Marion Woodman is a renowned Jungian analyst based in Toronto. She is a lecturer and author of numerous books such as “Addiction to Perfection,” “The Pregnant Virgin,” and “Leaving my Father’s House.”
As did Carl Jung, she considers body and psyche to be two aspects of one and the same entity. Jung opened the way to recognition of the feminine; Marion Woodman enriches and completes his understanding.
She focuses on the psychology of anorexia and bulimia, as well as on the development of “conscious femininity” and its role in our present-day society.
For Marion, food disorders are the expression of a “feminine search for true psychological nourishment in a society that often cannot produce it.”
“If you have not had a positive mother or mirror who could hold you in an atmosphere of non-judgment,” she wrote “you end up with death mother in your cells.”
Her method, which is practiced in her intensive seminars “BodySoul Rhythms,” brings body and psyche to the fore. The sessions utilize the energy of images as a link between body and psyche so as (i) to make manifest regressive energies that are in the unconscious and (ii) to make those energies subsequently available to consciousness.
The experience that results is the conscious realization that the body has accumulated and stored in its memory many mental patterns, feelings, perceptions, etc., that are blocking the overall movement of energy. This new awareness not only frees up creative energy withheld in the body, it also allows for the reunion of energy contained in mental images with energy contained in the body.
Today, energy and creativity are being increasingly attributed to the archetype of the feminine. That archetype, which is related to feeling, is acquiring more attention and importance than the logos, or purely rational functioning.
Marion and Anne