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Transforming Sexuality is an extended meditation on the contrasexual archetype, an eloquent exploration of analytical psychology with a decidedly theological and literary tone. This text reflects the broad spectrum of interests and the mature voices of its authors, gracefully integrating psychoanalysis, literature, comparative religion, and clinical material. Most central to its success, this is a book written by a couple about gender and love. The authors’ commitment to love as an operative human value infuses this work with warmth, grace and complexity.
Ann and Barry Ulanov, respectively professors of psychiatry and religion, and English, have edited and published numerous prior works on depth psychology. In Transforming Sexuality they describe anima and animus as intrapsychic structures that function as metaphorical bridges, dynamically connecting ego, identity, and consciousness to the threshold of the archetypal Self. Psychic material comes across the internal ‘bridge’, delivering the contents of the archetypal psyche into our lives, our bodies, and our relationships. By means of the bridge metaphor, the function of the anima and the animus is explored as it affects the development of identity, as it appears in psychopathology, and ultimately as it functions in the development of a meaningful religious life by facilitating the individual's authentic relation to spirit. The Ulanovs recognize and clinically amplify the psychic contents that cross this ego-Self bridge as insistently individual. In presenting case material, the authors are careful to value the contribution to healing of both human experiences and archetypal dynamics.
The authors explore structural impairments to the intrapsychic bridge from the perspective of the ego as well as from that of the archetypal Self. Collapse of the contrasexual bridge at the ego side results in the ego being made passive, of secondary importance. Reparation from the ego side of the bridge means ego development. As an indi