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The writing of this book was motivated by Linda Leonard's experience of her relationship with her own father. She explored the depths of her experience first in her analysis, and later, as an analytical psychologist with her own women patients. These women had been wounded by those aspects of their relationship to the masculine, which had been damaged during their psychological development. The book is worth looking into for its extensive exploration of the theme.
Although Leonard touches it several times throughout the book, she does not seize hold of the implicit wound firmly enough, perhaps because she suffered so deeply herself. The wound, the disturbed relation between the masculine and feminine principles, both actual and archetypal, affects not only individuals but has far-reaching effects on marital partners, groups and whole societies. Men and women suffer the disturbance, and herein lies something of the root of the problem. Both may be confused about their own identities and roles vis-áG-vis each other. Freud himself was puzzled; ‘What do women really want?’, he asked, caught by his own culture, not only in terms of middle-class Vienna in the late nineteenth century but also his Jewish culture, in which women are feared with archetypal intensity. It seems almost too simple that men and women need to be seen and cherished as individuals with their weaknesses and strengths.
Much of analytic literature expands on the influence of the mother on the development of the child's potential capacity for relationship and creative living. The role of the father has recently come once more into focus as the first experience for a woman of the masculine. The father can provide for a girl an important model for the way she relates to men and to her own inner masculine side; which may or may not be complemented by the mother and her relation to the feminine. However, we cannot ignore the innate archetypal aspect of the animus, whether this fulfils what is missing in the