Post-Jungian Feminine School

A coordinated post-Jungian elaboration of the feminine emerged from the late 1970s through the 1990s — a body of work that took up Jung’s anima theory and the first-generation work of Esther esther-harding, Toni Wolff, and marie-louise-von-franz, and re-grounded it in the body and in clinical practice with women. The school is not formally constituted; it is recognizable by a shared lineage of publishers, patrons, and recurring concepts.

Marion Woodman is one of its three most-cited voices. Donald Kalsched’s The Inner World of Trauma triangulates her with Linda Schierse Leonard and Clarissa Pinkola clarissa-pinkola-estes as the writers who made the archetypal self-care system speak in feminine terms — Woodman with the daimon-lover, Leonard with the “perverted old man,” Estés with the “innate predator” (Kalsched 1996). Andrew andrew-samuels‘s reference apparatus in Jung and the Post-Jungians records Woodman’s place in the same taxonomy.

The institutional spine of the school in North America is Inner City Books (Toronto), founded in 1980 with Daryl Sharp as publisher and Marie-Louise von Franz as Honorary Patron. Woodman’s three earliest titles, Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess (1981), and Linda Leonard’s books appeared under that imprint. The school’s defining gesture is the return of Jung’s anima theory to the female body and to the lived crises — eating disorders, addiction, the negative father complex — in which the patriarchal daughter encounters the unlived feminine in herself.

Sources

• marion-woodman: the daimon-lover, the pregnant-virgin, the conscious-feminine (Woodman 1980, 1982, 1985, 1992, 1993)
• clarissa-pinkola-estes: the innate predator, the wild-woman (cited in Kalsched 1996)
• donald-kalsched: the post-Jungian feminine triad (Kalsched 1996)
• andrew-samuels: Woodman in the post-Jungian taxonomy (samuels-jung-postjungians, 1985)