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woodman2
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| Marion Woodman |
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| A Tribute |
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Jungian high priestess pumps femininity's political potential By ALICE KLEIN  Femininity is still a very touchy subject. Ask any feminist. Ask any right-winger. Ask any daughter — or son, for that matter. Or even more interesting, ask Toronto author and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. She says bringing our conflict over femininity to conciousness could save our soul. Her international renown is based on her efforts to bring today’s dreamworld to light. In this world, where the psyche expresses itself directly, she says we can understand the unconscious forces that are responsible for creating the personal, political and social ills all around us. But to ask her about it, you have to find her first. By the time I get to her door, I am laughing. The journey here is actually like a dream — her street keeps ending before I get to her number. I’m a Toronto native and yet this happens to me three times. Then, finally, finding the building, elevator slow-rise. When I get to her floor there is reno going on. The highrise hallway is lined with doors with no numbers on them. Finally I spot Woodman’s entrance. It’s open. She welcomes me in. It all happened a lot faster, but this feels like my own path to putting the feminine into perspective — lots of earnest seeking, misplaced expectations of arrival, abrupt detours, dead ends and, sometimes, the exhilaration of an open door. An initiation. For Woodman, the feminine is identified with the soul — “the embodied part of the eternal,” while the masculine is identified with the spirit, which is the disembodied aspect of each person. She traces life’s meaning in their union. That’s why her work aims to bridge the rift between mind and body that characterizes patriarchy’s ailing unconscious. “We’re using these words not as gender,” she rushes to explain, knowing that a word like patriarchy can push the wrong buttons. When she uses it, it feels like a new language. She would say it’s the language of the soul. Woodman sees femininity as the inner partner to masculinity in every human, much like a charge acts inside the atom. Not only is it an energy essential for both men and women, Woodman says, but becoming conscious of this energy can break the addictive obsessions that are secretly eating at the core of our world. “Addicts don’t wake up until they’re on their knees at the wall,” she says, speaking from her own experience with overcoming an eating disorder many years ago. “Either they wake up or they blank out into death. And it’s the same thing in the situation we’re in now. “I think there’s going to be a fierce time ahead,” she says. “It seems we have to hit the wall. But I’ve seen it in individual addicts. When they hit the wall, something immense happens.” In other words, we tune in to the feminine or die. Woodman has been waking up to the teachings of dreams for 30 years. Her books, Addiction To Perfection, The Owl Was A Baker’s Daughter, The Pregnant Virgin, Leaving My Father’s House and others, weave dream accounts with myth, fairy tale and personal life into primers on the architecture of the inner self. Metaphor is her simplest message. “The fact is that when you work with body and mind, or you’ve been forced to because you’ve been ill, you find that the connector is metaphor. Metaphor is the language of the soul. Shakespeare talks in metaphors, the Bible talks in metaphors. Metaphor is a physical picture of a spiritual condition. Dear Friends, There are 10 pages in this set, so please keep clicking on "Next Page" to see them all. Next Page http://maxpages.com/marionwoodman/woodman2 |
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