Conscious Femininity

Conscious femininity, as marion-woodman develops it, is the differentiated relation to the maternal and feminine principle that depth work makes possible. Woodman names it as a new consciousness arriving through dreams: “a new consciousness that is manifesting in dreams. It has not yet reached the conscious level in the everyday world, but people who are in relationship to their dreams are contacting something that’s quite new” (Woodman 1993).

Conscious femininity is not the feminine gender role but a mode of relation to the body, to matter, and to the receptive ground of psyche that has been culturally devalued and personally split off. Woodman’s clinical work — with eating disorders, with addiction, with what she names addiction to perfection — diagnoses these as symptoms of a culture and a psyche estranged from this register. Recovery is not a return to a pre-modern femininity but the conscious differentiation of a maternal principle that had remained unconscious as mother-complex.

The concept stands in productive relation to ratio-matris: where ratio matris names the measure of the maternal mode of cognition, conscious femininity names the practice by which a person comes into right relation to that measure. One is the structural principle; the other is the lived discipline.

Relationships

• marion-woodman
• ratio-matris
• matriarchal-consciousness
• mother-complex
• anima

Primary sources

• woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993)