Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Women’s Dreams

Name: Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Women's Dreams
Author: Karen A. Signell

Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Women’s Dreams is a work by Karen A. Signell (1991).

Core claims

Signell’s decision to let dreams generate theory rather than illustrate it constitutes a genuine methodological reversal within Jungian practice—one that quietly dismantles the animus-centered framework that had dominated post-Jungian writing on women’s psychology for decades.
The book’s most radical move is its rehabilitation of the emotional substrate of archetypes: Signell argues that feeling-tone, not symbolic image, is the primary carrier of archetypal meaning, repositioning the heart as an organ of cognition rather than sentimentality.
By tracing the spiral from the early feminine Self through aggression, shadow, relationship, and sexuality to the Wise Old Woman, Signell maps a distinctly feminine individuation sequence that does not depend on heroic separation or dragon-slaying—offering a structural alternative to the Neumann-Edinger developmental model.

How does Signell’s model of the Wise Old Woman as the culmination of feminine individuation compare to Erich Neumann’s account of the Great Mother’s transformation stages in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype?
In what ways does Signell’s claim that archetypes originate in primary emotions rather than symbolic images challenge or complement James Hillman’s image-centered archetypal psychology as articulated in Re-Visioning Psychology?
How might Marion Woodman’s treatment of the feminine body-soul in Addiction to Perfection be read alongside Signell’s chapter on sexuality as two parallel attempts to reclaim women’s embodied experience from Jungian abstraction?