Conscious Femininity

A collection of thirteen interviews with Woodman conducted between 1985 and 1993, published by Inner City Books in the Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts series. The volume functions as the most compact summation of Woodman’s method and vocabulary in her own spoken voice. Its interviewers — Pythia Peay, Sally Van Wagenen Keil, Barbara Goodrich-Dunn, Anne Simpkinson, Ralph Earle, and others — draw her to articulate, often more directly than the books allow, her central concepts: the somatic-unconscious, the conscious-feminine, addiction-as-distorted-religion, the black-madonna, and embodied-consciousness.

The volume’s particular gift to the Lineage is autobiographical. Woodman narrates her trajectory in detail — the twenty-one years of teaching, the 1968 journey to India, the hotel-room crisis in which she had to choose whether to return to her body, the year with E. A. Bennet in London, the Zurich training, and the Emily Dickinson thesis that preceded Owl. The interviews place the theoretical work inside the life that produced it, and make legible the degree to which Woodman’s insistence that theory is nothing without the body was itself a finding she paid for in her own flesh.

Concepts introduced or developed

• embodied-consciousness
• conscious-feminine
• black-madonna
• somatic-unconscious

Cited by

• marion-woodman