Jung Psychology Space has recently published Claudette Kulkarni’s “Jung’s Pointing Finger: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.” In it, Kulkarni offers a systematic and uncompromising critique of Jung’s theories on sex, gender, and sexuality, challenging their binary assumptions and calling for a re-visioning of analytical psychology in light of contemporary scientific and social developments.
Kulkarni is a retired Jungian psychotherapist based in Pittsburgh whose writing has long engaged, from the inside, with the structural problems in Jung’s treatment of sex and gender. Her 1997 book Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A Post-Jungian Perspective (Routledge) was among the first post-Jungian works to confront the heterosexism embedded in classical theory directly. She remains active in the field as a member of the International Queer Jungian Initiative.
The essay opens with an epigraph from Renos Papadopoulos — “after a great man’s death his followers tend to stare in adoration at his pointing finger, rather than trace the implications of the pointed direction” — and this image becomes the essay’s animating metaphor. Kulkarni’s contention is that Jung was pointing toward something he never fully articulated: that all human qualities are available to all human beings regardless of sex, gender, or orientation. He stopped short, constrained by the binary architecture of his own system. Her task — and the one she implicitly sets for the field — is to follow the direction he indicated but could not travel.
The essay works through seven “problematics” in Jung’s theory. The first concerns the concept of opposites. Kulkarni does not reject the category of opposites as such, but argues that Jung’s application of it to sex and gender was unjustified — a metaphor from physics elevated into ontological reality without adequate grounds. Drawing on Aristotle, she argues that substances within a species cannot be contraries: males and females share far more in common than they differ, and those differences do not constitute genuine opposition in any meaningful sense. The result was a theoretical architecture that was formally coherent but disconnected from lived reality.
The second and third problematics — othering and unquestioned prejudices — work closely together. On othering, Kulkarni draws a careful distinction between “otherness” (which recognises diversity) and “Othering” (which employs polarising hierarchies and generates stereotypes). On prejudice, she draws on Gadamer: all understanding begins in pre-understandings we cannot escape, but we can subject them to scrutiny. Jung absorbed the cultural norms of 19th-century patriarchal Europe and then elevated them into ahistorical archetypes, placing them beyond question or change — the conceptual original sin of his theory of sex and gender.
The fourth and fifth problematics — outdated biology and sexism — form the empirical and critical core. Current science, particularly from Fausto-Sterling and the field of epigenetics, makes clear that sex development is spectrum-wide and shaped by environment and social experience as much as by chromosomes. Jung could not have known this; Jungians today can. A close reading of Jung’s own texts — alongside Demaris Wehr’s earlier critique — shows how consistently his theory mapped women into subordinate positions, and how the anima/animus concepts, despite their liberatory potential, remained embedded in the binary hierarchy they appeared to transcend.
The sixth problematic, heterosexist precepts, is where the essay is most personally voiced. Jung’s theory of contrasexuality requires projection onto someone of the anatomically “opposite” sex, making heterosexuality not merely the statistical norm but a structural requirement of psychological development. Homosexuality cannot fit this architecture without becoming pathology or anomaly. Kulkarni’s response is not to seek a queer accommodation within the existing framework — which she regards as collusion — but to call for its replacement with a pluralistic account of sex, gender, and sexuality altogether.
The seventh and final problematic — predetermined goals for individuation — is perhaps the most directly pertinent to clinical practice. If individuation aims at the development of personality in all its “incomparable uniqueness,” a theory that imposes preordained sex/gender norms contradicts that aim from the outset. Kulkarni cites Peter Mudd’s observation that interpreting a patient’s material through Jung’s formulations on anima, animus, and gender risks “forcing men and women into identities that can bind and injure the unfolding individual self” — mutilating rather than supporting the self’s realisation.
Kulkarni closes with an affirmative vision: the queer community, by its very existence, functions as something like a living symbol in Jung’s sense — a third thing arising from the tension of opposites, pointing toward new possibilities for everyone. She is clear-eyed about institutional resistance: Jungian training programmes, she observes, continue to endorse classical theory and effectively block the tracing of those implications. The call is both direct and, in its own way, faithful to Jung: to follow his pointing finger means being as transgressive and subversive as he was in his own time. She closes by quoting Jung against himself: “we miss the meaning of the individual psyche if we interpret it on the basis of any fixed theory, however fond of it we may be.” It would be a strange irony if that warning did not apply, above all, to his own.
The article is available free and open-access at Jung Psychology Space — a platform bridging the anglophone and francophone Jungian communities worldwide, and one that continues to build an impressive collection of critical and reflective Jungian scholarship.
The article is long and dense, structured around its seven problematics, and rewards careful reading in full. You can access it via this link.
Further Reading and Listening
For those who want to go deeper into this territory, the Jungian world has a body of queer-affirmative work spanning several decades. Robert Hopcke’s Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality remains the foundational text as the first full-length work in English on homosexuality within analytical psychology. The Queer Jungian Voices special issue of Psychological Perspectives (Vol. 67, No. 4, 2024) brought together contributors from the International Queer Jungian Initiative across the globe and is an excellent companion to Kulkarni’s piece. We covered this issue when it was first published in our summary, Beyond the Binary: Jungian Insights on Gender and Sexuality which is freely available for you to read.
The London Arts-Based Research Centre hosts Queer as Method: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Art, Research and Resistance, an online conference taking place on September 11–12, 2026. Treating queerness as critical and creative method rather than solely as identity, the conference invites artists, academics, performers, and practitioners to explore how queer approaches might destabilise dominant modes of knowledge and open alternative ways of making and knowing. Proposals are welcome across disciplines and the deadline for submissions is August 1, 2026. Jungian Initiative.