Paper to be presented at a conference

1. Dismembering the goddess : Effects of gender wars and marital failures on young adults
Abstract
A serious, though unintentional, negative outcome of feminist movement has been a gross
trivialization of motherhood. When mothering becomes a chore due to environmental stressors, the
potential of the infant, and of successive generations, is choked off with serious consequences. The
paper explores the emerging trends of masculinization of society, feminization of poverty and the
socio-politico-cultural devaluation of the feminine. The children, rendered fatherless through easy
dissolution of marital commitments, also becoming partially motherless through the absence of the
mother who now has to work for economic and social independence, are hurried into self
sufficiency, which impacts their psychosocial and psychosexual development.
The paper tracks effects of these distortion of early object representations in children, young adults
and the society in context of a lack of masculine container, and a general disrespect for the
feminine. The generation dismembers the goddess within and without, seeking personal
inviolability because the adults that it needs to depend upon are no longer perceived as dependable.
When these young adults come of age, they shrug off their responsibility towards dependent others
causing socio-economic nightmare in the world that has increasing number of aging adults, foster
children, and disabled. The inner space that spells tenderness, spontaneity, and aliveness, the
relational and healing aspects of the psyche, appears dead, this inner deadness being vehemently
defended by Fairbairn’s internal saboteur.
The paper arguing for an urgent need for policies and reforms that restore the nurturing and
regenerative aspects of the goddess in the psyche of the society. It argues for return of the
archetypal energies of the Great Mother, re-membering Hestia, and Virgin Mary, for through the
destruction of the feminine, our saviors, the heros and the gods of the modern world, lose their
altruism, their protective powers, and are forced into malevolence, anarchy and chaos.