Precursor to Awakening Consciousness: The Appearance of Female Twins (Dominatrix/Bimbo) in Current Cultural Representations

Post #1 on January 31, 2012:  Pairs of opposites always erupt in the art, stories, legends and mythological representations of a culture whenever a new psychological content is on the borderline of becoming conscious.  When old attitudes, operating procedures, and the “usual” ways of relating to reality become sclerotic, they begin to rattle, clank and fall apart like an old car.  The old ways no longer suffice when a new consciousness begins to dawn on the horizon.  Throughout human history, the motif of twins, one good and one evil, has appeared in mythologies whenever society has become too one-sided and a shift of the dominant cultural consciousness is necessary.  To name just a few of the more familiar duos, there is Cain and Abel, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Osiris and Set, Jacob and Esau.  Myths, legends and fairy tales from every culture are filled with the motif of “twins”.  There are even male/female pairings of twins (e.g., Osiris/Isis of Egyptian mythology; Apollo/Artemis of the Greeks).

The doubling (twinning) effect is seen in products of both the collective and individual psyche.  It can also readily be observed in one’s own dreams whenever a shift of personal consciousness is imminent and/or necessary.  When the dominant ego function gets worn out and becomes sclerotic, the individual is challenged to adapt and change, to admit another possibility of functioning.  This is a difficult, awkward, painful process.  In psychoanalytic practice, the task of becoming aware of and relating to all the potentialities of the personality, conscious and unconscious is called “individuation.”  When an individual stands to this challenge, the process of individuation constellates the imagery of twins, which then appear in our dreams and fantasy material.  The motif of twins in collective fantasy material is a harbinger of an expanding conscious awareness which results in civilization at the macro level.  The motif of twins in dreams and fantasy material of the individual is the herald of a more expansive and comprehensive personality at the micro level of the individual.  This is because twins indicate the possibility for a conscious differentiation (realization) of opposites.  Differences between the opposites must be recognized before they can be integrated.  It is the integration of the opposites that results in an expansion of consciousness.  Symbolically, the twin represents the psychological fact that there is another within that is at once just like us, as a brother or sister, and yet not like us.  The twin is the metaphor for a psychological realization of the opposite within.

Today we see everywhere a pair of feminine opposites emerging:  the dominatrix and the bimbo.  The eruption of the “witch/dragon/devouring mother/dominatrix” motif we see today has its polar opposite “twin” counterpart in the simultaneous eruption in mainstream culture of the insipid, effete bimbo with her equally stupid and insipid partner, the “bimboy” of “The Bachelor/ Bachelorette” fame.  These bimbo/bimboy television shows are equal-opportunity degradations of both the masculine and the feminine because they do not represent real persons but typologies, generic archetypes.  That these figures (dominatrix/bimbo) represent two opposite unconscious feminine archetypes is undeniable, as they have no discernible differentiated human personality.  Is there anyone who actually knows someone who is like these stereotypes?  I don’t, and I cannot imagine that anyone else does either, but I worry that I could be wrong about that.  I worry that because of the media fascination and massive marketing campaigns for huge financial gains (unconsciousness makes for huge profits for marketers), some poor souls are so completely unconscious that they have become identified with one or the other of these archetypes and sunk into the triviality of embodying, incarnating these archetypes rather than living their own creative human lives!  That is a huge waste of human potential.  Yet, if one takes an objective view of the hold the media have on collective consciousness, one can learn a lot.

The bimbo exists on the TV and movie screens because, on the one hand, she is the reflection of the masculine script writers’ anima problems.  On the other hand, the bimbo lives because her opposite, the devouring lamia/dominatrix shows up all over the place today.  Both of these generic types have “arrived” on the cultural landscape because more positive, more nuanced feminine values have been shoved down into the unconscious by a culture that is overly rational and materialistic.  There is a crisis of soul, a crisis of feeling, a severance from our connection to the earth and the natural world.  Refused life and expression, the positive, nuanced feminine values of feeling, relationship, intuition, and nature turn dark and malevolent and come back screaming in murderous rage, infanticide and matricide.  The unconscious always seeks redress in order to balance the archetypal forces.  Ignored and denied an invitation the party, the fairy nature godmother has turned evil.

Looked at differently, the concurrent appearance of the dominatrix and the bimbo is a symptom of the demise of a patriarchy that sees itself simultaneously threatened (and sexually aroused) by the powerful cunning of the dominatrix and comforted (bolstered in its narcissism to maintain its rigid rationalistic standpoint) by the silicon-filled, non-nurturing breasts, weakness and stupidity of the bimbo.  The bimbo exists because she presents no challenge to the masculine to engage in the thorny territory of real human relationship.  Both the dominatrix and the bimbo versions of the feminine abound in cultural manifestations of late.  This “twinning” phenomenon in modern cultural expressions reflects the polarized situation in the collective unconscious prior to what must surely (eventually) be an increase in collective consciousness, if we pay attention to what is happening.

In the history of twins in mythology, the sacrifice of one twin (Cain murdering Abel, for example) frequently means that one set of opposite values has vanquished another set of cultural and human values.  A rigid “either/or” mentality is unhelpful when a society (or individual) is presented with the problem of the opposites.  In the recent film “The Black Swan” (2011), we see in the black and white swans yet another modern-day cultural pairing of opposites, another set of twins.  This pair of opposites has not yet differentiated for the film's main character.  By the end of the film, the girl, Nina, has been turned into a swan, unredeemed by her sacrifice because it was unconscious.  There is an inability to psychologically separate the black from the white swan, the shadow from the ego.*  The human person, Nina,  is swallowed up by the archetype.  Sacrifice consciously chosen moves consciousness forward.  Unconscious sacrifice, however, benefits no one.   Without conscious differentiation of the opposites, integration and fluidity between the opposites is impossible.

*(See blog post, “The Black Swan” of March 14, 2011, at Link to three-part analysis of the film, "The Black Swan".  The same article was published in “Elements”, the online journal of the Minnesota Jung Association in July 2011:   Link to Minnesota Jung Association article in "Elements".