
The idea of striving for perfection—and, perhaps, being satisfied with nothing less—has been on my mind lately. I finally feel like I understand the role perfectionism has played in my life: a big one, but like most ideas, it’s not straightforward. My perfectionism does not look like my sister’s, which does not look like…

The take by Joseph Campbell that Murdock recounts on page 2 is interesting: In the the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going…

Now I turn to Maureen Murdock’s own words at the beginning of the introduction to The Heroine’s Journey. She tells us that she is a therapist who has worked with women, particularly those between the ages of thirty and sixty, and says, “I have heard a resounding cry of dissatisfaction with the successes won in…

Back to that epigraph: “So the female void” gets cured “by a remembering or a putting back together of the mother-daughter body.” Yes. It’s the body. Healing involves the body as much as—if not more than—the mind. And it’s important to remember Eugene Gendlin’s statement: “The body is the unconscious.” Maybe memory is held…

The epigraph with which Maureen Murdock has begun The Heroine’s Journey deserves a closer look, and what I post here and now may not be all I have to say about it. We’ll see. In the meantime: “There is a void felt these days by women and men—who suspect that their feminine nature, like Persephone, has…