A Re-Visioning of Love
Dark Feminine Rising
Ana Mozol
- 186 páginas
- English
- ePUB (apto para móviles)
- Disponible en iOS y Android
A Re-Visioning of Love
Dark Feminine Rising
Ana Mozol
Información del libro
In A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising, Ana Mozol parts the illusory veils of persona as she explores the reality of feminine experiences relating to love, trauma and sexuality in contemporary Western society. Mozol takes us on a personal journey through the three levels of experience, delving into the underworld and the trauma of rape, the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, and the upper world and the masculine spiritual ideals that fracture the feminine soul.
In this multidisciplinary examination of the feminine, Mozol seeks to understand violence against women intrapsychically, interpersonally and within the field of depth psychology. The book begins with Mozol's own experiences with violence and her exploration of the demon lover complex and the stages of breaking this complex after trauma. Combining personal testimony, theoretical reflections, historical analysis, and 20 years of clinical experience, Mozol uses a heuristic approach to explore personal stories, clinical material, dreams and depth analysis as they connect to the female individuation process. We follow Mozol's journey through the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, into the upper world and the complexity of Oscar Wilde's feminine character Salomé who represents the rising dark feminine energy that must be reckoned with for the possibility of love to exist. Accessible yet powerful, Mozol uses her personal story to place the oppression of women within the Jungian context of individuation.
A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising will be key reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, psychotherapy, trauma studies, gender studies, women's studies and criminology. It will also be an indispensable resource for Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists in practice and in training. A Re-Visioning of Love, however, is more than a psychological exploration; it is a memoir of the personal and archetypal feminine and as such will appeal to anyone interested in the story of many women today.
Preguntas frecuentes
Información
1
A MEMOIR OF DESCENT
Shortly after I go to sleep, I am awakened by a vision. There is a female figure wearing dark, hooded robes at the foot of my bed. She moves closer. My heart races and I am paralyzed with fear. She starts to lean over me. She has a bundle of something in her hands. She is offering me to take it. I see it is golden sheaves of wheat. She carries them like a beloved child. I seem to understand what she is doing and for a moment think her to be my mother.(Author’s dream journal, August, 1997)
I am in a dark dungeon. I am disoriented as though spinning out of control and then I stop dead. Nothing moves. Then sounds: primordial screams of terror from the mouths of ancient women. The screams are familiar somehow. They tear through my skin, breaking the boundary of self-protection, penetrating my skin. I fight to adjust my eyes to the dark. My vision comes to me slowly. There is movement all around me, like shadows. Cobwebs encase me and cloud my vision. My arms are immobilized. I struggle with all my will to move, to push the cobwebs from my face. Then everything becomes too clear too fast. There are women all around me being raped and murdered. I see the blood as it spurts from its sacred vessel. The screams grow unbearable, but the silence that follows is worse. The sweet, sticky smiles of nefarious men as they take their pleasure with no concern for the lives of their victims scorch themselves in my being. Things begin to swirl again. Boys become women; women become men. Nothing is sure but the carnage and the blood—so much blood.(Author’s dream journal, March, 1999)
I went to bed around one in the morning and did some visualization exercises, breathing into my heart the image from a previous dream—a large, open meadow of the most magnificent green, endless in its expanse. I drifted off to sleep . . .I am on a plane. It becomes clear that we are in danger and may crash. I take my seat as we move through an atmosphere racked with turbulence. Steve,1 my friend, is beside me. I go to put on my seat belt and realize that I don’t have one! I kiss Steve. My attention is gripped by a glimpse of the full moon through the small plane window. What is strangely familiar is that the full moon is at rest beside a body of water right next to the earth in the corner of a garden under a beautiful tree. It is a magnificent sight. I am filled with joy and say to Steve, “Whether we die in the crash or land safely, whether in flesh or spirit, let’s meet under the full moon at the side of the garden.” Fear is replaced with a wave of intense curiosity and the grace of a final destination beyond life or death. It is a rough landing, but we are safe. I am awakened by the acute emotion evoked.I have the intuition to try something new—to breath the fresh image of the full moon into my body. Vibrations take me over almost immediately and I am rendered powerless with awe. I think, “Well maybe I will try this experiment another night since I need to wake up early tomorrow.” I try to move, but my body is paralyzed. I decide to stay with it and breath the image deeper into my ovaries. The vibrations increase and I am transported into the familiar, but always frightening, psychoidal realm of psychic experience
I go downstairs into an unfamiliar room. My aunt, my sister, and a few men are watching a movie. It is only after I sit down to join them that I realize that one of the men is George Olsen—the man who raped me when I was young. He is discussing something about penis length with the other men. I am horrified. I feel sick that he is here. I leave the room. Dawn (my sister) comes after me and informs me that George is being inappropriate. I want to go back in and keep an eye on him, but at the same time I don’t want to be anywhere near him! The silence of lucidity washes over me, and I can’t believe that he is HERE on this night when I began my exploration into Persephone and considered for the first time disclosing the rape in my research. I think of the absurd perfection that I must face him NOW. I am considerably calm. I want him out but I fear my family knowing. I worry about the repercussions of a confrontation with him. I walk up the stairs and wander the halls of the house in silent anguish. I find my grandfather in one of the rooms. He sees my torment and asks me why I don’t just march down there and kick him out. I tell him my fears. “What if he gets violent? What if he says horrible lies about me? What if…?” My grandfather cuts me off with his strong voice: “That doesn’t sound like the Ana I know. She would not let anything, especially a few insults, stop her.” Emboldened by my grandfather’s words, I go back downstairs. I push Olsen towards the door, demanding that he leave. I directly announce why: “You must leave because you raped me.” To my surprise, he calls the others and prepares to go without insult, denial, or violence. He takes the time to return my sister’s key so that all ties between us will be severed. As he leaves, he hands me a large green mug, saying, “This is for you in recognition of what has happened. Please accept it as partial reparation for what I have done.” In the mug there is a thick, black liquid and it is bubbling. He leaves. I am glad he is gone. I am left standing alone with the mug of seething darkness steaming between my hands.(Author’s dream journal, July, 2003)
Persephone speaks
Out of 10,000 men surveyed, one half reported the use of physical and/or sexual violence against a woman and one quarter of those surveyed admitted to rape. The most common motivation that men cited for committing rape was sexual entitlement—a belief that men have a right to have sex with women regardless of consent.(p. 135)
This most powerful myth about rape lies at the root of all the others. It ignores the fact that rape is a physical attack, and leads to the mistaken belief that rape does not hurt the victim any more than does sex. The idea that rape is a sexual rather than an aggressive act encourages people not to take it seriously as a crime—an attitude frequently revealed in comments by defense attorneys and newspaper columnists. (“If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990, when he was candidate for governor of Texas.) Rape crisis counselors and researchers define rape as an act of violence in which sex is used as a weapon, and point out that a woman would no more “like” rape than she would like being mugged or murdered. (As a teenage victim of rape once said to me, rape is to sex like a punch in the mouth is to a kiss.) I prefer to characterize rape simply as a form of torture. Like a torturer, the rapist is motivated by an urge to dominate, humiliate, or destroy his victim. Like a torturer, he does so by using the most intimate acts available to humans—sexual ones. Psychologists and researchers in the field have found that rape is one of the most traumatic events that can happen to a person.(p. 14)