 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
woodman2
woodman3
woodman4
woodman5
woodman6
woodman7
woodman8
woodman9
woodman10
|
|
 |
| ||||||
An Interview with Marion Woodman Copyright © 1995 by Bert H. Hoff  Bert: You have been very inspirational for a lot of women. Your work in Jungian analysis has taken you into themes of women and spirituality. I remember how well you were received at the Women of Wisdom conference here last February. Can you elaborate a bit on how you got into working with women, spirit and soul? Marion: In my psychoanalytic work, I worked for many years on the rotten foundations, the very dark complexes that can undermine our lives. As people began to come through onto the other side and transform those complexes, huge creative energies began to emerge. That naturally led into soul and spirit. I think there's a place where psychology and religion meet, and where religion becomes more essential than psychology. My focus has become the meaning of incarnating soul in body. It simply has grown out of my own work with my analysands. This is where their processes have taken them. It wasn't anything artificial imposed on top of something. Bert: More like an organic evolution of your own process. Marion: That's right. An organic evolution out of an addiction, I would say. Because the energy that had been located in the addiction, when it was transformed, became very creative and spiritually oriented. Bert: That reflects the sequence of your books, beginning with The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, about anorexia, then Addiction to Perfection. Marion: And then The Pregnant Virgin, the attempt to find the feminine that is who she is because that's who she is. Then the growth of the newfound masculine out of the newfound feminine. Bert: The newfound masculine in women. Marion: Yes. Mind you, I think that the processes are similar in men and women. I think that the men have to also find their own new masculine, that hasn't been damaged by the patriarchy. And they certainly also have to find their feminine, free of the old mother that would devour them. I have to say here that I'm talking about archetypal energies, not personal mother and father. All of us, by the very fact that we've been brought up in a patriarchal system, have archaic parental complexes. Bert: That comes about because our parents were brought up in a patriarchal society. Marion: And their parents and grandparents, for generations back. We carry those negative energies that would destroy our individuality. My last book, Leaving My Father's House, is about the triumph of the positive masculine. The Ravaged Bridegroom is about the wounded masculine. Bert: Could you talk a bit about the message in Leaving My Father's House? Marion: It's based on a fairy tale. In the story, the heroine is trying to get free from an incestuous relationship with her father. It's about her having to discover, first, her intellectual powers, and secondly, her instinctual and feminine energies, and finally, her ability to relate to the cosmos. What I was doing in that book was showing how women and men are bound into incestuous relationships, from which they must free themselves. Bert: You're talking figuratively, as well as literally, about something that applies to everybody, not only those who have been victims of physically incestuous relationships. Marion: Yes, incestuous both physically and psychically. We have to bring those bonds to consciousness, and be able to use that energy, because very often when that energy is transformed it becomes immensely creative. That's because where there has been a psychically incestuous relationship, the unit has had a psychological bonding that can be a source of creative energy. Many women find their creative roots in that relationship with their father, because that relationship gives them a natural access to their own unconscious. So what the book is about is freeing ourselves from our personal fathers, patriarchal institutions and patriarchal thinking. For example, medicine and law that are based on patriarchal thinking. Not that I'm an anarchist, but I think that a lot of us accept patriarchal thinking and don't even question it. One goal of the book is to try to get people to think their own thoughts and recognize what they're living in. Bert: To take medicine as an example, I take it you're talking about Western medicine's reluctance to get into holistic approaches and look at the whole person, rather than the list of symptoms on the chart in front of them. Marion: That's right. And not being willing to recognize soul in body, so that they think they can treat the body as a machine, and forget that there is a soul meaning in illness. This isn't to mock Western medicine, because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the wisdom of Western medicine. Bert: The scientific and technical wisdom of Western medicine. But as you are going through your own personal journey, clearly you're dealing with matters of spirit and soul, and doing what Thomas Moore would refer to as care of the soul as a vital part of your healing process. Marion: That's right. I know that the healing is in the soul journey. The curing may be in the body, but being cured is not necessarily living a full life. A person can go on breathing without really living, or even die, if he or she is cured, but not healed. Healing is a coming to wholeness. Bert: What you're talking about is what the shamans knew all along. They have their own wisdom, even if it didn't reach the scientific level that ours did. They begin by working with the soul and where the person is. Marion: Working intuitively with soul. Bert: Intuitively because intuition is a form of soul-to-soul communication. Marion: That's right. I've found that to be a profoundly religious experience, to work with that kind of a doctor. Just to tie it back in, patriarchal thinking would take away the patient's capacity to think for himself or herself about what's going on with their own body, or to think about connecting in a dialogue with your own symptom. It would take away what you know instinctively to be your own process, and just make you rely on surgery or radiation or any of the other techniques, with just a thoughtless, "Yes, I'll do anything you tell me to do." You may take radiation, in the end, but it's better to take it through choice, or through an inner dialogue, so that you know what is going on, at both the body level and the soul level. Bert: There seems to be an element of lack of responsibility for your own life. "Here I am, I'm not connected to my body, you do to me what you think needs to be done." Marion: Rape me as you will. That's what it comes to. And that can happen in the law courts, too. Bert: Your work, then, on the positive and the negative aspects of masculinity has led to your working with men as well as women. Marion: I've always worked with men, but I didn't write about men because I'm not in a man's body, and I didn't feel that I had the ground to write about men. Now I'm starting to write about men's dreams, but I don't think it's possible for a woman to live imaginatively in a man's body. I can't imagine myself as the son of a father. I can empathize with it, but I can't feel it in my muscles. Next Page http://maxpages.com/marionwoodman/woodman6 |
 Sign Guestbook |
 View Guestbook |
 Anim0n@pacbell.net |
|
. |
| Visitors: 00053 |