Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 1

The theorist of the psyche Carl Jung discovered that, buried in the unconscious mind, we all have templates for images and symbols that crop up in fantasy, dream, and myth. These templates are the archetypes. We all have the same set of archetypes. They are energetic. After perhaps biding their time for years or decades, they can exert their powers in mysterious, numinous ways. They make us what we are, deep down, and they can change us as well.

In my recent Jungian Wholeness series, I've investigated Jung's map of the psyche. My investigations have led me to believe that Jung was right about the power of the archetypes. However, the books I have read and commented on have not made it their business to describe and discuss all the archetypes Jung identified. In the last day or so, I happened to run across one that I have been hitherto unaware of: the Androgyne.

And I have suddenly realized that this one is a powerful mover and shaker in my own life, and very likely has been as long all my life. Hence this post represents, for me, a sort of coming out ... if only to myself: I seem to be sort of inwardly androgynous.


The circumstances under which this realization comes to me has been roundabout. Yesterday I read an opinion piece by George Weigel in the Catholic Review, available online as Marriage, civility, persecution. "In the current election cycle," Weigel writes, there is "a full-court press to redefine marriage, and to compel others to accept that redefinition."

A measure in on the ballot in California, he says, that would repudiate (or uphold) the recent decision of the California Supreme Court to allow gay marriage. Weigel sees that controversy as part of a burgeoning tide of acceptance for gay marriage that threatens the Catholic view "that the sacramental love of man and woman, expressed conjugally, is an icon of the interior life of God."

I'm Catholic, and I'm not gay, but I have a problem with Weigel's sort of thinking. At the same time, I recognize that he and others who feel that way have a coherent argument to the effect that homosexuality and gay marriage are properly opposed by the Church.

Such thoughts lead me to wonder why, then, am I on the opposite side from Weigel and other religious conservatives. I imagine that here is an area where my Jungian orientation puts me in direct conflict with religious traditionalists ... so, I ask myself, what did Jung actually say about homosexuality?


After Googling "Jung homosexuality" and looking at a great many of the hits I got, I came to the conclusion that the answer is, "Not much."

I found that there are surprisingly few pointers to actual writings by Jung about homosexuality in the online "literature." I did find many references to a book by Robert H. Hopcke called Jung, Jungians & Homosexuality, but so many of these seemed to disagree with Hopcke that I'll set them aside for now.

Other than those, I found slim pickings. There are some references that suggest that male homosexuals are under the sway of the Anima — the archetype representing "the inner feminine side of a man," according to this glossary. But others said the archetype of the Androgyne may be the one that is dominant, instead, in homosexuals.


An androgyne, or hermaphrodite, has the sex organs of both sexes. That's the literal meaning. A small number of humans are born that way, and usually they are subjected to surgery to eliminate their androgyny.

I'm not physically androgynous. I'm inwardly androgynous ... which seems to mean that an archetype that expresses itself in dream images, religious art, etc., as an androgyne or hermaphrodite is somehow dominant within me. This would seem to be Jung's Androgyne archetype at work.

Yet I'm heterosexual. I'm not gay, not even bisexual. It is women, and only women, that turn me on.

At the same time, I have always felt a stronger kinship with women than men. However, this does not mean that I want to be a woman, or am interested in being transgendered. Nor do I have the prettified outward appearance of, say, someone like David Bowie. As I say, this is something I experience inwardly and have never been able to put a name to until now.


And now for the stuff that take real guts for me to say right out loud ... so I say it real fast and get it over with.

A 61-year-old man, I've never successfully had coitus with a woman (much less with another man, an act I've never been inclined to). I'm unmarried and my romantic involvements with women — there have been only a few — have never culminated in successful intercourse.

I have an abnormal interest in women's "plumbing" — always have. "A tendency to derive sexual pleasure from the sight or thought of urination," is how the dictionary defines urolagnia, or urophilia. I've had that going on in me since at least when I was a teen.

(I remember my high-school graduation — from an all-boys prep school — was held at a church away from the campus. I arrived there with my parents and my girlfriend Lynn in tow. Lynn tried unsuccessfully to find a bathroom before the ceremony. Afterward, Lynn and I drove off in one car, my parents in another. Lynn said she'd have to stop at a gas station, so I pulled up by the restrooms of one while she went in. There was a small frosted-glass window in the wall, and I noticed that I could watch Lynn's blurry figure as she dropped out of view (sitting on the toilet) then popped back up after a minute or so. I found it gave me an erection to imagine her activities.)

I feel I also have an unnatural interest in the clitoris — want to know exactly what it looks like, how it is formed, how it reacts to sexual arousal and stimulation, etc. (Did you know that the visible clitoris is just the tip of the iceberg? The rest of it, equivalent to the shaft of a man's penis, is hidden.)

Add to that what perhaps may seem a more "normal" male interest in the erectile capacity of a woman's nipples, and you have a formula for being intensely interested in how a woman's body works sexually. So I'll just say it: it is as if I have a "woman's body" inside my male body, trying to assert itself.

It is as if I were indeed one of those who are born with both sets of organs, and my female organs were removed at birth ... but, psychologically, my "female half" wasn't.

It is as if I were a candidate for a sex-change operation, but if I had one, I would be a lesbian! (But I would really miss my penis, to which I am irrevocably attached!)