Jean Shinoda Bolen - Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women

Every chapter in this book has many unnamed contributorspatients, friends, colleagueswho exemplified aspects of each goddess archetype, or provided insights into them. Most descriptions are therefore composites of many women, known to me under many circumstances; especially through twenty years of psychiatric practice. It is a privilege to be trusted by people who reveal their depths to me, enabling me to better understand their psychology and through them, the psychology of others, including myself. My patients are my best teachers. To all of them, thank you.

I have been blessed and burdened by many editors, each of whom added to the development of this book and to my growth as a writer during the three years that I worked on the manuscript: editorial direction and comment came from Kirsten Grimstad, Kim Chernin, Marilyn Landau, Jeremy Tarcher, Stephanie Bernstein, and Linda Purrington, to whom I turned for copyediting. And in the midst of their differing perspectives, I also learned to trust my own voice and vision, which was a lesson in itself and led to a change in publishers. In this, Kim Chernins encouragement was especially valuable.

My thanks go also to Nancy Berry, who worked skillfully and swiftly at the typewriter and computer whenever I called on her for help; to my literary agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, who added their expert perspective to a difficult book birthing process; and to my publisher, Clayton Carlson at Harper & Row, who through his intuition and personal regard for my first book, The Tao of Psychology, had faith in me and in Goddesses in Everywoman.

My family have been stalwart supporters as I labored on this book in their midst. Long ago, I decided that if I were to write, I would do it without withdrawing from them or closing a door between us. I would be available and present, at the same time that I would need their consideration. My husband, Jim, and my children, Melody and Andy, have been with me all the way on this project. In addition to emotional support, Jim has from time to time lent his professional eye as an editor to my writing, encouraging me to trust my own instincts, to leave in examples and images that evoke feelings.

And my heartfelt thanks to many people whose support to finish Goddesses in Everywoman came at synchronistic timeswhenever I was discouraged and needed to be reminded that this book could be helpful to others. My task was to persevere until the book was finished. Once published, I knew that it would have a life of its own and would find whomever it is supposed to reach.

I would like to invite you into this book, especially if you are one of those readers who might be, as I was, resistant to its theme. After all, how can mythological goddesses from a patriarchal past help us to analyze our current realities or reach an egalitarian future?

Just as we are most likely to buy books recommended by trusted friends, my inspiration to read this manuscript came from knowing its author.

I met Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen when she was organizing Psychiatrists for ERA, a group of women and men inside the American Psychiatric Association whose professional experience had led them to believe that equal treatment under the law was crucial to womens mental health. They therefore supported the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

All groups are the result of many energies, but Jean was clearly an effective and inspired organizer of this one. She not only envisioned such a group and sparked the imagination of her colleagues; she also followed through on the procedural detail of forging a cohesive, national organization out of busy and disparate people. In that process, she took care to bridge generational, racial, and professional differences, to research accurate, relevant information, and to leave even the most resistant adversary with dignity and some new understanding.

Watching Jean in action left no doubt that she was a practical, expert organizer in the here and now; a gentle revolutionary whose healing calm and accepting spirit were testimony to the better world that a feminist revolution might bring. She helped to create a center of change inside one of the countrys most prestigious and influential professional organizations: all this as a woman and a minority woman inside a profession that was 89% male, even more overwhelmingly white, and often still limited by the male-dominant theories of Freud. When the history of the American Psychiatric Association is written, and perhaps the history of social responsibility among psychiatrists in general, I suspect that the actions of this one small, soft-spoken woman will be an important force.

As I read the first chapters of Goddesses in Everywoman, I could hear Jeans trustworthy voice in each sentence of its clear, unpretentious prose; yet there were still hints of a romantic or inhibiting predestination in my thoughts about the goddess to come. Because Jung and others who placed such archetypes in the collective unconscious ended with either/or, masculine/feminine polaritiesthus inhibiting men as well as women from wholeness, and leaving women at the inevitably less rewarded end of the spectrumI worried about the way these archetypes might be used by others, or the way women ourselves might be encouraged to imitate and thus accept their limitations.

It was the explanation of the individual goddesses themselves that not only put my worries to rest, but opened new paths to understanding.

For one thing, there are seven complex archetypes to examine and combine in various ways, and each has within herself myriad variations. They take us far beyond the simpleminded dichotomy of virgin/whore, mother/lover that afflicts women in patriarchies. Yes, there are goddesses who identify themselves entirely by their relationship to a powerful manafter all, they lived under patriarchy, as do webut they also show their power, whether by subterfuge or openly. And there are also models of autonomy that takes many forms, from sexual and intellectual to political and spiritual. Most unusual, there are examples of women rescuing and bonding with each other.

Second, these complex archetypes can be combined and called upon according to the needs of a womans situation or the undeveloped part of herself. If a glimpse in the media of a female role model can have such important impact on the lives of women, how much more profound might be the activating and calling forth of an archetype within her?

Finally, there is no instruction to stereotype or limit ourselves to one goddess or even several. Together, they make up the full circle of human qualities. Indeed, each of these arose from the fragmentation of the one goddess, Great Goddess, the whole female human being who once lived in prepatriarchal timesat least in religion and imagination. Perhaps then, as now, imagining wholeness was the first step to realizing it.

At a minimum, these archetypal goddesses are a useful shorthand for describing and thus analyzing many behavior patterns and personality traits. At a maximum, they are ways of envisioning and thus calling up needed strengths and qualities within ourselves. As Alice Walker, the poet and novelist, makes so movingly clear in The Color Purple, we imagine god and endow her or him with the qualities we need to survive and grow.