This summer, Jungian Analyst, teacher and author Marion Woodman passed away at the age of 89. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her or hear her speak in person, her work has left an impression on me, as it has on many in the Jungian community. Marion was born in London, Ontario, where she grew up and became a teacher (for over twenty years) of poetry and drama at the South Collegiate Institute. She later began Jungian analysis with E.A. Bennett in England and then went on to train as an analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where she received her Diploma in 1979. An avid writer, she worked within a Jungian approach, initially focusing on persons with addiction problems and (in her view, a form of addiction) eating disorders. From there, in particular as she addressed the depth psychology underlying eating disorders in women, Marion developed a deep appreciation of feminine archetypes, including archetypes of the Dark Goddess, the embodied feminine, and, through guiding her many analysands, helped countless persons develop spiritual meaning in their lives, through inner work, guided by Jungian principles. Marion’s work continues in organizations such as the Pacifica Institute in California, which has a collection of her books, papers and lectures and the Marion Woodman Foundation, which promotes workshops based on her teachings. Marion’s books are among the most read of any by recent Jungian authors, and she was one of the early Fay Lecturers for the Fay Book series at Texas A&M University.
My encounter with Marion Woodman’s work began when I was a resident in psychiatry, working in San Francisco in the 1990s. At the time, I had begun treating a young woman who was suffering from anorexia and depression, and, not being content with behavioral and biochemical models to explain eating disorders, or with the extant psychodynamic theories, I remember seeking out a Jungian approach to doing this kind of work. Eventually I came upon Woodman’s book, Addiction to Perfection, recommended by a Jungian adviser I had at the time. I was immediately stuck by Woodman’s approach, which looked at eating disorders as a spiritual crisis and, as it was mostly occurring in women, as a manifestation of the loss of the deep and sacred feminine in our modern world. Addiction to Perfection, re-reading it now, is not the most polished or sequentially approached text, as she acknowledges in the introduction:
“By nature I like to work with cameos…in fine detail, perfect that…Writing a book is not cameo work and putting a rough-hewn rock into the world is not easy for a perfectionist. Reading it over now, I find some parts boring, some parts running away with themselves in true compulsive style, and some part mired in detail. I could cut them out, but when I wrote them they were important as part of a whole process – a process that takes infinite patience, with heartbreaking setbacks and long periods of moving ahead while looking backward into the mirror.” (In this last sentence, Woodman may have as well been describing the process of analytical therapy work!).
Woodman’s style honored her own inner work, as she shed perfectionistic and sterile methodologies, and instead, used a "spiral" motion to work together case vignettes, writings from her analysands, reflections on Jung’s ideas of how to work with inner archetypal images, parallels with the twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, the use of poetry and spiritual material, all to shed light on how inner processes develop over time and, if paid attention to, can help heal our modern illnesses. Reading Woodman’s book (Addiction to Perfection was her second published book), I found myself challenged to explore the deep feminine part of the psyche in myself, and to be open to how my patient at the time was struggling to find this in herself. Woodman’s work dovetailed nicely with a more embodied and soulful development of feminism that seemed to be gathering momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and I remember feeling her work resonated well with another important book I read at the time, The Chalice and the Blade (1988), by Riane Eisler. In this latter book, hypotheses were made and supported regarding feminine notions of the divine which had existed in previous cultures, and Eisler viewed history as a process of masculine and feminine principles that were in flux. Woodman realized, like Eisler, that our Western culture had been dominated for centuries by a patriarchal model, under which many a person was struggling, manifesting in our psychological and physical sickness and addiction. Moreover, with the loss of spiritual and religious approaches to life and the loss of ritual in the modern, scientific world, humans were even more cut off from accessing their inner, archetypal worlds in order to find balance. Woodman explored much of this current crisis of the patriarchal culture through analyzing her own dreams, and the dreams of men and women, in her writings. Although Woodman wrote extensively of feminine and masculine principles, she was always clear that these were archetypal forces and principles, active in both men and women.
As her life work developed, Woodman would participate in collaborative writing with other women (for instance, see Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey Towards Conscious Femininity (co-authored with Kate Danson, Mary Hamilton, and Rita Greer Allen (1992)) and with men (see The Maiden King:The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, written with Robert Bly in 1998). Leaving My Father's House follows the inner work and development of three women in some detail, revealing how each person's individuation process is unique, but also drawing parallels and finding group level understanding through the process of collaboration. This later book also utilizes Woodman's "spiral" approach towards working through a topic in book form, but here this is done in a more mature and complete form than in her earlier book, Addiction to Perfection, and her co-writers play a more formal role in the work.
Later in my journey to become an analyst, I also went to study at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Once there, I remember conversations with several fellow students who had either worked directly with Marion Woodman in Canada, or knew of her work (and that of her husband, Ross Woodman, who was a poetry scholar and who collaborated with Marion as a life partner). These students seemed genuinely moved and inspired by Marion's approach to conscious feminism, and had found her work and her presence as an analyst to be both healing and nurturing.
Towards the end of the last century, Marion dealt with serious illness in the form of ovarian cancer, and she wrote about this in her book Bone: Dying Into Life (Viking Press 2000). Following this illness, Marion seems to have focused primarily on workshops and writing, after a couple of decades of intensive work with her therapy clients. In 2009 a film about Marion Woodman (Marion Woodman: Dancing In The Flames) was released. After hearing of Marion's passing, I sought out the film, and found it to be very well made and insightful. The film blends her ideas with an overview of her life, linking her personal life story with her ideas. In dialogue with her husband Ross and with the writer/mystic Andrew Harvey, the film also explores the relevance of Woodman's own insights, through her work on herself and others in Jungian analysis, to current human culture and crises. In the film, we learn of Woodman’s inner life and how it unfolded from childhood, where she from an early age found herself trying to reconcile an earthy, “gypsy” nature with a pure and spritiual nature, the latter of which might have been passed on to her by her preacher father. Woodman shared having a Christian minister as a father in common with C.G. Jung, and indeed, hearing about her life and journey in this film (and in her writings) is a lot like reading Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Refections, but here from the perspective of a woman, and a woman growing up in a different culture and time from Jung. Some of what is revealed in the film on Woodman was surprising to me. For instance, she reveals that she herself went through a period of anorexia, and she talks about her own recovery process. Both Woodman’s and Jung’s work show how paying attention to one’s inner world (through dreams, journaling and active imagination) and inner truths becomes a lifelong process, often not an easy one, but a process which can lead to a deepening of meaning and consciousness over time.
Hearing of Marion Woodman’s death, I felt a sadness that one of the leaders of the Jungian community had passed away. But in her life, well and fully lived, and deeply expressed, I am thankful for what she has given us. Her journey, and her encounter with the deep feminine aspect of the psyche, stand as a soulful counterpoint to C.G. Jung’ own writings. Marion Woodman stands as a great example of someone who learned from Jung, but who followed her own individuation process and, in doing so, found a way to connect to many like-minded souls throughout the world. I know that in my work with analysands, and in my own inner work, Marion Woodman will continue to be a confidante and guide, for years to come. She surely has been that, and will continue to be that, for many other students of the human psyche and of feminine consciousness as well, for decades to come.
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