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Patriarchal Daughter

Patriarchal Daughter

The patriarchal daughter is Marion Woodman’s clinical type: the woman whose ego is organized around the father-complex, who lives “from the neck up,” and whose body has become “armor” against the feminine. She is the figure whose recovery of the body is the recovery of the conscious-feminine.

Woodman names the structure consistently across her work. In a woman with a profound eating disorder, she writes, “the soul went underground at about the age of one; the little girl started to perform and be what people wanted her to be. So when the weight comes off you have a one year old trying to relate to a man, and she simply can’t do it” (Woodman 1993, p. 119). The patriarchal daughter is “addicted to control and to perfectionism. They try to be so efficient every day, then they go home and all hell breaks loose in binging, partying, drinking or some demonic ritual” (Woodman 1993, p. 14).

The structure is the feminine clinical correlate of woodman-addiction-to-perfection. The “perfection” the daughter pursues is the patriarchal Father’s image; the “addiction” is her body’s revolt against the image. Her dreams begin to be visited by “big dark women… great wonderful black women” (Woodman 1993, p. 20) — the black-madonna arriving in compensation. Her individuation requires that she leave her father’s house, the title image of Woodman’s 1992 collaborative volume leaving-my-fathers-house. The concept stands in the lineage of Esther esther-harding‘s The Way of All Women and behind the work of Linda Leonard and the rest of the post-Jungian feminine school.

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