Mary Esther Harding

Mary Esther Harding (born August 5, 1888 in Shrewsbury , † May 4, 1971 in London ) was an English doctor , psychotherapist and writer .

Life

Mary Ester Harding was born in Shrewsbury in 1888, the fourth of six daughters in an educated family, her father was a dentist. She graduated from the London School of Medicine and received her MD in 1914. As a woman, she was only allowed to work at the Royal Free Hospital in London. During the First World War she served in hospitals and did research on diphtheria. As a result of these studies, she developed diphtheria herself . After her recovery, she opened a practice in London. There she rented a room to the analyst Mary Bell, who introduced her to the work of Carl Gustav Jung . After studying Jung's book Changes and Symbols of Libido , she decided to move to Switzerland and study his theories with a small group of other students in Jung's house in Küsnacht . In 1923 she moved to New York City with Eleanor Bertine and Kristine Mann and there they opened a practice for analytical psychology together . In the following years they traveled regularly to Zurich to continue studying with Jung. In the following years she became one of the most prominent exponents of Jungian psychology in the United States . After her death, notes of encounters with Jung were found under her papers.

In 1936 she founded the first American Jungian Society in New York together with Kristine Mann and Eleanor Bertine . She was also the first director of education at the New York Institute for Analytical Psychology .

She died on May 4, 1971 in a hotel in London.

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In her book Women's Mysteries , she connects the psyche of women with the moon. She argues that the modern woman is not in touch with the deepest, most instinctive and positive roots of her own feminine principle (as distinct from the feminine principle of the male psyche). The woman has turned her loyalty to the supposed male strength, reason and the associated destructive rule over nature and people. From this she draws the conclusion that the future of humans depends on the balance between the feminine Eros and the masculine Logos. In the book she also analyzes the moon goddess and her non-rational, dark and yet redeeming side of life that she represents. This makes the book interesting for religious studies on goddesses or the female deity. Women's Mysteries was published in 1936 and is considered her most important work. But it is also stylistically difficult, as the archetypal, mythical and dreamlike materials are not smoothly integrated into their own thoughts about the meaning and application. Jung herself asked Harding to process the material better before publishing the book.

In her later works, Harding emphasized the Jungian construct, a religious urge that emerges in the second half of life. To spread Jungian thinking in America, the most important work was Psychic Energy , published in 1947 : Its Source and Its Transformation . Harding's work did not get the recognition it needed because its religious impulses contradicted American psychology schools and because her writings on women countered the feminist tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s. The women in Jungian schools were also more likely to be pupils than independent thinkers. Harding, on the other hand, was an independent thinker who is described by other Jungians as a woman with an overdeveloped male side, opinion-conscious, dogmatic and assertive.

Through her books she has succeeded in making Jung's ideas accessible to laypeople. Her studies of women cultivated the memory of the lost female deity. She systematized and synthesized myths about the special biology and psyche of women. Her studies were among the first psychological studies to look at women from a woman's point of view. However, Harding also adhered to the male Jungian ideology that thinking is less natural for a woman, although she needs to develop this ability. Kinship is also more endemic to the female psyche than the male. It reflects on its epoch and transcends it in some crucial concepts.

Appreciation

American event artist and feminist Judy Chicago immortalized Mary Esther Harding in the list of 999 women at her dinner party in the 1970s . Her name is there, but in the spelling "Mary Esther Karding" in gold letters on one of the white, handmade, triangular tiles that cover the floor. Together with other writers, she is assigned to the symbolic table setting of Virginia Woolf .

literature

• The Circulatory Failure of Diphtheria: A thesis for the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the University of London , University of London Press, 1920
• Woman's Mysteries. Ancient and modern: A psychological interpretation of the feminine principle as portrayed in myth, story, and dreams (London: Longmans, Green 1936; rev'd ed., New York: Pantheon 1955)
• The Way of All Women , Putnam Publishing, New York, 1970 ISBN 1-57062-627-8
• Psychic Energy, its source and goal , New York, Pantheon, 1947, Bollingen Series No. 10
• Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation , foreword by CG Jung, 1963, ISBN 0-691-01790-5
• The Parental Image ;: Its injury and reconstruction; a study in analytical psychology , Published by Putnam for the CG Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (1965)
• The I and the Not-I , Bollingen: January 1, 1974, ISBN 0-691-01796-4
• The Value and Meaning of Depression , Analytical Psychology Club, June, 1985, ISBN 0-318-04660-1
• A short review of Dr. Jung's article Redemption ideas in alchemy
• The mother archetype and its functioning in life , Analytical Psychology Club of New York City, 1939
• Afterthoughts on The Pilgrim , Analytical Psychology Club of New York, 1957
• Inward Journey , Sigo; 2nd edition, October, 1991, ISBN 0-938434-61-6
• Way of All Women: a Psychological Interpretation , HarperCollins, January 1, 1975, ISBN 0-609-03996-2
• Journey Into Self , Longman Green & Co., 1956
• Woman's Mysteries: Ancient & Modern , Longmans Green & Co., 1935
• The Way of All Women , Longman Green & Co., 1933

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CG Jung: Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process: Notes of CG Jung's Seminars on Wolfgang Pauli's Dreams . Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-691-19194-2 , pp. 13 ( books.google.de ).
2. ^ Carl Gustav Jung: CG Jung in conversation: interviews, speeches, encounters . Daimon, 1986, ISBN 978-3-85630-022-7 , pp. 10 ( books.google.de ).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Harding, Mary Esther - Encyclopedia.com. In: encyclopedia.com. Accessed December 30, 2019 . 
4. ^ Brooklyn Museum: Mary Esther Karding. In: brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved November 3, 2019 .