Dr Marion Woodman: Analyst, teacher, author, friend, woman, visionary

Abstract

This paper is a biographical introduction to the life and works of Dr Marion Woodman. Written from the vantage point of one who has known Dr Woodman personally and professionally as a colleague and friend for the past two decades, the article's purpose is two-fold: to present a chronological digest of Dr Woodman to readers who may be new to her; and, secondly, to reprise her life events and publications to seasoned readers of her works and audiences of her many tapes, lectures, and intensives. The paper attempts to combine a chronology, personal anecdotes that illumine her character and personality, brief explanations of some of the terminology associated with her writing and teaching, and to foreground some of the major themes in Dr Woodman's oeuvre. A shorter version of this paper was read on 4 June 2007, on the occasion of Dr Woodman's having received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

Keywords:

• Marion Woodman
• biography
• publications
• conscious femininity
• Carl Jung
• Lifetime Achievement Award
• Marion Woodman Foundation

Declaration of interest : The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

Notes

1. See “Chrysalis: The psychology of transformation,” Tape #155 (M. Woodman, 1982a).

2. For Woodman, this kind of spiral reading of a great work of art entails a “cellular resonance” that can precipitate a bodily “shimmer” and ultimately lead to transcendence (Stromstedt, 2005, p. 23).

3. See Marion Woodman (1985), Chapter 2, “Taking it like a man: Abandonment in the creative woman” (pp. 33–44).

4. I am indebted to Ross Woodman for this articulation.

5. Joel Faflak (2005) understands Marion's use of the appellation “Sophia” as “the name Woodman uses to describe the dissenting work that she conducts on behalf of the ‘feminine,’ which is the wisdom of the ages that she marshals to resist the predations of abstraction and idealization–the seductive yet suicidally destructive impulses that she identifies with the ‘masculine’ and for which she blames modernity's sorrowful inability to bring living and dying into a meaningful convocation” (p. 138).

6. Telephone conversation, 3 April 2007.

7. Telephone conversation, 3 April 2007.

8. “The 1980's woman is realizing that her psyche has been raped as her mother's before her was raped. If she is conscious, she does not blame her parents, nor the men in her personal and professional life. She recognizes that both sexes are in the crisis together and she to accept her own share of responsibility. Having carried the perfectionist standards of parents, teachers, and society in general, her own world of inner uniqueness has been violated to the point where she fears even to look into the mirror, for fear she won’t be there. Her husband, brothers and sons are in an equally precarious position” (Marion Woodman, 1982b, p. 152). See also Jean Baker Miller (1976), Sandra L. Bartky (1990), Mary Field Belenkey et al. (1986), Jean Shinoda Bolen (1984), Susan Cady et al. (1986), Teresa de Lauretis (1987), Josephine Donovan (1975), Judith Fetterley (1978/1981), Sandra. M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1983), Madeleine R. Grumet (1988), Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1979), Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret. R. Higonnet (1981/1983), Jane Miller (1986, 1990/1994), Elaine Showalter (1977), and Carolyn Kay Steedman (1986/1987). In 1986 I taught OISE/UT's first course in feminist literary criticism using Elaine Showalter's text, published the same year (1985) as The pregnant virgin. In 1985 Showalter's book was already recording the history of feminist literary criticism. Other important books in Women's Studies published the same year as The pregnant virgin are Gisela Ecker (1985), Toril Moi (1985), Jane Roland Martin (1985), and Christa Wolf, (1985). My own experience teaching this course is described and analyzed in Chapter 6 of Re-educating the imagination (Bogdan, 1992b). Marion Woodman's conception of the “feminine” shares in a tradition of feminist thought that dates back to Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), who advocated not only for women's rights but for a fluid, dynamic conception of gender, the importance of a strong body to contain women's intellectual and spiritual development, and, most importantly, an independence of mind and spirit free from the fetters of patriarchal constraints that are politically and socially instantiated in the culture. See Susan Laird (2008).

9. Cf. Virginia Woolf (1929/1957), who draws upon Coleridge's concept of the androgynous mind to envisage a mind that “is resonant and porous; that … transmits emotion without impediment: that … is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided” (p. 102).

10. http://www.mwoodmanfoundation.org/_AboutUs.cfm?SA_SET_Z=4

11. http://www.mwoodmanfoundation.org/_HomePage.cfm?SA_SET_Z=4