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Numinous personal experience is frequently accompanied by an urge to communicate the experience, its effects and affects, but this is seldom successful unless mediated through art, which draws from the collective unconscious. Otherwise the description remains that of an individual event and the reader is invited to become interested in the personal psychology of the subject. This is what happened when I read Ginette Paris’ book but, perhaps, this is what she intended.
Despite its exciting title, which promises further exploration of the interaction between neuroscientific researches and archetypal psychology, this book is an account of a devastating and individuating experience suffered by the author, a practising therapist and lecturer. Lying in intensive care with a life threatening injury to her brain, kept alive by machines and efficient but detached nursing, she was comforted and soothed by the powerfully maternal care of a nursing aide, who held and sang to her. Her recovery was medically unexpected and she wrote this book to tell the story and to offer her hypothesis of the way in which the archetype of the Great Mother has been traduced and reduced within American culture and society, and, before Ms. Paris’ accident, within her own psyche. She posits the emergence of a Collective or Big Mother archetype, encouraging dependency and infantilism, while poisoning people with fast food, inappropriate medication, outworn religious myths of oppression and