Books received

BARKER, CARA. World Weary Woman - Her Wound and Transformation. An Adventure in Creative Living. Toronto:  Inner City Books, 2001. Pp.  157. Pbk. $16.00.

Cara Barker has had a lengthy career in clinical psychology and psychosocial nursing; she trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. She introduces the World Weary Woman as a modern archetype. This is contemporary woman responding to stress by struggling to achieve lofty goals and in the process getting disconnected from her feminine body of wisdom. Cara Barker undertook a ten-year study with a self-selected sample and found that these women had all suffered from some form of loss and were type A. The author then suffered major losses and found herself being comforted by the women in her sample. Her whole outlook changed and became fused with personal experience. She writes in Jungian idiom, which occasionally becomes cryptic as in ‘depth work does not take us to a candy shop’. The title comes from an Egyptian tomb where the author found hieroglyphs describing World Weary Man. Her thesis is that the World Weary Women are eternal father's daughters unable to move from Logos to Eros and thus ‘disenfranchised from their natural motherhood’. They are described as half women, half men. She follows Toni Wolff's model of feminine individuation from Amazon to Medial Woman and Mother to Heteira. Cara Barker also seems to believe that a deviation from the true feminine path has dire consequences and manifests itself in fibroids, miscarriages and all cancers, particularly ovarian and breast cancers. She is at her best when writing about the symbolic and offers an interesting reading of Grimm's Mother Helle. She does, however get lost in generalizations and seems to confuse the personal with depth. The message could be condensed into ‘trust the process’. This book needs to be read as a literary contribution and is recommended to readers interested in a classical Jungian viewpoint.

FRISCH, SERGE, HINSHELWOOD, ROBERT D. & GAUTHI