“If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness” M. Esther Harding

Life’s perhaps most fundamental dynamic is the attempt to move from a lower form of experience and consciousness to a higher (or deeper) level of consciousness. 

This generally takes place through ritual rites-of-passage processes at various life stages – the most prominent one being the journey through adolescence into adulthood. 

For the masculine and feminine energies today, there is either no effective and relevant initiation into adulthood or there are pseudo-initiations that fail to evoke the needed transition in to maturity. Pseudo initiation often amplifies the Ego’s striving for power and control in a new form, a continued adolescent form regulated by other adolescents and immature  energies – for example, for boys and men, think military training, gang initiation, prison systems and, more recently, chemsex parties as potential examples of these.

We need to take very seriously, the disappearance and lack of ritual processes for initiating our young folk (those who have missed or who have had this transition halted or distorted) into their fullest adulthood. The lack of adequate models of the mature masculine and feminine at any point along the gender and sexuality spectrums means that it’s pretty much ‘every person for himself’.

For gay/transgender/queer/non binary folk today, this is even more crucial for a more integrated personhood to emerge, exist and engage with life in a healthy and productive way.

Luckily, deep within all of us are blueprints of ‘hard-wired’ primordial, archetypal patterns energies and images that pattern our thoughts, feelings and relationships and instinctively provide the very foundation of our behaviours. 

Archetypes are well documented and sit in the collective unconscious ‘psyche’ of humanity – the inner human worlds we all hold within us. They can be found in images, dreams, visions, rituals, entrenched behaviours, art, films, music, mythology and so on and are surprisingly consistent across different cultures, times and histories of the world.

These archetypal patterns can go awry or get skewed into the negative by the lack of a proper transition into adulthood or by disastrous encounters with the outside world as we grow up (especially if we relate it to inadequate or hostile parenting). When they do, it more often than not, manifests in our lives in crippling psychological problems.