Chapter 9: Cartesian Duality and the Mind-Body Split
An excerpt from my unpublished book, Somatic Psychology, The Body in Culture, History and Spirit.
Psychologically and sociologically, the problem is of enormous interest for, as all schools of psychology agree, the image of the mother and the female affects the psyche differently from that of the father and the male. Sentiments of identity are associated most immediately with the mother; those of dissociation with the father. Hence, where the mother image preponderates, even the dualism of life and death dissolves in the rapture of her solace; the worlds of nature and spirit are not separated; the plastic arts flourish eloquently of themselves, without need of discursive elucidation, allegory or moral tag; and there prevails an implicit confidence in the spontaneity of nature, both in its negative, killing, sacrificial aspect, and in its productive and reproductive. -Campbell 1964, p. 74
Minds and bodies are not split. It is a primal dissociation that goes much deeper and farther back than René Descartes’ 17th Century philosophy. We are separated from the inside of our body by masculine and feminine identities. For over 3000 years life here in the West has been dominated and defined by patriarchal forms of thought and action. It is this masculine, testosterone-driven domination that dissociates the mind from the body, the body from nature, nature from Spirit and ultimately, Spirit from the universe. We are faced with many dichotomies at the turn of the century. None has more impact than one’s basic nature—who we are inside of our body and mind.
Historically, the goddess cultures or matriarchal cultures flourished between 25,000-3500 BCE. Gradually, between 3500 BCE and 1250 BCE they were suppressed and the masculine, patriarchal cultures became dominant and remain dominant to this day. The Mother Right, as these old goddess cultures were called, contained the personification of the power of “Space, Time and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configuration of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead” (Campbell 1964, p. 7). This was a state of non-dissociation.
With the coming of the patriarchal viewpoint also came linear time, in which life was seen as moving from a beginning to an end. Therefore, at the end of one’s time there would be a judgment of one’s beliefs and behavior during the linear life span. Sins would be punished. Guilt became an item of religious significance and power, as well as a disease which is still prevalent. This attitude alienates the mind and body internally as a traumatic dissociation. Originally, bodies were not separated from minds nor was there separation from the earth or the Divine.
She is the goddess of life and death at once … the feminine contains opposites, and the world actually lives because it combines earth and heaven, night and day, death and life. We lived thousands of years within this psychophysical space in which outside and inside, world and man, powers and things, are bound together in an indissoluble unity (Neumann 1955, p. 45).
The universal symbolic formula to this union of opposites is Woman = body = vessel = world. Woman and earth both give forth life and are sacred as such. Their bodies contain new life inside. Both are vessels just as a round world contains new life that springs forth in the summer. A woman and the earth have the exclusive domain of creating new biological life. She is sacred, her body is sacred also. These are not just myths or historical entities, “but psychological realities whose fateful power is still alive in the psychic depths of present-day man” (Neumann 1955 p. 44).
When powerful nomadic warriors systematically obliterated the goddess cultures in the second and third millennium BCE, they rewrote the myths, stories and legends, the truth of these matrilineal societies. One male God became easier to worship; it was more efficient politically and psychologically.
Where the female principle is devalued, as always happens when a power of nature and the psyche is excluded from its place, it has turned into its negative, as a demoness, dangerous and fierce. And we are going to find, throughout the following history of the orthodox patriarchal systems of the West, that the power of the goddess-mother of the world, whom we have here seen defamed, abused, insulted, and overthrown by her sons, is to remain as an ever present threat to their castle of reason, which is founded upon a soil that they consider to be dead, but is actually alive, breathing and threatening to shift.…this turn from the plane of the mother to that of the sons, the sense of identity of life and death disappears together with that of the power of life to bring forth its own good forms, so that all now is strife and effort, defamation of what is alien, pretentiousness, grandiloquence, and a lurking sense of guilt. (Campbell 1964, p. 86)
