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The authors begin with the feminist premise that by the time they reach adulthood, all women in our patriarchal society will “evaluate themselves, even their strengths at times from a deficit orientation.” “We have … been socialized to believe that we lack something and that we are thus destined never to rightfully fill the decision-making positions of symbolic authority in our society” (p. 28). The authors' goal is to help women through the five stages of ego and animus development to the final one in which they achieve female authority. Female authority is “the ability of a woman to validate her own convictions of truth, beauty, and goodness in regard to her self-concept and self-interest.”
The authors describe themselves as certified Jungian analysts, feminist therapists, and psychologists. They conduct Jungian and other “forms of counseling.” They provide detail about their feminist position but not about why they chose Jungianism in the first place. They disagree with the Jungian emphasis on an intrapsychic model that excludes the interpersonal dimension. According to the authors, female identity evolves though significant relationship. “‘Identity in relationship' is a central ideal of our model in personality development” (p. 225), they write. They acknowledge that Jung too saw women as lacking “intellectual objectivity” and make apologies for him, “No doubt his formulation of a woman's inferiority has its roots in the sociocultural context in which Jung made his initial observations” (p. 47). In that case, the obvious question is, why are the authors Jungians? They explain, “The concept of archetype permits us to understand what is archaic and enduring in human communication.” The argument is not convincing enough to motivate a reader's having to wade through lengthy, distracting discussions of the Greek and Roman gods.
Their purpose in writing is to counteract the “deficit” model of women that they found in the course of diagnosing psychopathology and applying