If you want to argue that male patriarchy in Western culture worked in Dr. Jung's favor, I have no doubt that it did, especially in his formal education and professional training. But male patriarchy in Western culture has presumably worked in favor of certain other men as well -- not many of whom experienced the kind of personal transformation that Dr. Jung experienced -- the kind of personal transformation that a good number of other men and women would have to experience for the hypothetical new age to emerge.
It has been said that a camel has a better chance of slipping through the eye of a needle than a rich man has of entering the kingdom of God (or the reign of God). A similar point might be made about the beneficiaries of male patriarchy in Western culture and the possibility of experiencing personal transformation.
If you want to argue that male patriarchy in Western culture worked against Mrs. Morgan, I have no doubt that it did. Due to the history of male patriarchy in Western culture, the collective unconscious of women and men in Western culture contains a certain amount of "shadow" material involving women. Figuratively speaking, Mrs. Morgan was trying to work herself out of a deep hole. Perhaps many other women and men are also trying to work themselves out of a deep hole.
But do people who are NOT the beneficiaries of male patriarchy in Western culture thereby have a special advantage for possibly experiencing personal transformation? I doubt if they do. (Because Mrs. Morgan came from an economically and socially privileged background, she was indirectly a beneficiary of male patriarchy in Western culture.)
Figuratively speaking, the playing field of life is not level for everybody. In addition, life is famously not fair. So is it reasonable to expect that a critical mass of people could experience personal transformation -- a sufficient mass of people to usher in the new age -- Dr. Jung's Age of Aquarius? Perhaps it is not a reasonable expectation. Perhaps Dr. Jung was just full of hot air when he discussed the possibility of the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps the Christian tradition of thought about a possible new age is just hot air.
In any event, Dr. Jung says that sea imagery is used to represent symbolically the collective unconscious. So exactly how deep is the sea of the collective unconscious? I have no idea. Nevertheless, it strikes me that Mrs. Morgan may have plumbed depths of the collective unconscious that were deeper than the depths that Dr. Jung had plumbed.
If you want imagery to characterize serious depression, serious depression involves dragging oneself along the bottom of the sea of the collective unconscious -- with the weight of the sea weighing you down. It's a terrible drag. Of course both women and men can experience serious depression. But you've got to put up a fight whenever you find yourself afflicted with serious depression, Dr. Jung says.
DR. JUNG'S LIFE JOURNEY
After his famous break with Sigmund Freud, Dr. Jung engaged in self-experimentation using a trance-like technique that he refers to as active imagination. Over a period of several years, he engaged in this self-experimentation using active imagination. As a way to process the material from the unconscious that he had been experiencing, he painted works of art representing the images he has called up from the unconscious, and he also recorded verbal messages he had received.
For Dr. Jung's paintings and written transcriptions based on his active imagination exercises, see the recently published over-sized book THE RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani (2009).
In her incisive book C. G. JUNG: HIS MYTH IN OUR TIME, translated by William H. Kennedy (1975; German original ed., 1972), Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-1998; Ph.D. in classical philology, University of Zurich, 1943) quotes Dr. Jung as making the following statement about his encounter with the unconscious:
"'It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space'" (quoted on page 109).
In the book WOMAN'S MYSTERIES: ANCIENT AND MODERN (1935), the British-born M. Esther Harding, M.D. (1888-1971), a Jungian psychotherapist in the United States, explores moon imagery.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dr. Jung devoted the rest of his life to processing and working through and trying to understand the material from the unconscious that he had experienced during his years of self-experimentation using active imagination.
Dr. Jung experienced a significant breakthrough in his understanding of the material from the unconscious that he had experienced during his years of self-experimentation using active imagination when he read Richard Wilhelm's 1929 German edition of THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER -- more than a decade after he had started his self-experimentation.
In her book about Jung, Dr. von Franz says, "The first detailed description of active imagination which Jung published was in his commentary on THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, translated by Richard Wilhelm into German in 1929" (page 113).
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