Addiction to Perfection
Published in 1982, Marion Woodman’s book Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, has a title that resembles those of Woodman’s subsequent books, including The Pregnant Virgin, The Ravaged Bridegroom, and The Maiden King, among others. A Jungian analyst when not writing books, Woodman—born Marion Jean Boa in Ontario in 1928—was very interested in the unconscious mind and the imbalance of masculine and feminine energy that results in various physical and psychological illnesses. Much of her writing dealt with the phenomenon of eating disorders in particular, as the majority of her psychoanalysis patients suffered from anorexia, bulimia, or binge-eating disorder. She herself had anorexia until in her 40’s, which is when she traveled from Ontario to Zürich to train as an analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute. In Addiction to Perfection, she asserts that eating disorders are just “symptoms of a malaise that is general in Western society,” and that they point to deeper “sexual and spiritual problems.”
Woodman was diagnosed with uterine cancer in November of 1993, and she documented the following two years of cancer treatment in her journal. Those writings were published in book form in 2000, titled Bone: Dying Into Life. Given what a potent symbol of femininity the uterus is, and how Woodman’s work focused so much on what she called “the conscious feminine” and the importance of cultivating it in all people, regardless of gender, it’s ironic that her uterus would come under attack like that. But she survived, and went on to live over two more decades, eventually succumbing to dementia and dying in a long-term care facility in her hometown of London, Ontario, on July 9th, 2018. She was 89 years old.
=
I first heard about Marion Woodman when I was a graduate student at Goddard College, studying mental health counseling. One of my mentors there, Wendy Philips, suggested I check out Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection and see how it might inform one of the papers I was writing, and my work with eating disorders in general. At the time—I was living in Albuquerque, so this was 2013-2014—I had an internship at an eating disorders treatment center, where I helped facilitate thrice-weekly intensive outpatient treatment groups.
Having reread Addiction to Perfection some eight years later for this episode, I feel as I felt about the book the first time around: it’s intense! Woodman deals a lot in symbols and archetypes and myth and witches and gods and goddesses—all characteristics of territory I’m not entirely comfortable in. But there’s also a lot for someone like me to sink her teeth into, so I do feel I can talk about the book without being able to wield all of its more arcane elements. I will at least say, though, that the subtitle, “The Still Unravished Bride,” is borrowed from the first line of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and for Woodman’s purposes is referring to the maiden Andromeda. In Greek mythology, Andromeda, daughter of the King Cepheus, is chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the sea monster that Poseidon has sent as punishment for Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia, boasting that she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs that often accompany Poseidon, god of the sea (and also storms, earthquakes, and horses). Perseus ends up releasing Andromeda from her chains, afterwards marrying her and taking her to Greece, where she reigns as his queen.
Woodman compares the sea in this myth, to the unconscious mind, and so the monster coming for Andromeda is a monster of the unconscious, and she says that Andromeda is “the forgotten one” in our culture, the positive feminine energy that we must learn to love and allow to find her own deepest passion. Instead of focusing on Andromeda and unchaining her from the rock, Woodman says, we have been in the thrall of Athena—the efficient, stern disciplined goddess of war and wisdom—and also Medusa, one of the three monstrous Gorgons, typically described as winged human females with living venomous snakes instead of hair. Woodman says that the more we try to be Athena—driven as we are to do our best at school, on the job, and in our relationships—the more of Medusa’s “voracious repressed energy” builds up within us. Chogyam Trungpa says something similar in his book Meditation In Action, which I explored in my last blog post. He says that to deny any aspect of ourselves is to attempt perfection, and when we try to become perfect in this “one-sided way,” then the “same amount of imperfection is building up on the other side.”
Our addiction to perfection—the byproduct of our patriarchal culture’s emphasis on specialization and, well, perfection—is, according to Woodman, at the root of all addictions. And if I’m reading her correctly, the addiction to perfection is actually an addiction to masculinity, or the masculine principle, which is primarily goal-oriented, rational, and hyper-focused on efficiency. In order to experience more well-being, we need not eliminate the masculine principle, but balance it with the feminine.
Where gender and sexuality are concerned, we’ve evolved quite a bit since 1982, so for most people today it probably goes without saying that “masculine” and “feminine,” especially when seen through a Jungian lens, have nothing to do with one’s biology. Some of the most masculine people I know are women, and I know some men who have a lot of the feminine principle at work in them. In the world of public figures, two random examples of the latter pop into my mind: Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Fireside Chat on the energy crisis, for which he wore a sweater and encouraged all Americans to do the same instead of cranking up their oil-fueled electric heat; and Bruce Lee’s oft-quoted advice to “be water, my friend.” In Addiction to Perfection, Woodman provides as an example of the masculine and feminine being in healthy balance, her friend Tony, with whom she liked to go sailing. I’ve never been on a sailboat, but I gather that the art of sailing requires that one be willing to go with whatever the wind and water present at any given moment. It requires the masculine traits of strength and perseverance, along with knowledge of technique and the ability to use that technique toward a certain aim, and it also requires the feminine traits of letting go and being able to trust one’s body, intuition, and environment.
My invitation to you, dear reader, is to notice how you respond internally to the words “masculine” and “feminine.” I’ll admit that notice my mind wants to automatically associate “masculine” with strong and “feminine” with weak, even though I know, intellectually, that femininity is not synonymous with weakness. If you identify as male and I say to you, “How do you feel towards your feminine side?”, what comes up for you? Are you inclined to deny, in a knee-jerk way, that you have a feminine side at all? Or if you can acknowledge its existence, are you ashamed of it? If you identify as female, consider the same question. And also how you feel towards your masculine side. I think it’s a good thing to get curious about.
It does seem like, even today, we’d be better off using less loaded terms to describe these psychological elements. Carl Jung referred to the unconscious masculine principle as the animus, and the unconscious feminine principle as the anima. In ancient Chinese philosophy, it’s yin and yang, referring, respectively, to the receptive and active principles. Every one of us possesses both, and life itself is the challenge, presented continually, to keep them in balance. All too often we go from an extreme version of one to an extreme version of the other. Take the example of working our asses off all day and then coming home to binge on wine and/or Netflix. The very act of identifying with one aspect of ourselves inevitably leads to “plunging into its opposite,” and Woodman asserts that “the ratio is cruelly exact.” In a paragraph that made me write “whoa” in the margins upon first reading it, she says, "The more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I’m going to have in my dreams.” I wrote “whoa” because I myself have dreams like that on a somewhat regular basis. I’m always in a public place—usually a university campus—and every bathroom I try to use ends up being a total disgusting mess, every toilet brimming with grossness, the floors covered in it. I appreciate Woodman for normalizing such dreams—or at least offering up a possible explanation for their existence—and also: Lorelei Gilmore! In the “Winter” episode of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Lorelei is afraid to go to sleep one night because, for the past five nights in a row, she’s had what she calls “dirty bathroom dreams.” And when she does indeed have one for the sixth night in a row, she wakes with a start, saying “Don’t touch the handle!” In my dreams you wouldn’t even want to set foot in the stall—if there even is a stall to begin with.
=
One way the modern age feeds our over-identification with masculine energy—which strives for perfection and efficiency and has no tolerance for emotion, intuition, or not-knowing—is through its reliance on computers. Woodman suggests that we actually worship computers (which I’d agree with), and she was writing this in the early 1980s! If there’s a level above worship, we’ve definitely reached it where computers are concerned, if not surpassed it and a couple other levels above it. And according to Woodman, people tend to become what they worship. But the thing that’s keeping us—or you might say protecting us—from becoming robots is “our agony.” Computers don’t feel pain, but human beings do—physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Ironically enough, this pain can be our saving grace, or what brings us back to our essential humanity. And as I understand it, the capacity to acknowledge our own pain in a loving and curious way is an inherently feminine capacity. We see this concept reflected in the still-too-common belief that boys and men should never cry.
I recently had the realization that maybe men are actually more emotionally sensitive than women, generally speaking, precisely because they’ve so often been taught that they shouldn’t be so sensitive. So any hint of emotional pain instantly (and unconsciously) registers as a major threat to their ego, creating far more conflict within their psyches than the initial painful stimulus would have created on its own. And from that conflicted place they react—usually in ways that make them look like jerks. Maybe that process is what underlies toxic masculinity, a term that Woodman does not use in Addiction to Perfection, but which was coined around the time of her writing it. Indeed, toxic masculinity is a concept that falls under the umbrella of mythopoetic thought, and Woodman herself was a mythopoetic author. She contended that when the masculine principle within a person—or society, for that matter—is divorced from the feminine, then a “false notion of Kingship” develops. This “demonic parody” of Kingship seeks power as an end in itself, and it can manifest in women, too. Woodman cites Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth as an epitome of this phenomenon in its extreme form. The “unrealized feminine assumes masculine ideals foreign to its own nature,” and the result, in the case of Lady Macbeth, is a crazed murderer.
And also, regarding the influence of technology, the more connected we are—to all things internet, I mean—the more disconnected we become from nature, and that includes our own inner nature, and the wisdom of our bodies and instincts. You might say that our growing reliance on all things “smart” outside of us is inversely proportionate to the wisdom we’re able to access inside of us. And of course we justify our use of so much technology by citing the huge role it plays in our productiveness and other achievement-focused behaviors. But it’s also those very behaviors—the constant doing and striving and general busy-ness—that are divorcing us from our inner lives, as well. Add to this the sad fact that many of us lack the foundational attachment experiences that would instill us with trust in our inner lives, and it’s easy to see how this cycle of self-denial continues across a lifespan, and across generations.
It is especially heartbreaking that we expect machine-like behavior from our children. Nowhere is this expectation more glaring than in our education system. In my second blog post I explored the book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, and I agreed with its author, A.S. Neill, that children should be able to learn whatever they want to learn, whenever they want to learn it. It is one of many great lies that this house of cards is built upon, that we need to teach children things at all. Of course, we can teach by example and we can offer help and boundaries to keep them from hurting themselves, but this whole classroom model of teaching is absurd. It keeps us locked into a way of being in the world that prevents us, generation after generation, from reaching our full human potential. All those hours spent learning what the school systems have arbitrarily deemed the most important information would be much better spent in play and conversation and time out of doors and following one’s own interests. So if a child is lucky enough to have parents who do instill them with basic trust in their own selves, much of that trust gets undermined when they start school, where they learn, if nothing else, that their own interests really don’t matter and they should just read this and write that and solve this and regurgitate that if they want to get a good grade and therefore be considered good. I know there are exceptional schools that do honor a child’s inner, unique genius, but they’re definitely not the norm. For the most part, schools uphold what Woodman calls “the sterility of the perfect machine.” They prioritize the masculine principle while all but ignoring the feminine.
=
All this talk of machines makes me want to hear the song “Extraordinary Machine,” by Fiona Apple. The language of it is very evocative of what Marion Woodman would call the “conscious feminine,” which is a potential that all people, regardless of gender, possess. She travels by foot even though it’s a slow climb (the masculine principle would demand for greater speed and efficiency); she’s “good at being uncomfortable” (the masculine force would insist on getting rid of any discomfort right away, preferably with a pill); she “can’t stop changing all the time” (a more masculine energy would expect sameness, like the sun, and have no tolerance for the waxing and waning inconstancy of the feminine moon). The chorus continues in this same vein, expressing a trust in the universe, saying, “If there was a better way to go, then it would find me,” and a trust in herself to “make the most of” whatever comes her way, be it kindness or meanness (the masculine principle would require kindness at all times). And then there’s the bridge, sung in that most feminine of registers to which my voice can never ascend, hard as I might try: “Do I so worry you, you need to hurry to my side? It’s very kind, but it’s to no avail, and I don’t want the bail. I promise you, everything will be just fine.” You see, the masculine principle cannot trust that everything will be just fine unless something is done—the problem must be solved, action must be taken, emotions neutralized, control exerted over the situation, the environment, another person. We tend to think of “masculine” as synonymous with “strength,” but there’s a great deal of weakness to it when you look at it from this angle. There’s a great deal of weakness to the feminine principle, too— obviously there’s such a thing as being too submissive or open or trusting or aimless—and therefore both must be in balance with each other, so that we can access the strength in their differences.
And that reminds me of an Ani Difranco song—the song “Overlap.” “I know there is strength in the differences between us,” she sings, “and I know there is comfort where we overlap.” Ani also sings, in her song, “Buildings and Bridges,” “What doesn’t bend, breaks.” This is an exquisite distillation of the masculine principle run amok, without any input from the feminine. And nowhere is the devastation of identifying with this unchecked masculine force more evident than in our current climate crisis. Stuff’s breaking, y’all. And it’s because we weren’t more willing to bend with the winds and currents of nature. We expect, for example, to have tomatoes in the dead of winter, and to be warm at all times. If it snows, we expect the roads to be plowed right away so we can get back to work. We expect to have light whenever we want it, regardless of the sun’s whereabouts. If a river flows one way, we’ll make it flow another way (as we did with the Chicago River). If a mountain impedes the path of our highway, we’ll blow the damn thing up, or we’ll slice the top right off in order to cover the remaining stump in ticky-tacky houses. All of this behavior is masculinity at its sick extreme, and all of it has contributed to climate change and what will ultimately be our demise as species. Across all these centuries of our striving for perfection in the form of efficiency, progress, material wealth, power, independence, etc., its evil opposite has also been growing in strength, outside of our awareness, because all of our attention has been focused on the addiction, which I realize now is the striving. To be addicted to perfection is to be addicted to striving, because perfection can never be achieved.
And real quick I’ll also add that our current response to the climate crisis is just another example of the masculinity that created the crisis in the first place. We’re gonna fix it! We’re gonna solve this problem! We’re gonna set goals, and make other countries agree to do stuff, and we’re going to force global temperatures to not go up anymore—or no more than one point five degrees Celsius, because that is a number we came up with and like to repeat a lot. One point five degrees above what, I want to know! Who can tell me that? And also, if it’s not obvious, I don’t think we can fix this. Too little too late. A more appropriate response at this point would be a more feminine one, which would come from an acceptance of what is actually happening and what little control we now have to stop it. How might we move forward from that place? Ew, it would involve sitting with a lot of fear and grief. Why would we do that when we could focus on doing stuff? But really, I know there’s still a lot of stuff we could do where climate change is concerned. It just needs to be more focused on how we’re going to respond to what’s coming, rather than on how to prevent it from coming. It’s coming. It’s here.
=
As I mentioned earlier, Woodman was a Jungian analyst, and most of her therapy patients suffered from some kind of eating disorder. The “creative purpose” of an eating disorder—or any neurosis—is, according to Woodman, to force a confrontation between the person with the disorder and the “negative mother” that person harbors within, which the disorder is, by its existence, rejecting. The phrase “negative mother” has an intimidating quality, doesn’t it? I’m inclined to give it more weight and complexity than maybe it deserves. I think it will suffice to keep things simple and liken “negative” to “pessimistic,” to somehow fundamentally unsupportive of a child’s natural way of being. Which can also look like overindulging the child. In this case, Woodman says, the mother is projecting her own ideals onto the child, expecting it to live out her expectations. The child thereby adopts a false set of values without even realizing it. We all internalize various aspects of our parents—usually the aspects they’re not conscious of—so that as adults we walk around with mother and father “introjects,” whose voices we usually mistake for our own. Psychotherapy is often a process of differentiating our own inner voice from those of our parents.
What Woodman has to say about the mother—a figure who would, in an ideal world, epitomize the conscious feminine principle—rendered negative by her own trauma and her life-saving accommodation of society’s expectations, is that she demands great courage of whomever she inhabits. If you suffer from addiction of any stripe, Woodman says—and through her lens, most psychological or emotional struggle implies some kind of addiction, which at its root is the addiction to perfection, or the masculine principle—then there is a task that your mother failed to perform, and so got passed along to you, and it is now your job to perform that task. “It takes great courage,” Woodman says, “to break with one’s past history and stand alone.”
As far as I can tell, she doesn’t specify what the task in question actually is, aside from somehow balancing the masculine and feminine. I gather it can be unique to a particular individual or family system, and it can also relate to larger societal dynamics. Woodman uses the example of our over-reliance on pills and other medical interventions, which has greatly compromised our ability to listen to our bodies when they might really be trying to tell us something. Of course there are times when medicine is decidedly appropriate. There are also times when corrections of a psychological and spiritual nature are what’s needed most. In these cases, consciousness is key. If a child, for instance, is treated like a machine—receiving implicit and/or explicit messages that it shouldn’t have feelings and fears—then the child will grow up treating itself that way, and so on down the generations “until someone in the family becomes conscious enough to stop it.” Again I’m reminded of J. Krishnamurti—and also Chogyam Trungpa—who said that the end is in the beginning. Regarding enlightenment or any kind of profound psychological healing—one starts with consciousness and one ends with consciousness. We must be aware of how we’re thinking and how we’re feeling and how we make meaning of things, and from that awareness, we act. And sometimes acting looks like doing nothing.
As a society—and species—we are failing miserably at the task of keeping our masculine and feminine forces in balance. The patriarchy is not just interested in giving men most of the power, but also in giving masculinity most of the power, and even the most strident feminist among us has most likely contributed to maintaining that particular imbalance of power.
Let’s look at the historical example of more women joining the workforce. I’m all for it. I’m also all for men staying home to raise the kids and otherwise maintain the household. Things get messy when everyone wants to be out there working, or everyone wants to stay home. We clearly find ourselves now, for the most part, in the former situation, with everyone working. It’s another example of how our society is imbalanced. I believe there’s a reason that only one half of the population has the ability to give birth and breast feed. As Father John Misty says in the song “Pure Comedy”—sung from a woman’s perspective—“Somebody’s gotta go kill somethin’ while I look after the kids. I’d do it myself, but what—are you gonna get this thing its milk?” We can’t all be getting milk for things, and we can’t all be out killing somethin’—a.k.a. working.
But we’ve refused to accept that. Thank you, unchecked masculine principle run amok! The average maternity leave in this country is ten weeks, and then it’s back to work you go, Mama! Because how else will you afford your child’s daycare? And what else will you do while your children are at school for most of their young lives? I know I’m stomping through a PC minefield talking this way, and I’ll reiterate: I’m not saying women shouldn’t work—I work; I have since I was fifteen, although I didn’t find meaningful work until I was thirty-four—I’m just saying that it’s ridiculous to expect that everyone in our society work a full-time job for the majority of their lives. But we’ve normalized that expectation, and now it’s a necessity. Kind of like cars and social media. And I have to wonder: would it be a necessity if it weren’t so normalized?
=
And of course, we don’t always want what’s good for us. Woodman attributes our society’s fascination with food and alcohol, for instance, to our overall crisis in faith. We’ve lost our religion, basically. She says that Jung saw religion as a human instinct, something that we need on a really fundamental level. With too little of what Woodman calls “the institutionalized sacred,” people compensate for the lack with material objects, drugs, food, sex and more. Without the sacred rituals of church and temple, we create demonic ones of cell phone, booze, and donut. A crucial step to stripping such rituals of their magic is telling someone about them—like a therapist or some other perceptive soul. In talking about the rituals, one is finally facing one’s fears, and only by facing them can one understand them and start to sort out the false from the true. A woman with anorexia, for example, probably operates under the belief that her food restriction exists as a way to keep her thin. But Woodman asserts that this mindset is a “bewitched state” created by the media, and by a general state of isolation. Upon closer, more conscious inspection (usually with the help of a therapist) the starved individual can see that a much different fear is at the heart of her disorder—the fear of losing control, which is an inherently masculine fear.
If we think of a ritual as a kind of offering, we can see that our rituals of shopping and bingeing and purging and drinking and scrolling and swiping and pill popping are only offerings to our egos. Woodman says that in order for rituals to have meaning, they must be “grounded in something or someone larger than the fragile ego.” You can call it what you want. Alcoholics Anonymous—which Jung apparently respected and Woodman did, too—calls it a “Higher Power.” Woodman appreciated that religious/spiritual aspect of AA and Overeaters Anonymous and encouraged many of her patients to join those groups. She also believed in the profound value of feeling understood by others—also a benefit offered by 12-step groups. She emphasized, though, that in order to find one’s own inner truth, one must plumb one’s own dark places alone in order to discover one’s unique “healing archetypal pattern.”
Healing archetypal pattern? This sounds complicated, but I think we can simply start by looking at our lives through this lens of masculine/feminine. How are these principles off-balance within us, and in how we interact with the world? To what extent are we expecting perfection from ourselves, which Woodman says is to cast ourselves as gods. Completeness or wholeness, rather than perfection, is all we can hope for as humans. To experience such wholeness, a woman cannot only acknowledge the Madonna in her (literally meaning “my lady,” referring to the virgin mother), but also the whore. When we isolate or exaggerate a part, neuroses develop. I’m reminded of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, who in his cosmic or universal form (as opposed to his human chariot driver one) is actually a terrifying sight to behold, because he is everything that exists—not just what we humans deem holy or beautiful.
=
Woodman says that trying to be perfect is easier than being who you really are. There’s a doozy of a thought to ponder.
I actually thought of my grandmother when reading this section of the book, the chapter titled “Through Thick and Thin.” My grandmother was a prolific diarist—especially as a teenager and into her twenties—and her diaries track a growing obsession, or what Woodman would call an addiction. And the object of her addiction was, indeed, perfection. Grammy, as I and all my cousins called her, expected nothing short of perfection from herself at all times, basically striving to be the same as Jesus Christ. In her diaries from the 1970s, when she was in her late 40s, Grammy uses the word “unreality” a lot to describe how she feels when moving about in the world. Woodman uses the same word when talking about a life that’s dictated by ideals. She says we’re not living our own lives when we’re guided (or perhaps driven) by principles only, and we are therefore “constantly plagued by a sense of unreality.” Had my grandmother read that line in 1972, her jaw would have hit the floor. (And she no doubt would have copied it verbatim in her diary!) Woodman goes on to say, “When the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren’t there… In trying to live out your principles and ideals, the part that matters the most was lost.”
I can see now that at least part of what Woodman means when she says that striving to be better than you are is easier than actually being yourself, is that family and society tend to reward us for the former and can be downright punishing toward the latter. And again there’s that idea of “you can never get enough of what you don’t really want or need.” For it is not ultimately praise that we want—praise is for the gods. Rather, it is the sense of feeling secure within our own selves that would really nourish us. According to Woodman, the more praise we receive for upholding a given ideal or principle, the more self-denial we experience. The more flawless our performance, the more alienated we become from our true nature.
And “nature” is the ideal word in this case. We humans are a product of nature, and just like the source from whence we came, we are “at once unchanging and in continuous change.” And just as we accept (to the best of our feeble ability) the changes in nature—sunshine and rain, night and day, summer and winter, full moon and crescent—we must accept our own mutability, because, as is the case with nature, that mutability actually contains immutability. In other words, the continuous process of change is what comprises the eternal. In locking ourselves into one set of unchanging values—by worshipping the masculine principle and ignoring the feminine, by identifying with our egos instead of with the present moment—we try to shove the infinite into the finite, where it doesn’t belong. The result is a sick society made of sick people. And as Krishnamurti says, “It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
One crucial step in getting back to your instinctual roots involves connecting with your body, what Geneen Roth calls “a piece of the universe you’ve been given.” You must cultivate a loving attitude to your body, honoring its need for food, rest, movement, and catharsis. Where the latter is concerned, Woodman cites Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. In that book, Frankl talks about the human need to weep, saying, “There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest courage, the courage to suffer.” Our complexes and neuroses have convinced us for too long that we are not equipped for suffering, and in doing so they create a kind of suffering that we aren’t, in fact, equipped for, because our avoidant, addictive behaviors drain us of the energy required to be courageous. When one part of a person isn’t free, that entire person is in chains, like Andromeda on the rock. But unlike in the myth, it’s not a Perseus who will ultimately free us to be ourselves. Only we can do that.
In the final chapter of Addiction to Perfection, Woodman puts it like this: “To be true to the soul is to value the soul, to express it as uniquely as possible. It is loving from inside, rather than accepting a foreign standard that does not take our essence into consideration.”
