Thread by @schlomouomo

In 1951, Toni Wolff—first a student, then a collaborator, and ultimately a romantic partner of C.G. Jung—published 'Strukturformen der weiblichen Psyche', in which she describes four archetypal forms of the female psyche, across two axes.

Wolff’s archetypes are not personality types or fixed roles. They are structural potentials within the feminine psyche. Every woman may express aspects of all four, but typically one or two dominate her psychological development.

Core virtues:
The Mother archetype's gift is unconditional love and generativity.
The Amazon offers courage, discipline, and autonomy.
The Hetaira brings emotional intelligence, charm, and relational depth.
The Medial Woman channels intuition, vision, and spiritual insight.

Each archetype carries a "shadow"—a term coined by Jung to describe the unconscious, repressed aspects of the psyche. When unacknowledged, these shadows distort the archetype’s gifts, leading to emotional imbalance, projection, or compulsive behaviour.

Remarkably, these shadows appear to underpin what is now termed wokeness. They also suggest that the movement originates from patterns of feminine behaviour. Let us examine each archetype separately—and the shadow with which it is associated.

The Woke Mother engages in public displays of outrage or virtue that serve the self more than the cause, and treats groups as perpetually fragile or voiceless. A special case is Transhausen by Proxy—like Munchausen, a perversion of mothering.

The Woke Hetaira uses guilt, shame, or outrage to silence dissent or demand allegiance, framing disagreement as personal harm and making critique feel like betrayal. This is the fundamental archetype underpinning cancel culture.

The Woke Amazon engages in militant activism, enforcing ideological purity with aggression and justifying it through a sense of righteousness—dividing everything into oppressed versus oppressor. This is the core archetype underpinning the social justice warrior persona.

The Woke Medial Woman speaks in symbols, dreams, or esoteric language, yet lacks grounding in reality. She sees herself as a chosen vessel, claiming privileged access to truth. This is the core archetype underpinning luxury beliefs—of which gender ideology is a prime example.

Feminism, especially in its second and third waves, laid the groundwork for many core tenets of wokeness: identity politics, systemic critique, and moral activism. The damage it has done is nothing short of remarkable—and its alignment with the shadows outlined above is striking.

unroll @threadreaderapp