in places and spaces which are unattended to by mainstream culture.

Authority, autonomy and agency

Authority

Authority is not related to the concept of power as over or against another. Authority means that an individual is the genuine creator of imagery produced within that individual's own imaginal realms. Authority is synonymous with psychological health in terms of being able to maintain a stable identity while inhabiting a liminal terrain. The word authority has the same root as authentic and author (aut); the Greek word authentikos was a derivative of the Greek noun authentes, the doer or master which was formed from autos meaning self and the base hentes, worker or doer. The word shows itself to be a Trickster, as the dictionary definition of authority shape-shifted from its “original meaning of ‘authoritative’ to its current sense of ‘genuine’ in the late 18^th century” (Ayto 1991: 44).

Autonomy

The word autonomy has the same root as authority (aut) and having bodily autonomy means feeling free to choose your intentional behavior. This sense of self-determination and self-governance is a psychological condition precedent to successful identity formation. For women, this requires absolute control over their procreative capacities. “Expressing and supporting one's decisions with responsible action, ethical values, and clear language is a skill that can be developed only through conscious understanding and effort,” says Polly Young-Eisendrath, (1999: 186) and I agree. Marion Woodman agrees that autonomy and authority are condition precedents to successful identity formation:

We know we can change ourselves when we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for ourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our inner work, to accept our own darkness and work towards consciousness, the situation will change. We begin to emanate a different energy, one that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.

(Woodman and Dickson 1996: 66)

This “different energy” Woodman refers to which “exudes” autonomy and authority is the energy of a woman's psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. “She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience” (Woodman 1996: 134). This is the kind of autonomy which (some fortunate) women can develop in the twenty-first century because their creativity is not tied exclusively to their procreative role. While Woodman talks of the mother, the virgin and the crone, the female Trickster as shape-shifter can appear in any and all of these forms or none at all.

Agency

The word agency comes from the Greek root gen meaning potent, convincing and compelling, as in a cogent argument. Agency is used in its sense of potency, as a mode of action and as the means to employ a mode of action (Moore and Moore 1997a: 6). Agency is based in the sense of movement as action and also as being capable of acting on others' behalf, as in how a detective agency is a business or service authorized to act for others. Inherent in this use of agency is the presumption that one who has agency also has the power and freedom of physical and psychological movement within their culture.

What is a Trickster and is the female Trickster really different?

Traditional scholarship has consistently employed similar descriptive terms when discussing archetypal Trickster energy: individuality, satire, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, mediation and unity of opposing forces (e.g., Gates 1988: 6). Tricksters preside over moments of passage, rupture, and transformation. Tricksters appear to model change and possibilities. Jung found in Trickster the self, the individuation process and the collective unconscious:

(1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures.

(2) He is both material and spiritual.

(3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa.

(4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive Trickster, and God's reflection in physical nature.

(5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum.

(6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious.³

(Jung CW 13: par 284)

The postmodern female Trickster is different from the traditional Trickster

The most significant difference can be seen in the postmodern embodiment of the archetypal Trickster energy in a female body with psychological authority, physical agency, and bodily autonomy. Another major difference in the postmodern female Trickster is how humor and irony are deployed as strategic subversive and transformative devices aimed at revolution and not just revolt. Another important aspect of the postmodern female Trickster is how her cultural and psychological revolution is accomplished through social work which takes place concomitantly with the construction of an identity which refuses to be a victim. These differences in characteristics between the way that Trickster has been imagined in the past and in postmodernity are directly attributable to the imagination of women imagining and sharing with other women images of women with authority, agency and autonomy.

The body

If traditionally Trickster has been said to include all the possibilities, then what could be different about the female Trickster other than her embodiment in a female body? The imagery and narrative of the Trickster has always mirrored the culture within which the energy manifests. Traditional cultural norms overemphasize sexual determinants of birth and under-emphasize the process of identity formation. Traditionally, identity has been fixed and stable, depending upon what body your psyche happened to be embodied within. In traditional narratives, Tricksters' refusal to recognize the power over paradigm has meant that Trickster energy manifested with a bodily fluidity called shape-shifting, but images embedded in traditional narratives, even if they might shape-shift from one to another, always ended up being male in the final image. This was because only the elite male body was permitted legal freedom of movement. Now our Trickster narratives and imagery can be embodied in a female, because females are no longer (in western civilization and democratic societies) legally restricted from physical movement. Postmodernity has brought us a dawning consciousness where the cultural body and the physical embodiments of consciousness can exhibit the fluidity that was found in the Trickster of the Winnebago cycle (see Radin 1972; Hynes and Doty 1993), but now the body can be imaged as strong, self-reliant, and female. This embodiment in the female is precisely the point because previously a female body, by definition, excluded the possibilities of movement which was one of the defining characteristics of Trickster. Yet, the definition itself of Trickster, as Henry Louis Gates posited correctly, represents the “indeterminacy e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introducing the female Trickster
• Part II Calling upon the ancestors
• Part III Honoring the traditions
• Part IV Re/storation
• Bibliography
• Index