Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride; A Psychological Study

Meredith Kimball was Associate Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

In this book Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst, presents her analysis of the missing archetype in the lives of many of her women patients who are anorexic, bulimic, or obese. She argues that the spiritual forms that used to hold meaning for us (religion, magic) have lost their meaning, leaving us with no collective container for our spiritual needs. Thus, we often try to fill spiritual needs through material goods, including, in particular, food. This attempt necessarily fails us and results in addiction. Furthermore, in an attempt to be perfect, women have developed a split between our minds and our bodies, repressing the body and with her, our femininity. The goal of therapy becomes reunion with our bodies and an acceptance of who we are as women.

Although Woodman is very sensitive to her women patients and uses many of their words and pictures to illustrate her points, her work is so buried in Jungian terminology and in many different myths that is very difficult to follow her if one is not trained in Jungian thinking. The effect of her writing is that one is dazzled by her brilliance rather than enlightened by her knowledge.

Woodman’s vision emphasizes the reclaiming of the feminine both for individual women and for our culture as a whole. She reclaims the original meaning of virgin — a women who is whole unto herself and who acts on truth rather than with the goal of pleasing others. But Woodman’s view of completeness is one of androgyny. Thus, the purpose of being a virgin is to be able to open oneself to be ravished by the male spiritual principle. Woodman’s vision emphasizes reclaiming feminine qualities that masculine culture has basically approved of in women — receptivity, passivity, and openness. In contrast, Perera, in her book Descent to the Goddess (Inner City Books, 1982), emphasizes reclaiming feminine qualities that have provoked fear in the patriarchal heart — coolness, objectivity, and anger. Both authors also emphasize, through the use of myth, the importance of a journey to the underworld. For Woodman, who uses the Demeter-Persephone myth, “... the girl has to be carried into the underworld and experience there the penetration and impregnation by the creative masculine” (p. 149). For Perera, who uses the Inanna-Ishtar myth, Inanna journeys to the underworld where she is penetrated, killed, and transformed through contact with the dark side of the feminine. While each of these visions is useful in therapy and each describes an important development for individual women, Perera’s emphasis on activity, choice, and possibility of wholeness within the feminine is more likely to prove a useful imagery system to feminists.