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Eva Pattis Zoja has made an important contribution to Jungian clinical literature. She has written a courageous, thought-provoking, emotionally evocative book on abortion subtitled ‘Loss and Renewal in the Search for Identity’. Zoja's writing is based on the subjective stories of women in her practice, which she tells with compassion and deep understanding. She relates to their encounters with abortion on a psychological and symbolic plane that reaches beneath the pro- and anti-abortion debate in the political arena. This book will be of interest to women who have had abortions, Freudian and Jungian clinicians, abortion counsellors and gynaecologists. Zoja estimates that one out of four women have aborted one or more pregnancies.
The author asks us to view the process of abortion as an individual psychological female experience. As she states, ‘Some abortions are rapidly decided and problem-free, whereas others are charged with severe debilitating conflicts’. In eighteen chapters and two appendices Zoja circumambulates the process of abortion from multiple-depth vertices. She asks us, ‘Is it possible to think of abortion, in all its violence, as an attempt to give life - quite literally flesh and blood - to … alternative modes of femininity?’ She particularly focuses on modes of womanly identity which are extraneous to the world of mothers. Among her examples are modes of identity anchored in the myths of Artemis and Athena.
From an anthropological vertex Zoja tells us that Ashanti women in western Africa see it as their duty to abort when a pregnancy has occurred under certain circumstances. An Ashanti woman would be plagued by feelings of guilt if she does not abort. In South America Mataco women abort their first pregnancy for the purpose of facilitating the next. In that society unmarried girls who become pregnant must always abort. By contrast, Zoja observes, ‘Our society never reproves a woman for not having an abortion’. In addition to ‘Anthropological Reflecti