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Suffering ‘horrendous depressions which went on and on every month before my period came’ ultimately brought this author to pay attention to the subject of menstruation. At first relieved to be told that she had a physiological premenstrual syndrome to reckon with, she later became convinced that there was a powerful psychological aspect as well. As a trainee analyst, she began to note that some of her women patients, normally passive and rather silent, were more affectively active at the time of menstruation. This led her to seek ‘an archetype at work within the psychological structure of menstruation’. She examined hundreds of dreams of menstruating women, as well as some myths and anthropological data, and was led to postulate a collective phantasy of the time of the menses being linked to an idea that the woman was being possessed by or married to a demon or a god. This is the difference between a woman who is ‘possessed’ and a woman who could be a healer or shaman; in modern terms, an analyst perhaps.
Putting it together with Freud's theory that a woman unconsciously experiences menstruation as castration (whether of potential child or penis), Nagy suggests that a woman suffers psychological pain each month as a result of a powerful encounter with her inner lover or animus. ‘The attributes of this image, together with the affective qualities attached to it, may indicate the direction along which a change in consciousness is taking place’. She calls the archetypal image ‘The Strange Man’, and avers that as much as ovulation is the peak time for physical conception, so is menstruation the time when the ‘spiritual child’ is conceived. Women who fall into the possession of the Spirit lose their minds, but those who relate to the image and its archetypal qualities, and to the realities both of a differentiated other and to their own shadow content therefore, can hope for development of true consciousness and of conscious loving. Such women are fruitful not only as ch