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Guy Spiro: Jean, please tell us briefly how you started your work.

Jean Shinoda Bolen: The first book that I wrote was about synchronicity and spirituality. Those were the two elements that brought me into medicine and the serendipity of a psychiatric residency. I had thought of that as a means to get back to San Francisco, and that a year of psychiatry never hurt anybody. I found that I had a real gift for the work and loved it. At that time, 1963-66, there was a Jungian analyst on the clinical faculty, and an optional course given by a really charismatic person named Joseph Wainwright, who was one of the founders of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco. I didn’t set out to be a therapist or a Jungian analyst. It had to do with going into medicine, going into psychiatry and then becoming a Jungian analyst, and beginning to write. It all had to do with a spiritual and synchronistic series of events. That’s how I got here.

GS: Being an astrologer, I deal with synchronicity quite a bit. The Tao of Psychology – Synchronicity of the Self came out in what year?

JSB: 1979. In that year I wanted Synchronicity to be in the title, but my publisher said that it was too esoteric a word. Since then there has been, among other things, a platinum album named Synchronicity.

GS: It’s said that there’s no such thing as luck or coincidence, it really is all just synchronicity. Can you describe the Tao of Psychology in a nutshell?

JSB: I always was amused that if you understood those words, Tao and Synchronicity, you didn’t have to read the book. The principle is that the sense of oneness that underlies everything is the Tao. When synchronistic events happen, they cannot be logically explained because there’s no apparent cause-and-effect direct mechanism. But it does fit with the sense that there is an underlying oneness that meaning connects us to, and once you have a synchronistic event, there is a sense of getting some grace and being kind of looked after by the universe. So Tao, Synchronicity and Self are different ways of looking at the intuitive, feeling sense that we truly matter and we have a place in the universe. I became an author because of synchronicity.

GS: How did that happen?

JSB: Harper and Row had moved its former religious titles department out to San Francisco to be a trade division, and the head of the editorial staff happened to be at my lecture on synchronicity. One of the things about synchronicities is that they seem to be a series of events. There was a series of events that got me invited to write a book, which is an amazing way to begin life as an author.

GS: You cooperated with the synchronicity. People often pass on the opportunities that the universe presents.

JSB: I certainly have heard of amazing events that have happened to people who minimized it.

GS: What was the impetus for the next book?

JSB: The next book was the one that has sold the most copies, and this was The Goddess is in Every Woman. It is coming out next year as a special 20th anniversary edition. I seem to write a little bit ahead of the curve, and this is my gift. When I’m writing about something, it is about something that captivates and interests me, but it seems that I articulate ideas that are still on the cusp. Then people catch up, and I’m putting into words what is going on in the psyche.

GS: That’s a good place to be.

JSB: It is a good place to be. It also has to do with maybe the innate cusp of the women’s movement and age. Certainly the current book, Crones Don’t Whine, could only be written by a woman that is over sixty. To be of my age means that as the women’s movement changed our culture, I was carried along with it. The writing of The Goddess is in Every Woman grew out of the women’s movement, in which male experts on women’s psychology suddenly backed off, and I was invited as a young faculty member at the Department of Psychiatry to present seminars on the psychology of women. I did that from a Jungian perspective that ended up evolving into an archetypal psychology having to do with the Greek divinities. That is how Goddess is in Every Woman and Gods in Every Man came about. Also because I was an activist and still am, I did something that Jungians don’t usually do. I could see, as Jungians see, how powerful archetypes are inside the psyche, but I could also see how powerful stereotypes were on acting on it. So I could explain, perceive and feel how consciousness raising had to be about both what was projected as expectations and what was acting from within as archetypes.

GS: You had a wealth of source material there.

JSB: One of the wonderful things about what I’ve ended up doing is that I was never scientifically minded. I moved into medicine out of a sense of wanting to give back, kind of an idealistic sense of deep gratitude. My loves were the Liberal Arts, and having moved through the nuts and bolts of pre med, medical school and residency, here I am as a Jungian analyst writing out of these liberal arts that I had an innate feel for.

GS: A good combination.

JSB: It’s been quite wonderful. The message that I continually give people is to do what you love, and if you have a sense that what you’re doing gives you meaning, to trust it. The phases of women’s lives are Maiden, Mother and Crone. The third phase is a time when it’s possible to be very juicy, authentic and have an influence. There are 45-50 million women in America who are over fifty, have had their lives influenced by the women’s movement, and have a sense of what a difference it made. This group of women have become conscious of how unique we are, but we could just be a blip in history. We’ve never had a generation of women live this long, with choice over reproduction, lifestyle, opportunities for education, resources, the ability to network with each other and the possibility to change the world. We will either tilt it in the direction of bringing the feminine principle into the culture, which it sorely needs, or we will be sent back by the fundamentalists of the different varieties who have difficulties with who we are now.

GS: It is interesting how perceptions change. I remember a conversation I had with a young woman when I was in my early 20s and she was finishing up her study to become a gerontologist. I thought that was just the most boring and uninteresting field imaginable. I turned around three times and I’m in my 50s. It makes a great deal more sense to me now. This word crone is usually used as a pejorative.

JSB: It is, and then when I put juicy in front of it, it sort of stops you in your tracks. In a word association test, if you put out the word crone, you probably think old and decrepit, and a negative image comes to mind. But if you put juicy in front of crone, it’s a juxtaposition that stops you. It’s a first step to redeeming the word, which I think is really necessary because there really isn’t a decent word for an older woman. There are pockets of women all over the country that are celebrating by having croning ceremonies, an acknowledgement of entering the phase of the Wise Woman. If you line yourself up with an archetypal form, you tap into the energetic field of the circle with the sacred center. The crone goes back to pre-patriarchal times when people had a reverence for the power of nature and divinity was feminine. You had the Great Goddess in her three phases of Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and indigenous people have had a respect for the woman elder that in Western civilization was sort of burnt out of women. Five hundred years of burning any wise woman who had any psychic abilities, or healing abilities, or helped women not be in awful pain during childbirth made it very difficult to be a wise woman after all.

GS: I remember being young and thinking that for people in their 50s and 60s, it was over.

JSB: It was definitely over. If you were born in 1900, life expectancy was fifty. For a woman born now, I think the life expectancy is something like 92. That’s amazing.

GS: It’s being pushed. Talk more about the juicy crone.

JSB: Look at women who are over fifty now and are speaking up, women like Susan Sarandon or Oprah Winfrey or Jane Pauley, who are post menopausal crone age women, and they certainly are not dried up. No woman is, who has vitality and passion and energy for her life. We arrive at fifty and, instead of feeling like we are over the hill old folks, we have a sense of being in some kind of prime. Growing into being our own person. This is not true of everybody, obviously. If we’ve been learning and observing in our life, and have had an opportunity to go through the ups and downs of life, and say, well, here we are. Juice has to do with vitality, with looking forward to developing some part of ourselves that we’ve often shelved for those middle years when family and work was the juggling act. Now there’s time to go back to that budding writer, or painter, or activist, or traveler, or pilgrim, or whatever it is. There’s time, and with our particular generation, there are often the resources to travel or whatever.

GS: This is new ground.

JSB: It absolutely is.

GS: How do you see it proceeding?

JSB: I look at my contemporary women doing amazing things. I think humanity is at an amazing crossroad where things can be like the Cane and Abel story, sort of large and destructive, or the possibility of the sense that we are one planet and one people, and it’s precious and it’s beautiful, and we have an underlying spirituality that cuts across all religions. United Nations’ resolution 1525, that interestingly was passed on Halloween, 2000, and is referred to as the Women’s Peace and Security Resolution, postulates that women be involved at every single level from community to globe where there are issues of peace and security. If women could be, and we are moving towards having an influence, then I think the cusp would shift in the direction of bringing the masculine and feminine into balance, into consciousness. Because I’m a women’s movement woman, I can see that a huge evolutionary change happens just through women meeting in consciousness raising groups. Out of that, and their insights and their writing and their marching and what have you, our culture change has influenced the world. That’s why I wrote The Millionth Circle. A critical mass would occur with the metaphoric millionth circle of women meeting with a spiritual center in that circle. And I think that it’s the crone age woman that really gets that.

GS: I notice the title, Crone’s Don’t Whine – Concentrated Wisdom for Juicy Women and Exceptional Men.

JSB: That’s the title of the talk, and there is a chapter in that little book called Exceptional Men Can Be Crones. Once the concept of being a wise and compassionate person is understood, which draws on the archetype of the crone, which is in everybody, then it would be high praise to say to a man, “you are a crone.” Meaning that you’re an elder, you have wisdom, compassion, you’ve done your share of suffering, and are not angry and bitter and vengeful but have a bigger picture. Such as Nelson Mandela, who comes out of prison and helps unite South Africa.

GS: Who could have predicted in their wildest dreams that South Africa wouldn’t end in a bloodbath?

JSB: Right, and what hope, that if they can do it, it can be done ...

GS: Or that the Berlin wall would come down?

JSB: And that the nuclear arms race would end. Of course, at the moment it appears that it was a remission, that the danger of nuclear arms proliferation is happening again.

GS: Well, it’s interesting that one phase just leads to another. There is a cultural conflict. In the way it was hard to see how those other conflicts would resolve, it’s hard to see how this one will. Unfortunately, hatred has been taught for generations and that will take some serious healing.

JSB: It will. But there is a tipping point kind of thing. When something moves through a culture and there gets to be a critical number of people thinking differently, and sometimes it’s about 20% who grasp a new idea and articulate it, then it tilts the culture. There’s also some sense that, before there is a tilt or shift, the conservative forces that want to maintain the status quo fight back the hardest, and then it tilts.

GS: We wait for signs of moderate Islam to stand up to the radicals, but I don’t see it happening yet.

JSB: Though it was good that the awarders of the Nobel Peace Prize gave it to an Iranian woman. She is a Muslim who, among other things, interprets and speaks forcefully that it is an interpretation of the Koran and not the truth of it that has been used to oppress women.

GS: That was an interesting award. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the long run.

JSB: It was a hopeful sign.

GS: What’s cutting edge for you right now?

JSB: Getting the message out to the world. I’m actually having a good time, which hasn’t always been the case when doing the book tour side of life. In part, this is because it has to do with my growing edge. In a sense, this is my assignment. This is your project to take up and, if you do, you’re on your spiritual path — this one of bringing the notion of circles and encouraging women to meet again in consciousness raising groups, but this time in circles with a spiritual center. Out of that, to do what it is right for them to do, and to appreciate the historical place we’re in, and to help tilt things in the right direction.

GS: I’ve said many times in these interviews, this is a toy store of a lifetime. There really does seem to be the possibility of men and women working together.

JSB: That’s a wonderful image and I fully agree. It has to do with the possibility of men really being in touch with their crone archetype. It goes back to when they entered the labor rooms and delivery rooms, and participated in the birthing process with their wives, and bonded with the children and carried them around, rather than being so proud that they never changed a diaper. In the 60s, the culture became more androgynous, and that means that the feminine principle was released so that men and women could develop each side. That is the hope is for the future.

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