Woman Changing Woman: Feminine Psychology Re-Conceived Through Myth and Experience - Hardcover

Rutter, Virginia Beane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062507486 ISBN 13: 9780062507488

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1993

Synopsis

Around the world, throughout time, cultures have marked the intimate and transformative events of a woman's life - the onset of puberty, her first sexual experience, conceptian, childbirth, menopause - with myths and rituals. Today, such significant feminine rituals are missing, but these transitions still profoundly affect a woman's body, mind, and soul.
Offering a compelling vision of psychotherapy as a sacred space for women's rites of passage, Jungian analyst Virginia Beane Rutter brilliantly illuminates the emotional lives of women.
"Woman-to-woman therapy," writes Beane Rutter, "is the ritual container for the lost feminine in our culture." Modeling on intrinsically female pattern of change, woman-to-woman therapy is a process involving stages of containment, transformation, and emergence. It is a place for a woman to uncover and make conscious the motivating stories and myths in her individual psyche. Here, a woman has the opportunity to listen to her own voice perhaps for the first time.
With insight and understanding, Beane Rutter connects the practices, myths, and archetypal images of cultures post and present (the Navajo, Neolithic Catal Huyuk, and Ancient Greek) to the life experiences, dreams, and therapeutic processes of three contemporary women. In so doing, she traces the emotional, physical, and spiritual journey of the "cultural heroine" who, through her individual process of initiation, transformation, healing, and self-awareness, courageously takes up the task of all women.

About this title

From the Publisher:

An illuminating perspective on feminine psychology that has "the suspense of a novel, the careful scholarship of a dissertation, and the emotional flow of a poem."--Booklist

From Publishers Weekly:

In a society that has demeaned feminine culture and eradicated its ancient symbols, the relationship between a woman and a female therapist can restore her sense of femininity. At least that is the thesis of this evocative and absorbing work by Rutter, an analyst with the C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco. Rutter describes the effect that therapy with female therapists had on her life and discusses her relationship with three of her own patients. She attempts to show how their dreams relate to the symbols and themes of mother-daughter relationships seen in a number of ancient cultures--Turkish, Navajo and Greek among them. Some may wonder if Rutter isn't a little too anxious to see archetypes in her patients' dreams, but nevertheless this analysis illuminates an unappreciated aspect of the therapeutic relationship which, as the author suggests, when entered into by two women, can embody a feminine mystery of great intimacy and depth. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0062507486
• ISBN 13: 9780062507488
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243