The Call to Create: Liberating Acts of Imagination

Linda Schierse Leonard, a renowned Jungian analyst and the best-selling author of The Wounded Woman and Meeting the Madwoman, shows how we can use our energies to live more creatively in all areas of our lives.

In the decades Linda Schierse Leonard has spent as a Jungian analyst and teacher, she has seen that nature and creativity are healing--even necessary--tools for her clients, readers, and students. In The Call to Create, she explores the many parallels between the cycles, moods, and landscapes of nature that foster inspiration, renewal, and hope. Leonard shows how understanding these parallels helps us move through dark times so we can be ready to receive and actualize creativity in our lives.

Many people do not think of themselves as creative. Yet their everyday discoveries, work, and appreciation of families, relationships, and personal lives are creative acts. In The Call to Create, Leonard helps us identify the characters and archetypal patterns that rise up inside us as we go about imagining a better life. These characters can be hinderers--such as the Perfectionist, the Cynic, or the Escape Artist--or they can be helpers, such as the Sower, the Adventurer, or the Celebrant. The Call to Create helps us recognize these characters within ourselves, enabling us to turn our everyday struggles into creative acts.

Leonard encourages readers by showing that the obstacles preventing them from creating a better life are like those that artists confront, and that imagination can be born of frustration. By understanding how to cultivate the helpers within us--and by following the examples of well-known artists--we can develop and appreciate creativity in everything from our search for meaning to family and love relationships, from communications and business ventures to artistic endeavors.

Linda Schierse Leonard, Ph.D., is a philosopher who trained as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. She is the author of many best-selling books, among them The Wounded Woman, On the Way to the Wedding, and Meeting the Madwoman, which have been translated into twelve languages. Leonard lectures internationally and has held teaching positions in the California State Universities and the University of Colorado at Denver. She has been in private practice for thirty years and currently practices in Aspen, Colorado.