1. The Shadow King: The Invisible Force That Holds Women Back: Ending the Tyranny of the Inner Patriarch by Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-King-Invisible-Force-Holds/dp/0595137555/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237661843&sr=1-1
Product Description
Women's power, sexuality, relationship roles, and emotions — all are unconsciously influenced by a compelling inner voice echoing thousands of years of patriarchal beliefs. The Shadow King reveals this voice and examines its power. It shows how to transform this Inner Patriarch from an unseen enemy to a powerful ally, enabling each woman to claim her full, and unique, feminine power.
Excerpts:
a) "Although the outer system has been somewhat changed, many of our unconscious belief systems have not. Within each of us lives an Inner Patriarch that continues to carry the old patriarchal rules and values, many of which have been taught us by our mothers. The Inner Patriarch controls us from the inside, not the outside. . . . he operates beyond the edges of our awareness." (pages xv - xvi)
b) " . . . our Patriarchs keep us in an inferior position -- if not at our work, then in our relationships. They make us distrust ourselves. Even more important . . . they make us distrust other women as well." (page xvii)
c) "Our Inner Patriarchs give men greater recognition for their accomplishments than they give us. What we do is just not as important as what a man does; if a man had done the same piece of work, it would be considered more important. . . There is nothing personal in this; the inner Patriarch feels the same about all women and about all things womanly." (page xvii)
d) "As I learned about my Inner Patriarch . . . I could see that many of [his] values were quite admirable, and that he knew a great deal about the world, particularly the world of men. He knew what was acceptable and what was not. He also knew how I could keep my traditionally feminine qualities even while I developed power." (pagexviii)
e) "We humans are not as simple as we sometimes think. Our psyches are made up of many parts. Some of these parts we know about, and others are hidden in the unconscious." (page xix)
f) Our lives are dominated by the selves we call 'primary selves.' . . . They are who we think we are. . . On the opposite side we have what we call our 'disowned selves' . . . The primary selves judge and fear these disowned selves.' (pages xx - xxi)
g) "If I do not know about these selves, I have no choices in life. I behave automatically." (page xxi)
h) "The Inner Critic, in contrast [to the Inner Patriarch] usually gives the impression that we are personally responsible for whatever is 'wrong' with us and that if we were to work hard enough, even if we are women, success just might be possible." (page 4)
i) The Inner Patriarch divides "humankind into women and men and [sees] these two groups as basically different. Each group [has] its own territory or arena of power and its own gifts to bring to the world. The gifts of the men [are] important, and the gifts of the women [are] secondary. . . he undervalues the portions of the world that belong to the traditionally feminine. These are undervalued in men as well as women." (pages 4-5)
j) "If I give my package to my Inner Patriarch, then he will judge its contents and take charge of miy life. I will be considered inferior to men, but I will be safe, blameless, and protected. . . If I keep my own package, then I keep my power and my individuality, but these gifts will be my responsibility.
" . . . the specifically female gifts . . . [are] the power of a woman's sexuality, her ability to attract others, the intensity of her need for relationship, her capacity to support and to care for others, her intuition, her natural connection to her emotions and, of course, her childbearing capability. But . . . the Inner Patriarch that has its roots deep within the patriarchal culture that has nourished and protected us, deprives us of the right to enjoy these gifts. At best, it trivializes them; at worst, it shames us for possessing them.
"We are not taught how to honor and develop these traditionally feminine gifts as true soruces of power; they are devalued. We are also not shown how to include the aspects of ourselves that are more traditionally masculine in nature in our overall development." (pages 5-6)
k) "Let us look at how the traditionally feminine gift of caring for others has been turned into a curse, first by the outer patriarchy and now by the Inner Patriarch. . . . this . . . need to care for others was seen as a weakness and was often used as a means of manipulation, exploitation, and domination. Women were expected to do this because this was their nature. Therefore they should not require anything in return for the gift of love and nurturing that they bestowed on others. The Inner Patriarch still carries these values . . .
"In fulfilling this role of the caregiver and the protector of relationship and family, women have learned to move beyond their own needs in order to meet the needs of others. This has been creative and quite wonderful in many ways, but women have paid a high price. We have lost our ability to make choices, to know what it is that we want, and to think for ourselves. It feels as though, in the realm of the Shadow King, there is a law that says: "Others come first." Women can only do as they wish after everyone else has been cared for." (pages 11-12)
In Chapter 11 Dr. Stone discusses the Inner Matriarch and the conflicting messages and values conveyed by the Inner Patriarch and the Inner Matriarch to their children. hat is left for you to discover.
2. The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine by Helen M. Luke.
http://www.amazon.com/Way-Woman-Awakening-Perennial-Feminine/dp/0385485743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237665680&sr=1-1
Product Description
The Way of Woman offers a distillation of Helen Luke's life's work as a writer, counselor, and Jungian therapist, a luminous, multifaceted reflection on the two questions that have long preoccupied her: Why do so many modern women feel so conflicted about their roles, so cutoff from sources of spiritual nourishment? More importantly, what can they do about it?.
From the Publisher
Equality of value between men and women is an eternal truth, but this does not mean that men and women are not psychically and spiritually different -- profoundly so. A woman must live her life as a woman, with a woman's values, or she fails. In The Way Of Woman, Luke drew from the riches of the Bible, mythology, folklore, Greek tragedies, and modern poetry to reconnect women with lost feminine images, symbols, and values. She speaks with the power of a true sage on continuity, relationships, the women's movement, marriage and divorce, and mothering. Profound, graceful, and transforming, The Way Of Woman is a true celebration of feminine worth.
Rather than quote several short excerpts from this book, I am going to cite one long paragraph that I think answers one of the questions we discussed last Thursday about Jung's attitude toward women, femininity and the animus.
The great contribution of C. G. Jung toward the restoration of feminine values to Western man is often obscured by a misunderstanding of his concept of the animus. In Jung's terminology the animus is a personification of the unconscious masculinity in women, the anima being the parallel image of the feminine in a man. Being unconscious, it is necessarily projected and often manifests itself in negative ways, and this has been interpreted entirely out of context by many of those who are devoted to the cause of liberation. Jung, they say, denies to woman any equality with man. He accuses her of producing secondhand opinions and engaging in all manner of inferior masculine activity, as though she were by nature incapable of real creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Jung does affirm is that the creative power in a woman can never come to fruition if she is caught in an unconscious imitation of men or identification with the inferior masculinity in her unconscious. He defined the masculine as the ability to know one's goal and to do what is necessary to achieve it. As long as the animus remains unconscious in a woman, he will persuade her that she has no need to explore her hidden motives and will urge her to a blind pursuit of her conscious goals, which, of course, liberates her from the hard and undramatic task of discovering her real individual point of view. Unrecognized and undifferentiated, he will actually destroy in her the possibility of integrating her contrasexual powers. Her spirituality will thus remain a sterile thing and this negative animus will poison her attitude to her own nature. The true function of the animus is to act as an inner guide between the ego and the deep springs both of the spirit and of true feminine wisdom so that the woman may bring to birth a new consciousness of both. It is when he operates between her and the outer world, and she identifies with him, that he destroys her creativity. Esther Harding quoted Jung as saying in conversation that the true feminineness of the man is not the anima; likewise the true masculine spirit in a woman is not the animus, though he leads her to it. The conscious integration of her dormant spirit of clear discrimination alone can free the individual woman from the compulsive yoke of the negative animus. Without this freedom, no amount of liberation in the outer world can do more than throw her into another and more dangerous slavery.
