Women and the Working Group
Kathleen Kehoe
There are at present a number of psychological working groups made up entirely of women. It is sometimes asked: why women only? Actually, there are several reasons for this; and it may be useful to set them out, very briefly.
The first is purely practical. As matters stand, for every one able and responsible man wanting to take part in a psychological working group, there are ten able and responsible women. This means that, if every group were to have equal numbers of men and women, some 90 per cent of the women would be left out. Such striking disproportion might in itself seem to be sufficient answer, but it does not get to the heart of the matter. The essential reason for the all-women working group is that, when it comes to psychological exploration, women have special aptitude and special responsibilities.
Generally speaking, women are by nature more aware of the other side of consciousness than are men. This awareness may be dim, diffuse, unformulated, but it is usually present and acknowledged. Women are extraordinarily alive to inner motivations (even the unconscious ones) in other people, especially other women; and seldom altogether blind to their own. When psychological phenomena are described to them, women will readily recognize something of the kind in their own life-experience: particularly the type of situation or reaction that men often tend to regard as “irrational” or “emotional” and to dismiss accordingly. A woman will see more in it than that—though probably she cannot say what. One of the great values of the all-women working group is that it puts the responsibility squarely on the women themselves to sort out their experience in a meaningful fashion. They cannot just leave it to the men, as they would otherwise be liable to do.
Besides their natural awareness, women have the necessary courage to confront the other side of consciousness. They are not afraid of looking into the hidden depths. In fact, their lack of fear can sometimes amount to foolhardiness and to underestimation of the very real dangers. But, as in the field of outer exploration, whether in the realm of ideas or in the polar regions, without courage nothing happens; the journey is never begun.
A further point is that women on the whole seem able to acquire, as if by nature, some or all of the psychological methods of inner perception: the understanding of dreams; active imagination; painting or writing from the unconscious; the direct approach to the entities encountered the other side of consciousness. Their diffuse awareness is here an advantage, since turning inward and “letting things happen” is by no means foreign to them. It is the effort to seize and to focus upon what happens that they find more difficult—capacities that come more easily to the man. But here again, the working group impels them to make the effort to hold what has come to them, and see what it may mean.
Also, in their discussions, a women’s group goes directly to practical examples in everyday personal life and relationships. There seems to be a natural ability to reach back into actual experience in their own lives, rather than remaining in the abstract.
Over and above these basic reasons for working groups composed wholly of women, there are certain psychological problems and possibilities for which women have special responsibility. One of these problem-and-possibility areas is that of the woman’s latent and undeveloped masculine side: the side still in the un-conscious. This, masculine side has two main characteristics: a driving energy; and a capacity for discernment, for discrimination, for focused awareness—an awareness having that sharpness and intensity which the consciousness of a woman does not usually have. These characteristics are, with most women, repressed, unlived, dissociated; but because of this, all the more dangerously present.
When the masculine side remains undeveloped, one or other of two highly undesirable situations is likely to arise. In the one, the woman loses contact with these inner capacities—projecting them, perhaps, on a man or on men generally; or just cutting off from any possible exercise of them. When this happens, she becomes completely one-sided, and for drive and discrimination feels herself to be dependent on other people. In the other situation, the undeveloped masculine side works through the woman compulsively so that she is run by it, and becomes the kind of person who manages everyone and everything. Sometimes both these situations occur, alternately, so that a woman is cut off one moment, run the next. The great possibility opened up by the working group is that, through deeper insight and effort, women may be able to come to terms with their masculine side.
A second problem, and possibility for development, arises from the woman’s key position as mother, or—more broadly—as the person most closely concerned with the growth (physical, mental and spiritual) of the young. This unquestionably lays a tremendous responsibility on women. Because everyone has been a child, and to a great extent still carries that child along throughout life, the influence of the “mother”—for good or ill—is immense. Psychologists trace a large proportion of mental sickness, or delinquency, of failure to develop, directly to the mother-situation. And it is by no means uncommon, in ordinary everyday observation, to see women who—while regarding themselves as the embodiment of motherly love—smother and devour their children, friends, relatives and anyone else who comes within reach.
Women who have anything to do with young people—as well as all those who value relationship between human beings old or young—have therefore an urgent need to sort out their own internal pattern of relationship, particularly the fundamental mother-child relationship as it has formed in their own life experience. There is no psychological area in greater need of practical attention than this. For inner patterns tend to perpetuate themselves from one generation to another; the child who is devoured, no less than the child who is deprived of love, becomes a problem-personality in its turn.
This whole question of relationship is directly linked to a final point in regard to women: the most important of all and correspondingly difficult to express. This is that women are deeply concerned with love. They value love and wish to be loving persons, realizing that in this lies a great creative possibility. But few women go through life without seeing, at some point, that the love involved in their closest relationships can be possessive and demanding. Even if a woman does not see this in herself, she will hardly fail to see it in other women. Sometimes, even at its best, love of family and of friends tends to be entirely personal and to contain a subtle underlying ego-centeredness, whether or not this is recognized. Love, in its truest sense, needs to go beyond the ego, beyond the merely personal; to be a drawing to wholeness within the person and between people: relationship linked to the creative source.
The women’s working group is here relevant in that, where the group holds and comes alive, a special fellowship forms; one that is neither highly personal nor demanding, but that gives a sense of companionship on the way, in mutual respect and joint endeavour.
Experience thus far has shown that the women’s working groups are not concerned with speculative theorizing, or with esoteric ideas as such. Of necessity, in seeking greater wholeness of spirit, they have to do things in the women’s way—which links always on to life. Provided the group is “centred down” effectively, the tendency all the time is to keep closely to reality. Psychological insights are immediately applied to specific instances, to observation of people (including oneself) and to situations where these things are actually happening every day. The question: “What does this mean in factual, human terms?” is constantly present with those taking part, and is a necessary prelude to the next vital question: “What can be done about it?”
Kathleen Kehoe works with the International Study Centre of Applied Psychology, founded by P. W. Martin, at Oxted, Surrey, England. Her paper in this issue was written on behalf of the Study Centre.