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This is a spellbinding book. It explores the damaged sense of self experienced in the mother-daughter dyad within patriarchal culture.
Virginia Beane Rutter trained as a Jungian analyst in America and Zurich and brings to her work the influence of her Italian Catholic maternal heritage, her studies in mythology and anthropology, and her own experiences as analysand, daughter, woman and mother.
She sees psychotherapy between women as a sacred ritual container within which the psychological rite of passage from one stage of consciousness to another is inseparable from the woman's bodily experiences of ‘menstruation, defloration, fertility, conception, childbirth, nursing and menopause’.
She takes Bruce Lincoln's threefold pattern for women's initiation rituals as the shaping form for her book, weaving her rich clinical, mythological and anthropological material into three parts: Containment, Transformation and Emergence.
In ‘Containment’ she introduces her three women patients, Carmina (19), Sarah (30) and Beatrice (32). Their histories, sexual orientation and presenting problems are all very different but they share a religious background — respectively Catholic, Episcopalian and Buddhist.
It is the author's contention that in the containing analytic relationship the women make a symbolic return to the mother; the ‘heurisis’ or ‘finding again’. She elaborates and illuminates the clinical work, conveyed mainly through dreams, by an exploration of the Neolithic birth-giving Goddess culture of £Catal Hüyük, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Kinaaldá, the Navaho girl's puberty ritual and the Tukuna Festival of the New Maiden from the Northwest Amazon. Images of fusion and separateness are explored with great subtlety. The Navaho ritual stresses the need for protection and support during change whereas the Tukuna ritual emphasizes the endurance needed.
The author belongs to a ritual group as part of her current cultural life, and rituals spontaneous and formal are shared