The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology. This item is unavailable.The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology

This is an exploration of the malaise of our time, the wounded-feeling function, through the mystic stories of The Fisher King and The Handless Maiden. Johnson looks to the heightened, magical language of myth for an analysis of, and a prescription for curing, this contemporary malaise. The Fisher King story can be seen as an experience of the masculine in either gender; so too, the tale of The Handless Maiden explores both a woman's interior experience, as well as being an allegory of the feminine element in us all.

Johnson, whose work will already be familiar to those interested in Jungian thought, specializes (as in his three books He, She, and We) in applying Jung's theories to the relations between men and women. In this slender book, he mines two important tales for what they can tell us about feeling not simply emotion but a grounded sense of values. Everyone in our culture, he argues, is "wounded" in the area of feeling, but the wound is expressed differently among men than among women. To understand the male problem, he examines the figure of the Fisher King from the Grail legends; to understand women's relationship to feeling, he explores the famous folktale of the Handless Maiden pledged to the devil by her own father. A solid contribution to Jungian thought. Pat Monaghan