Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity

by Marion Woodman

Overview

The renowned analyst and author here provides deep insight into the process required to bring feminize wisdom to consciousness in a patriarchal culture—as struggle in which many women are more fully engaged today that ever before. Presenting the personal journeys of three wise women as maps, she points the way to the state of inner wholeness and balance she calls "conscious femininity."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780877738961
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	11/17/1992
Edition description:	Reprinted Edition
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,097,289
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Marion Woodman is a Jungian analyst who is internationally known as a teacher, lecturer, and workshop leader. She is the author of numerous books, including Addiction to Perfection and Leaving My Father's House.

Editorial Reviews

A Jungian analyst in Toronto, Woodman here collaborates with three of her analysands, who tell their own stories of breaking with patriarchal values and recovering feminine energies. Danson, a graduate student coping with the trauma of an abortion, comes to terms with her loveless childhood and a brother's sexual abuse. Hamilton, a dancer struggling to crack through the armored rage in her body, dialogues with inner figures she calls Medicine Woman and Deer. Allen, a sculptor working through the grief of being childless, at age 72 ``faces into darkness with the wit and wisdom of a seasoned crone.'' Using Jungian archetypes and a Grimm fairy tale about a princess who rejects an incestuous marriage, Woodman in her interlinking commentaries charts each woman's growth toward wholeness. The first-person case histories, distilled from private journals, are detailed maps of self-transformation. Illustrated. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Living in a patriarchal society in which the driving force is power, women learn early how to please through the power of their sexuality. The transformative process of finding feminine consciousness involves the painful experience of leaving the father's house and claiming the positive energy usually projected onto a man, making him godlike. Woodman, a Jungian analyst and author of The Pregnant Virgin (Inner City Bks., 1985) and The Ravaged Bridegroom (Inner City Bks., 1990), uses the fairy tale Allerleirauh to demonstrate the process of integrating the many parts of a personality into a whole, allowing a woman to take her active role in society and freeing her from the negative mother (or the overly critical feminine). Three women describe their process, each representing a part of the fairy tale. Their stories are heartening in their emphasis on the positive in a difficult process of healing the psychic split between feminine and masculine. As in all of her books, Woodman's piercing clarity and intelligence leaves one both wiser and inspired. Highly recommended for psychology and women's studies collections.-- Paula N. Arnold, Norwich Univ. Lib., Northfield, Vt.

Library Journal