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The author offers a wide-ranging and multi-layered perspective on struggles to take back feminine powers usurped by a patriarchal society. Woven into the text, well illustrated by the author and others, are threads from mythology, psychology, feminist theory, history and personal experience. This wraps round a small qualitative research project in which each of the participants converses about their experiences within a framework of reclaiming for themselves the power of the Perverse Feminine Archetype.
This adventurous project can be commended for guiding the reader on a tour that illuminates some of the dark corners lurking round the central focus of the perverse feminine and for connecting archetypal figures, from witches to Lilith, with grounded human experience. It also ushers in a pathway to healing using the Perverse Feminine Archetype as a symbolic form that can be used as a framework for conversations around understanding and internal change. This healing is associated with a developmental arc of the Perverse Feminine Archetype as healing moves through four phases: Societal Indoctrination, Shapeshifting, Awareness, and Redefining the Feminine.
The text is dense, with a tendency towards short headed paragraphs so that the meaning does not always flow easily to the reader and needs to be carefully extracted and examined. From the title onwards, many individual words are charged and need consideration in themselves as well as in their specific context.
The word ‘perversity’ is both central to understanding the text and highly problematic. It is presented as one of the book's key terms with the explanation, ‘Traits like assertiveness, which deviate from traditional gender roles, are labelled perverse, pushing them into the hidden realm’. While this description, emphasising social norms and behavioural expectations, may ally itself to feminist theory, it cannot be regarded as depth psychology where perversion is rooted in the individual psyche through, in Jungian t