Description
The wild woman archetype within a woman’s psyche is an expression of her innate, soulful essence. By midlife, a woman may become aware of this wild, instinctual animal nature and begin to recognize how socialization, almost from birth, can lead to being overly “civilized.”
That domestication affects how they express their sexuality and conduct relationships. When a woman becomes conscious of the wild woman archetype, she then becomes free to explore sexuality and relationships on her own terms. Paradoxically, the struggles experienced in relationships and with sexuality are often the catalysts that bring her into deeper engagement with psyche and into the realm of the wild woman archetype. This is explored as a process of psychological development that occurs at midlife in relation to Carl Jung’s notion of individuation. The psyche has an impetus towards unification and wholeness—towards becoming an in-divisible whole.
The structure of Tracking the Wild Woman is designed to present a redefinition of the wild woman archetype that focuses on articulating a synthesis of psychological and sexual development. Relationships can serve as the alchemical vessels of a woman’s psychological transformation. Tracking the Wild Woman finds that the paradoxes and impossibilities of love serve to create a more profound woman who is more conscious of the manifold world of unconscious archetypes. It tracks the process of individuation and alchemical transformation through the study of texts, the author’s lived experience, and imaginal ways of knowing, such as dreams, synchronicities, and active imaginations.
