What does a Jungian perspective reveal about the current debates on gender identity? How do concepts like anima, animus, and archetypes shape our understanding of identity and embodiment? Why did Jung, following Nietzsche, insist that we cannot escape the body—and what does that mean in a culture driven by the fantasy of self-reinvention? Could the literalisation of symbolic truths explain the rise of gender incongruence, and how might therapists engage more deeply with dreams and myth in their practice? What role do evolutionary insights and collective unconscious dynamics play in shaping our cultural conflicts over sex and gender?
I’ve been listening to an episode of the Beyond Gender podcast featuring Gary Clark, an evolutionary biologist and author who takes a critical look at gender theory from a scientific and cultural perspective. Clark’s position is firmly rooted in evolutionary anthropology—he argues that sexual dimorphism and sex-based social roles are constants across human history, even if their cultural expressions vary. His critique of gender theory, particularly its roots in post-structuralist and queer theory thinking, resonates with the observation that much of this intellectual tradition is ironically very Western, despite its claims to dismantle Western “hegemony.”
From a metamodern perspective, what stands out for me is the interplay between scientific grounding and symbolic meaning-making. Clark repeatedly stresses that biology is not a political position. Yet, as he points out, biology has become ideologically framed—misinterpreted as inherently conservative or “right-wing.” His frustration is palpable: for him, biological realities precede social systems; they can be exploited but not erased. This, he argues, is why we need clarity about sex difference without collapsing into stereotypes or erasing embodied realities.
Here, Jung’s work becomes relevant—not as a reductive explanation, but as a lens for understanding the deeper psychic forces shaping this cultural turbulence. Jung did not share Freud’s tendency to treat dream images as signs to be decoded into latent content. For Freud, a dream of climbing a mountain could signify ambition or repressed sexual impulses. Jung, by contrast, saw such imagery as symbolic, participating in the vast web of the collective unconscious. Symbols, for Jung, point beyond themselves to archetypal patterns of psychic life. They are not mere disguises of instinctual drives but invitations to meaning.
This distinction matters because the phenomenon of gender identity—especially its rapid cultural escalation—cannot be understood through social theory or neurobiology alone. Jung would have asked: What archetypes are constellating here? What myths are trying to live themselves out through these individuals and through our culture at large? When a person claims to be “non-binary” or “beyond gender,” is this a literal truth—or, as Jung and Nietzsche would suggest, a symbolic aspiration, tragically misunderstood in a culture addicted to concretization?
The passage from Jung’s Zarathustra Seminars captures the crux of this issue:
“You cannot get away from the fact of your sex, for instance, or of the colour of your eyes, or the health or the sickness of your body, your physical endurance. Those are definite facts which make you an individual, a self that is just yourself and nobody else. If you were a spirit you could exchange your form every minute for another one, but being in the body you are caught; therefore, the body is such an awkward thing: it is a definite nuisance.”
Jung, echoing Nietzsche, insists on the primacy of embodiment. Our spiritual yearnings are bound to the earth. Attempts to annihilate or escape the body, whether through asceticism, digital fantasies, or radical identitarian projects, risk what Jung called “inflation”—a psychic dissociation from reality. And reality, for Jung, is psychophysical: soul and body intertwined.
Few Jungians have seriously engaged with the gender identity phenomenon, which is surprising given its symbolic density. To do so would require attending both to the collective neurosis—what Lisa Marchiano has described as a psychic epidemic—and to the individual’s inner drama. A Jungian approach would explore dreams, fantasies, and myths to discern the archetypal energies at play: the Hermaphrodite, the Androgyne, the longing for wholeness. As Stella O’Malley noted in the podcast, there is a tragic literalization of metaphor here. The alchemical coniunctio—the sacred union of opposites—has been flattened into surgical interventions and prescriptions, as if the integration of anima and animus could be achieved on the operating table.
Clark touches on this when he critiques how gender theory reifies stereotypes only to rebel against them. Instead of asking, “What inner figures am I projecting onto the outer world?” the discourse insists on reconfiguring reality to match the projection. This is where Jung’s concepts of projection, anima/animus, and archetypes offer profound insight. They remind us that psychic content belongs first to the psyche. When denied or externalized, it can tyrannize both the individual and the culture.
As therapists and thinkers grapple with gender incongruence, it would be fruitful to recover this symbolic attitude. What if clinicians asked their patients not only about dysphoria but also about their dreams? What if, instead of rushing to affirm or deny, we held space for the psyche’s imaginal work? This is not about “conversion” or negation—it is about honouring the complexity of being human, embodied yet imaginal, rooted yet reaching.
I’m encouraged that voices like Dr Bret Alderman, who writes insightfully on X, are beginning to articulate a Jung-informed perspective on these matters. It’s a conversation that demands both courage and subtlety, qualities our polarized discourse often lacks. As metamodern thinkers, we can help hold the tension—between biology and culture, science and soul, fact and symbol—without collapsing into the certainty of either pole.
Because, as Jung and Nietzsche both remind us: the self is the meaning of the earth.
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