author and women's movement figure. She is a Jungian analyst
trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich
, Switzerland
. She is one of the most widely read authors on feminine psychology, focusing on psyche
and soma
. She is also an international lecturer and poet. Her collection of audio and visual lectures, correspondence, and manuscripts are housed at OPUS Archives and Research Center
, in Santa Barbara, California
. Among her collaborations with other authors she has written with Thomas Moore
, Jill Mellick and Robert Bly
.
Her brothers are the late Canadian actor Bruce Boa
and Jungian analyst Fraser Boa.
Her husband is Ross Woodman, currently an English professor at the University of Western Ontario
.
On November 7, 1993, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.
Her [an Anorexia nervosa|anorexic's] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left.
Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother.
Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are. If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all "must," "ought to," "have to." And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there. Then the house of cards collapses.
The whole, however, had become more than the sum of its parts. The parts concentrate on the periods in the chrysalis when life as we have known it is over. No longer who we were, we know not who we may become. We experience ourselves as living mush, fearful of the journey down the birth canal. The whole has to do with the process of psychological pregnancy—the virgin forever a virgin, forever pregnant, forever open to possibilities.