Woman Changing Woman: Feminine Psychology Re-Conceived Through Myth and Experience
by Virginia Beane Rutter
Category: Social Science

Around the world, throughout time, cultures have marked the intimate and transformative events of a woman's life - the onset of puberty, her first sexual experience, conceptian, childbirth, menopause - with myths and rituals. Today, such significant feminine rituals are missing, but these transitions still profoundly affect a woman's body, mind, and soul. Offering a compelling vision of psychotherapy as a sacred space for women's rites of passage, Jungian analyst Virginia Beane Rutter brilliantly illuminates the emotional lives of women. "Woman-to-woman therapy", writes Beane Rutter, "is the ritual container for the lost feminine in our culture". Modeling on intrinsically female pattern of change, woman-to-woman therapy is a process involving stages of containment, transformation, and emergence. It is a place for a woman to uncover and make conscious the motivating stories and myths in her individual psyche. Here, a woman has the opportunity to listen to her own voice perhaps for the first time. With insight and understanding, Beane Rutter connects the practices, myths, and archetypal images of cultures post and present (the Navajo, Neolithic Catal Huyuk, and Ancient Greek) to the life experiences, dreams, and therapeutic processes of three contemporary women. In so doing, she traces the emotional, physical, and spiritual journey of the "cultural heroine" who, through her individual process of initiation, transformation, healing, and self-awareness, courageously takes up the task of all women.