Tag Archives: Danish Girl

Chuck’s Place: Bowie, Androgyny, Syzygy, and Wholeness

Spirit rising... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Spirit rising…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

I honor the earthly life of David Bowie who creatively expressed and lived the innate androgyny of all human beings to the benefit of human evolution. Well done, David. May your journey continue to new energetic heights!

Marie-Louise von Franz quite bluntly identified the physical manifestation of a woman in a man’s body in his nipples, and the physical manifestation of a male in a woman’s body in her clitoris. Although one’s sex is genetically determined, she points out, biologically it is obvious that there is a real contrasexual component to both sexes, present in the sex they are born into.

Psychologically, C. G. Jung coined the term syzygy to depict the inherent pairing of contrasexual opposites within the human being. Syzygy literally means yoked together, like a pair of horses bound together, drawing a carriage. The male/female parts of each human being are yoked together for life in every human being and it remains for all to creatively get to know, accept, and integrate those part selves into a wholeness that gains deeper entrée into the magic and mystery of infinity.

We find ourselves now in an energetic fervor similar to that of 1933 Nazi Germany when the solution to wholeness went the way of the scapegoat, of annihilating the shadow self, projected, in a xenophobic assignment of the rejected self, onto the wandering Jew. As history has shown, this psychotic one-sided attempt at purification to achieve wholeness allowed pure evil to dominate the world and nearly destroy it. Extinguishing an unwanted part will never bring about wholeness.

On another front, the movie The Danish Girl depicts another fatal attempt to achieve wholeness through a concretized physical attempt to surgically transform the body. Unfortunately, the psychiatry of that time, the 1920s, had not been sufficiently infused with Jung’s wisdom about syzygy to support a deeper process of reconciliation with one’s inner opposites.

David Bowie shines as a modern creative being who fully allowed for the unfolding, integration, and manifestation of a multifaceted being. He continued to evolve and died as an integrated warrior, leaving behind a plethora of insinuations for creative transformation and wholeness.

Thank you, David. Bon voyage,

Chuck