The Creative Feminine and her Discontents: Psychotherapy, Art and Destruction (repost)

This book is an attempt to look at creativity from a female perspective. It is an exploration of what these specific difficulties for women might be and how we might think about them and try and find a way through them. The author is aware that men also experience difficulties with their creative selves, but she believes the problems are significantly different from the ones addressed here. The author does however address the fact that we all suffer, men and women, if women feel cut off from important aspects of their internal creative lives. If aspects of the creative feminine appear inaccessible to women, then they are also not available to men and this is a double tragedy.

Although the book is written from the perspective of a Jungian Analyst, primarily interested in the life of the psyche, the author also examines some of the historical, cultural and social reasons why women may have specific issues relating to their creativity. Together, she suggests, these all add up to a multi-layered and conflicted mixture of barriers and fears for women who wish to express themselves. The book explores women’s subjective experiences of their creative selves as writers, singers, mothers, therapists and artists and argue that these subjective experiences are marginalized by the symbolism and language that is available to express and explore the creative feminine. It is a thesis of this book that one of the problems about writing or speaking about female creativity is that the language of a patriarchal world is restricted to speaking about women and not for them.