Athena (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Athena is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, war and the crafts. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is one of three virgin goddesses, with Artemis and Hestia, whom Bolen groups as independent goddesses never overpowered by a male god or mortal, sharing a mode of attention she calls “focused consciousness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 37–38). The woman in whom Athena predominates, as Bolen describes her, keeps her head, thinks strategically and solves practical problems, and is at home in the world of work and advancement; she forms mentor relationships with strong men, and she identifies more readily with her father’s world than her mother’s. Bolen’s chapter title names both halves: strategist and father’s daughter. The difficulties she attaches to it are the costs of that orientation: an exclusive identification with rationality that cuts her off from the full range of feeling, what Bolen calls the “Medusa effect”, an armoured capacity to intimidate people unlike herself, and, as a father’s daughter, a readiness to defend the patriarchy against other women.

Two exclusions apply. This is not Athena the goddess of Greek religion, whose myths are described here only as the material Bolen used. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her goddesses archetypes; what she describes is a type of person, recorded here as hers: one of seven goddess patterns for women (1984), to which Gods in Everyman (1989) added eight for men, among them Zeus, Athena’s father in the myth.

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter “Athena: Goddess of Wisdom and Crafts, Strategist and Father’s Daughter” of Goddesses in Everywoman, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985. The chapter follows the book’s usual order: the myth retold, then the pattern traced through a woman’s life, its relationships, work, characteristic troubles and ways of growth. The twentieth-anniversary edition (Quill, 2004) added a new introduction and changed the subtitle to Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives; a thirtieth-anniversary edition followed in 2014.

The myth Bolen draws on is public domain. Hesiod tells how Zeus swallowed his first wife Metis when she was about to bear Athena, and then gave birth to the goddess from his own head (Theogony 886–900, 924–926); the longer Homeric hymn to Athena describes her springing from his head in armour, and the Hymn to Aphrodite names her among the three goddesses Aphrodite cannot bend (Hymn 5, ll. 7–32), the trio Bolen calls the virgin goddesses. The fullest classical statement of the “father’s daughter” is Athena’s own, as she casts the deciding vote for Orestes in Aeschylus:

For me no mother bore within her womb, / And, save for wedlock evermore eschewed, / I vouch myself the champion of the man, / Not of the woman, yea, with all my soul,— / In heart, as birth, a father’s child alone. — Aeschylus, Eumenides (458 BCE), Athena’s vote, trans. E. D. A. Morshead, Gutenberg #8604

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The phrase itself was current among Jungian women before Bolen. Marion Woodman (1980) called Athena a father’s daughter, “sprung from her father’s forehead after he swallowed her pregnant mother” (p. 9), and Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) wrote of the father’s daughter whose identity is built on the father principle. Philip Zabriskie’s “Goddesses in Our Midst” (1974), as summarised by John Sanford (1980), had already read Athena, born from her father’s head, as the feminine concerned with consciousness, work and ego, one of five goddesses in a “typology of the feminine”; Bolen lists the article among her references. Bolen’s claim to build on Jung holds in part: Jung supplied the archetype and the animus, but the goddess as a type of woman is hers and her immediate predecessors’.

The debate

Bolen’s Athena has no classical counterpart. The nearest is the animus. In classical Jungian writing a woman’s logical, purposive side was the animus, and its excess was the “animus-ridden” woman; Bolen’s Athena gives the same traits a feminine goddess and a positive value, and Bolen sets her virgin goddesses against Jung’s anima–animus theory in so many words (1984, pp. 43–45), a move ’Iolana (2016) reads as detaching the anima and animus from bodily sex. The difference from the feminist Jungians is one of evaluation. For Woodman and Perera the father’s daughter is a wound to be healed, a woman cut off from her own feminine ground by identification with patriarchal values; for Bolen the Athena woman is a legitimate way of being a woman, with characteristic costs. The nearest earlier typology is Toni Wolff’s Amazon (1951), whom Sanford (1980) matched, “perhaps”, with Athena; Bolen draws on Wolff only for the Hetaira, which she sets beside her Aphrodite (p. 230).

The general objections apply. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) noted that Bolen tends to identify the gods and goddesses with personality types and replied that “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess”. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) had already warned against a rival search for female archetypes, and Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular face of essentialism, a single female essence that ignores race, class and ethnicity (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016). Susan Rowland (2002) set the book among the grand narratives of goddess feminism. Its first scholarly reviewers were the analyst Mary Ann Mattoon (1986), under the title “A New Psychology of Women?”, and the social psychologist Kay Deaux (1986).

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Athena as a psychological construct. Online quizzes in her vocabulary disclaim any validity; one is attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis that we have not located, and no psychometrics have been published. Research on women’s identification with their fathers, and on gender and leadership, makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are mythic: the goddess born from her father’s head; the patron of heroes, who guides Perseus against the Gorgon, aids Jason and the Argonauts and brings Odysseus home (pp. 76–77); the inventor of crafts who turns the weaver Arachne into a spider; and the goddess with the Gorgon’s head on her aegis, the image behind Bolen’s “Medusa effect”. The classical images include Phidias’s lost Athena Parthenos (c. 438 BCE) and, later, Rembrandt’s Minerva in Her Study (1635). Literary figures often offered as Athena women include Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Brünnhilde as Wotan’s warrior-daughter, and, in recent fiction, Hermione Granger. Bolen’s vocabulary circulates in popular psychology, for example in a 2018 series of the Personality Hacker podcast on her goddess groups. All of these identifications are readings, not Bolen’s, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 5, “Athena: Goddess of Wisdom and Crafts, Strategist and Father’s Daughter”, pp. 75–106; also pp. 15, 35–45 (chapter 3, the virgin goddesses), 230. Pages from Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing, https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean (contents, index and running heads). Chapter titles also checked against the contents of the Harper Colophon paperback (1985), ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24226567M
• Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (twentieth-anniversary ed., new introduction). Quill. ISBN 978-0-06-057284-6.
• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4.
• Hesiod, Theogony 886–900, 924–926; Homeric Hymns 5 (to Aphrodite), 11 and 28 (to Athena). In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Homer, Iliad V.738–742, the Gorgon’s head on Athena’s aegis (S. Butler, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #2199.
• Aeschylus, Eumenides (458 BCE). In The House of Atreus (E. D. A. Morshead, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #8604.
• Woodman, M. (1980). The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-03-8. P. 9.
• Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Summarising P. Zabriskie, “Goddesses in Our Midst”, Quadrant 17 (1974).
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Rieker, P. P., & Jankowski, M. K. (1995). Sexism and women’s psychological status. In C. V. Willie et al. (Eds.), Mental Health, Racism, and Sexism (pp. 27–50). University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3869-9. Pp. 30–32, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 327.
• Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-2517-1. P. 150, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 40.
• ’Iolana, P. (2016). Jung and Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of the Western Goddess Movement (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. Pp. 31, 40, 327. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
• Mattoon, M. A. (1986). A new psychology of women? [Review of Bolen, 1984]. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 6(4), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1986.6.4.13
• Deaux, K. (1986). [Review of Goddesses in Everywoman]. Contemporary Psychology, 31(6), 468. https://doi.org/10.1037/024853
• Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
• Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0233, “Goddesses in Everywoman: The Virgin Goddess Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0233-goddesses-in-everywoman-the-virgin-goddess-archetypes/