The disturbing experience of psychological infanticide reflects the darkest aspect of the wounding of the Sacred Feminine – the Death Mother archetype that annihilates rather than nurtures life.
Through myth, story, classic literature, biography, poems, art and dreams, Dr. Sherwood weaves together symbolic aspects of psychological infanticide with psychoanalytic theory of traumatic attachment and the literal truth of a centuries-old history of infanticide.
She illuminates the Death Mother archetype in the dynamic between the unwilling (or unsupported) mother and the unwelcome child. Her personal and archetypal journey into, through, and beyond the underworld, offers hope and guidance for the restoration of the relationship between the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Child.
She draws on her professional experience as a psychotherapist and her lived experience of psychological infanticide as a result of closed stranger adoption to explore the intimate connection between life and death, revealing the life task of the infanticided psyche is to embrace death and discover the life that lies beyond the realm of the underworld.
Table of Contents
-List of Figures
-Foreword
-Acknowledgments
-Dedication
-Prologue
-Introduction
PART ONE: SETTING THE SCENE FOR A MURDER INQUIRY
-Chapter One: A Haunting
-Chapter Two: Researching Apparitions
-Chapter Three: Infanticidal Attachment
-Chapter Four: Nineteenth-Century Baby Farming: A Crucial Link with Adoption
PART TWO: SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
-Chapter Five: Murderousness
-Chapter Six: Abandonment
-Chapter Seven: Opium
-Chapter Eight: Neglect
PART THREE: PSYCHOLOGICAL INFANTICIDE: A PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SYNTHESIS
-Chapter Nine: Eclipse: The Alchemy of the Non-existent self
-Chapter Ten: Minnie Dean and a Poetics of Engagement
-Chapter Eleven: Solutio: The Alchemy of Drowning and the ‘Trauma-world’
“Haunted: the Death Mother Archetype is a wonder of a book. Dr. Sherwood’s impeccable scholarship undergirds a transformative dance between the imaginative capacity of soul, and the harsh realities embedded in her subject matter.”
-Dr. Mary Harrell
Dr. Violet Sherwood is a Jungian-inspired psychotherapist, poet, and author.
She lives in the beautiful seaside community of Whaingaroa Raglan in New Zealand, where she practices psychotherapy, teaches qigong, and walks on the wild west coast beaches.
The ebook version of The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz Volume 2 will be available on Google Play on November 1.
The paperback version will also be available on November 1.
The Hero’s Journey is about the great adventure that leads to a cherished and difficult to obtain prize. In these fairytales, the Self is often symbolized as that treasured prize and the hero’s travails symbolize the process of individuation. In its many manifestations, the hero embodies the emerging personality. “In the conscious world, the hero is only one part of the personality—the despised part—and through his attachment to the Self in the unconscious is a symbol of the whole personality.”
Von Franz’s prodigious knowledge of fairytales from around the world demonstrates that the fairytale draws its root moisture from the collective realm. This volume continues where Volume 1 left off as von Franz describes the fairytale, “suspended between the divine and the secular worlds (…) creating a mysterious and pregnant tension that requires extreme power to withstand.” The resistance of the great mother against the hero and his humble origins, as well as the hero freeing the anima figure from the clutches of the unconscious are universal archetypal patterns. The spoils retrieved by the hero symbolize new levels of consciousness wrested from the unconscious.
The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz is a 28-volume Magnum Opus from one of the leading minds in Jungian Psychology. Volume 3 turns to the Maiden’s Quest within fairytales.
The maiden/heroine navigates a complicated maze of inner and outer relationships as she builds a bridge to the unconscious. The heroine contends with the animus in many forms like a devouring and incestuous father, demonic groom, the beautiful prince, an androgenous mother, a cold dark tower, and through conflict with the evil stepmother.
Dangers and pitfalls await her as the conscious feminine strives to make connections with the unconscious masculine. The maiden is the undeveloped feminine and the promised fruit of her struggle with the animus is the coniunctio. Volume 3 is a masterwork of cross-cultural scholarship, penetrating psychological insight, and a strikingly illuminating treatise. With her usual perspicacity and thoroughness, von Franz gathers countless fairytale motifs revealing a myriad of facets to the maiden’s quest.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Bluebeard
Chapter 2. The Pastor’s Wife
Chapter 3. The Woman Who Became A Spider
Chapter 4. Sedna
Chapter 5. The Girl and the Skull
Chapter 6. The Two Sisters
Chapter 7. Mother Holle
Chapter 8. Ingebjörg and the Good Stepmother
Chapter 9. The Wages of the Stepdaughter and the House Daughter
Volume 1 – The Profane and Magical Worlds
Volume 1 – Both paperback and hardcover – are now available. Fairytales, like myths, provide a cultural and societal backdrop that helps the human imagination narrate the meaning of life’s events. The remarkable similarities in fairytale motifs across different lands and cultures inspired many scholars to search for the original homeland of fairytales. While peregrinations of fairytale motifs occur, the common root of fairytales is more archetypal than geographic. A striking feature of fairytales is that a sense of space, time, and causality is absent. This situates them in a magical realm, a land of the soul, where the most interesting things happen in the center of places like Heaven, mountains, lakes, and wells.
This book describes the development of images of God, beginning in antiquity and culminating in Jung’s notion of the Self, an image of God in the psyche that Jung calls the God within. Over the course of history, the Self has been projected onto many local gods and goddesses and given different names and attributes.
These deities are typically imagined as existing in a heavenly realm, but Jung’s approach recalls them to their origins in the objective psyche. This book shows how Jung’s approach avoids many of the philosophical problems produced by traditional anthropomorphic images of God and describes the myriad symbolic ways in which the Self may appear, independently of doctrinal images of God. By focusing on the empirical, psychological manifestations of the Self, Jung’s approach avoids arguments for and against the existence of a metaphysical God.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: The Existence of God in an Age of Science
Chapter 2: The God-image in Jung’s Psychology
Chapter 3: The God-image in Archaic Religions and Antiquity
Chapter 4: The God-image of the Hebrew Scriptures & the Post-Biblical Tradition
Chapter 5: The Development of the Christian Image of God
Chapter 6: The God-image from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century
Chapter 7: Psychological Approaches to the God-image
The Soul in Anguish presents a variety of approaches to psychotherapeutic work with suffering people, from the perspectives of both Jungian and psychoanalytic psychology. An important theme of the book is the impact of suffering—suffering may be harmful or helpful to the development of the personality. Our culture tends to assume that suffering is invariably negative or pointless, but this is not necessarily so; suffering may be destructive, but it may lead to positive developments such as enhanced empathy for others, wisdom, or spiritual development.
The Sacred Cauldron makes the startling claim that, for both participants, psychotherapeutic work is actually a spiritual discipline in its own right. The psyche manifests the sacred and provides the transpersonal field within which the work of therapy is carried out. This book demonstrates some of the ways in which a spiritual sensibility can inform the technical aspects of psychotherapy.
Dr. Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is a professor of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, in Santa Barbara, California.
He is the author of five books: Psyche and the Sacred: Spirituality Beyond Religion; The Religious Function of the Psyche; The Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice; The Soul in Anguish: Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Suffering; and Understanding Evil: A Psychotherapist’s Guide.
He is the co-editor of four volumes of collected papers: Psyche’s Stories: Modern Jungian Interpretations of Fairy Tales; Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field; Psychology at the Threshold; and Jung And Aging: Possibilities And Potentials for the Second Half of Life.
Lauren Sleeman, a Jungian and Transpersonal Psychotherapist, is the author of two novels. In Behold her quest is to bring the goddess tales of Greek and Celtic mythology to life again, especially the goddesses associated with the power of the Great Mother, and to acknowledge these strong archetypes and the sacred wisdom they bring to women’s lives.
As a Jungian transpersonal psychotherapist, Jung’s symbols and archetypes inspired the mystical world of Sleeman’s novel, Behold. Alchemy also plays a significant role in this magical fantasy, a journey of personal and collective transformation. The many layers of archetypal consciousness in human experience are brought to light in a humorous yet “instructive” way.
Behold also resurrects ancient goddess wisdom and playfully rewrites myths and histories in which women are marginalized or silenced. Sleeman’s study of world religions and travels to ancient sites in Greece, Malta and the British Isles inform the sacred rituals in the story.
Emerging from “the Great Darkness” through a prism of light come two forsaken goddesses of antiquity—Lilith, the Great Mother and Crone of the Cosmos, and Hekate, Goddess of the Dark Moon and the Mysteries of Life, Death, and Rebirth. They stand at the crossroads between worlds as the Bringers of Transformation at a time of chaos. Hekate, the narrator of this tale, descends through the “aethers” under the watchful guidance of Lilith to portals of otherworldly realms, and incarnates on Earth to “guide the Souls of mortals…through the dark times ahead.”
Sleeman humorously rewrites classic tales of Greek and Celtic mythology to bring her delightful characters to life while resurrecting ancient goddess “knowing”—the Divine Femina. Conjuring magic spells and wielding their dark powers, Lilith and Hekate visit the Hellenic pantheon to witness Zeus in his demise, helping Hera and the goddesses beat the conquerors at their own game.
Descending to the Celtic Realm, Hekate befriends the Druids, who mourn their plight as the “black robes” threaten mortals with damnation, making them forsake their pagan beliefs. Hekate journeys with her lover Carnonos to festivals honoring Nature and the Otherworld. Descending to Earth through the time portals, Hekate incarnates alongside mortals. In ancient En-dor and medieval Ireland, she consoles women called “witches.” Hekate herself must go through the “Eye of Fire,” the alchemy of rebirth, to guide mortals to their Heart-Soul Wisdom. In the surprising finale, she guides her initiates (and the reader) through a powerful ceremony, ending her story with the promise of hope for the future.
Below are a few responses from Lauren about the content of the book.
1) We spoke earlier about the dark goddesses who are present in your book. Who are the dark goddesses and how does your work seek to reclaim them?
2) Your book has been presented as a feminine journey through consciousness. How does a feminine lens influence the perception of consciousness and the progression of a journey through it?
3) Witchcraft appears in your work, and have said that one intention of this book is to resurrect witchcraft from the pejorative. What would you say is the contemporary view of witchcraft and how does that differ from the vision of witchcraft in your work?
Realizing the Self is the absolute goal of Jungian psychology. Yet as a concept it is impossibly vague as it defines a center of our being that also embraces the mystery of existence. This work synthesizes the thousands of statements Jung made about the Self in order to bring it to ground, to unravel its true purpose, and to understand how it might be able to manifest.
“In The Self in Jungian Psychology – Theory and Clinical Practice, Leslie Stein circumambulates the concept of the Self from a rich and varied perspective. Usually, the descriptions of the Self are like the blind men trying to describe an elephant; but here we have the whole elephant. Ancient as time, organizing and guiding consciousness and beyond consciousness, Leslie Stein’s rendering of the Self is finely cut and masterfully polished diamond, which will be an invaluable resource to scholars and seekers alike.”
-Ashok Bedi, M.D. Psychiatrist, Jungian Analyst, author, Path to the Soul, www.pathtothesoul.com
“A wonderful exploration of the Jungian symbol and processes of individual integration, which beckon from within the cracks and potentials of our personal, cultural, and natural environment to become the goal of our experiences of wholeness. An essential read.”
Leslie Stein is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Sydney, Australia. He is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute of New York.
He is the author of nine books including Becoming Whole – Jung’s Equation for Realizing God, Working with Mystical Experiences in Psychoanalysis, and the Jungian allegory The Journey of Adam Kadmon: A Novel.
He is also the editor of the forthcoming Eastern Practices and Individuation: Essays by Jungian Analysts to be published by Chiron.
The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz is a 28 volume Magnum Opus from one of the leading minds in Jungian Psychology. Volume 3 turns to the Maiden’s Quest within fairytales.
The maiden/heroine navigates a complicated maze of inner and outer relationships as she builds a bridge to the unconscious. The heroine contends with the animus in many forms like a devouring and incestuous father, demonic groom, the beautiful prince, an androgenous mother, a cold dark tower, and through conflict with the evil stepmother. Dangers and pitfalls await her as the conscious feminine strives to make connections with the unconscious masculine. The maiden is the undeveloped feminine and the promised fruit of her struggle with the animus is the coniunctio. Volume 3 is a masterwork of cross-cultural scholarship, penetrating psychological insight, and a strikingly illuminating treatise. With her usual perspicacity and thoroughness, von Franz gathers countless fairytale motifs revealing a myriad of facets to the maiden’s quest.
