Into the Heart of the Feminine
Facing the Death Mother Archetype to Reclaim Love, Strength, and Vitality
Paperback: $16.99
Kindle: $6.99
Audio Book
In this exceptionally readable book, Jungian analysts and authors Massimilla and Bud Harris dynamically weave their own personal and professional experiences in the form of rich and compelling stories, providing a down-to-earth book available to a wide audience.
A Book for Women, for Men, and for our Culture… Imagine within each of us, there is a deep, powerful source for living lives of love, creativity, and fulfillment. To imagine this foundation for life and the energy it produces is to imagine ourselves and our world filled with the influence of the archetypal feminine – her passionate creativity, love, and ageless knowing. Personally and culturally, this force – which lives at the heart of our lives – has been diminished and wounded until it seems to have retreated beyond the horizon, in a world filled with rationalism and an anxious search for the material “good life.”
This is a powerfully moving book that goes beyond gender roles into the soul of the archetypal feminine, exploring how it has been damaged and traumatized, and finding out how this condition affects all of us. Through the myth of Medusa, the authors create an inspirational guide for healing, revitalizing, loving, and nurturing the archetypal feminine as we awaken our own voices and transform our fate.
>> Read some excerpts here.
>> Download the Study Guide here.
Table of Contents
Part I: Facing the Death Mother
1. Facing the Death Mother: Remembrance of Things Lost
2. Where Love Begins
3. Turning Points
Part II: A Healing Path
4. From Paralysis to Full Vitality/The Myth of Medusa
5. Power, Reality, the Feminine, and Projections
6. The Reality of Medusa’s Myth
Part III: Burning Clean
7. Women Turned to Stone—Confronting Fear
8. Men Turned to Stone—Confronting Shame
9. Mirroring the Death Mother Up Close
Part IV: The Freedom to Come Home
10. A Map for the Journey
11. Finding Our Voice
12. Changing Our Fate
Reviews
“In this compelling book, Jungian analysts Massimilla and Bud Harris explore the power of the Death Mother complex that ‘drains our energy, saps our vitality, and drags us down.’ Drawing upon personal experience, clinical practice, archetypal stories, and the myth of Medusa, the authors describe not only the paralyzing effects of the Death Mother complex, but the steps needed to transform it into healing and vitalizing energy. This engaging, moving work offers wisdom to both men and women who seek to liberate their deepest creative potential.”
– Susan Olson, Jungian analyst and author of By Grief Transformed: Dreams and the Mourning Process
“The authors’ promise of an intelligent and thought-provoking archetypal journey leading to renewed strength, love and creativity is fulfilled throughout this book. Transforming the Death Mother’s influence within ourselves for the sake of healing and wholeness will take courage, perseverance, and time. Fortunately for the reader, Massimilla and Bud prove themselves to be trustworthy and compelling guides who help you to travel safely.”
– Caren Goldman, author of Restoring Life’s Missing Pieces and Healing Words For The Body, Mind and Spirit: 101 Words to Inspire and Affirm
“Into the Heart of the Feminine goes directly to the heart of one of the most urgent and pressing psychological challenges in our culture – the reclamation and restoration of the healthy feminine to a place of influence in the psyche. Using myth, fairy tales, compelling clinical vignettes and revealing personal experience, Massimilla and Bud Harris build a compelling case for the healing potential of the ‘eternal feminine soul.’ This is a book I will encourage all of my clients to read.”
– Pete Williams, Jungian analyst
“Massimilla and Bud Harris identify and track the archetype of the feminine, a metaphor for the elemental, essential energy of life in both its nurturant and destructive forms as it courses through the lives of each of us. However mediated by the personal mother, this elemental energy proves generative, is blunted, or is diverted into the realms of death, neurosis, somatoform disorders, or soul sickness. The Harris’s provide examples both of those suffering from the loss of and those coming to integrate this “feminine” energy. Their book is thus tocsin, or clarion call to action, and an accessible agenda for redeeming this energy and healing the sundered soul.”
– James Hollis, Jungian analyst, and author of Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives