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The use of language is not often considered in psychological work. We tend to assume a written treatise in psychology is imparting information. Nevertheless, the written word may be used for other purposes. Considered as a manifestation of consciousness, language itself has numerous attributes. Sylvia Brinton Perera's treatise on Maeve renders unexpected reading in psychology.
Perera's use of word repetition has an unusual effect upon the reader. Frequent strings of nouns, verbs, or adjectives (usually in threes) play upon what seem at first technical terms which merge into other terms suggesting meaning beyond what they ordinarily denote. Her prose style readily produces an inductive effect.
Divine primal appetite becomes life-enhancing curiosity, ambition, questing, adult sexuality, and even gourmet cooking.
Enthusiasm for Maeve comes through Perera's virtually trance-inducing cadences of words and/or runs of sentences.
As the life energy that underlies and manifests through a multiplicity of life forms, Maeve is the divinity of maternity, aggression, orality, sexuality, sovereign power and authority, and artistic and spiritual inspiration.
The reader is taken into Perera's world of shape-shifting language in which she uses analytical and psychological vocabulary in her own special ways. The book as it is read becomes more an experience of active imagination rather than clinically rigorous treatment of the subject of addiction. She plays upon the familiar terms to lead the reader into another place - into an imaginal space - and there she amplifies the many themes of the book. There she explores in circumambulatory manner her comparisons of Maeve to addiction.
The addict's ‘true self’ hidden and lost behind these fraudulent, precociously usurping ruling powers and bionic grandiosity remains a fragment of dependency bound into unconsciousness by the leprous Maeve.
Goddess Queen Medib, Meadhbh (Gaelic names for the alcoholic drink), or Maeve occurs in