Marion Woodman – Addiction to Perfection: Preface
Preface
Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rime:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
This book is about taking the head off an evil witch. Lady Macbeth, glued to the stickingplace of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life, will serve as a symbol of the woman robbed of her femininity through her pursuit of masculine goals that are in themselves a parody of what masculinity really is.
And though in Shakespeare’s tragedy it is Macbeth who is beheaded, the head he loses is fatally infected by the witches’ evil curse.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are metaphors of the masculine and feminine principles functioning in one person or in a culture, and the deteriorating relationship between them clearly demonstrates the dynamics of evil when the masculine principle loses its standpoint in its own reality, and the feminine principle of love succumbs to calculating, intellectualized ambition.
Shakespeare’s beheading of his hero-villain is, in the total context of the play, the healing of the country.
This book is about a beheading.
It has been hewn out of the hard rock of an addiction to perfection.
Repeatedly, I have done battle with the black crow sitting on my left shoulder croaking, “It isn’t good enough.
You haven’t anything new to say.
You don’t say it well enough.”
Repeatedly, I have had to stop trying to perfect a sentence here, a paragraph there, while the rest of the book remained unwritten.
Fortunately there were deadlines to be met, or I would never have struck this book out of the rock in which it was buried. And the crow croaks, “Just as well.”
I counter that with the interest of the audiences to whom much of this material was first presented, and the encouragement of friends and analysands who so generously opened their own souls to make this book possible.
Thus I have steered my course through the Scylla and Charybdis of rigid scholarly methods and a whirlpool of material and landed my creation, rough-hewn, as delicately as possible without falling into my own addiction.
By nature I like to work with cameos.
I like to work in fine detail, perfect that, and fall back in exhaustion until another cameo comes along.
Writing a book is not cameo work and putting a rough-hewn rock into the world is not easy for a perfectionist.
Reading it over now, I find some parts boring, some parts running away with themselves in true compulsive style, and some parts mired in detail.
I could cut them out, but when I wrote them they were important as part of a whole process a process that takes infinite patience, with heartbreaking setbacks and long periods of moving ahead while looking backward into the mirror.
Linear thinking does not come naturally to me; moreover, it kills my imagination.
Nothing happens. No bell rings; no moment of HERE and NOW. No moment that says YES. Without those moments I am not alive.
And so, rather than driving toward a goal, I prefer the pleasure of the journey through a spiral.
And I ask my reader to relax and enjoy the spiral too.
If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry.
You may pick it up on the second or the third or the ninth.
It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are relaxed so that if the bell does ring you will hear it and allow it to resonate through all the rungs of your own spiral.
The world of the feminine resonates. Timing is everything.
If it doesn’t ring, either it is the wrong spiral or the wrong time or there is no bell.
Many of my analysands have eating disorders, and therefore much of the illustrative material, especially in the first half of the book, centers on obesity and anorexia nervosa.
These syndromes, however, are simply particular symptoms of a malaise that is general in Western society, and while the anguish of a distorted feminine body brings the problem into sharp focus, the psychology involved does not apply only to the obese or the anorexic.
Indeed, as the weight problem is brought under control, images of emptiness, prisons, glass coffins, etc., begin to appear in the dreams, pointing to sexual and spiritual problems common to most modern women.
These emerge in the latter half of the book. I might add that the cry of the witch that underlies most of the material may well be recognized by men too.
A Greek version of the witch motif concerns Medusa, a beautiful woman until she offended the goddess Athena (born “fully armed, with a mighty shout” from the head of Zeus after he had swallowed her pregnant mother Metis).
In reprisal, Athena changed Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her face so hideous that all who looked on her were turned to stone.
It fell to the hero Perseus to kill the Medusa, and to do this Hermes gave him a curved sword and winged sandals, Athena a mirror-shield, and Hades a helmet which made Perseus invisible.
Thus accoutered, Perseus slew Medusa, avoiding being turned into stone by keeping his eyes on the mirror-shield. From the pregnant Medusa’s neck, Pegasus and Chrysaor were released.
On his homeward journey Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster and released her from the rock to which she had been chained as a sacrifice.
Later they were married.
If we look at the modern Athenas sprung from their father’s foreheads, we do not necessarily see liberated women.
Many of them have proven beyond question that they are equal to or better than men: excellent doctors, excellent mechanics, excellent business consultants. But they are also, in many cases, unhappy women. “I have everything,” they say.
“Perfect job, perfect house, perfect clothes, so what? What does it all add up to?
There’s got to be more than this. I was born, I died, I never lived.”
Often, behind the scenes, they are chained to some addiction: food, alcohol, constant cleaning, perfectionism, etc.
As already mentioned, much of this book concentrates on eating disorders, but I am convinced that the same problem is at the root of all addictions.
The problem manifests differently, of course, with the individual, but within everyone there are collective patterns and attitudes that
unconsciously influence behavior.
One of these patterns is illustrated in Athena’s cruel revenge on the once beautiful Medusa, whose snaky locks twist and writhe in constant agitation, reaching, reaching, reaching, wanting more and more and more.
Is it possible that the modern Athena is not in contact with her Medusa because somewhere back in the dark patriarchal ages she was shut up in a cave?
Our generation scarcely knows of her existence, but she is making her presence increasingly felt in her unquenchable cravings for something.
What that something is depends on the individual’s personal history.
To try to fight her directly is almost certain defeat because she is so angry and so full of repressed energy that to face her brings on a paralysis of fear, as Margaret Laurence with devastating but moving accuracy has described in The Stone Angel.
We have to find our own inner Perseus and arm him with the right weapons and let him move in, wearing his helmet or cloak of invisibility, in order to remove the tormented head.
He dare not look the Medusa in the eye; neither dare he take his eyes off her in the mirror. Once the head is off, Pegasus, winged horse of creativity, is released along with Chrysaor, he of the golden sword.
Then the hero, of victory, finds the virgin who was been sacrificed to the sea monster, her and takes her as his bride.
Essentially I am suggesting that many men and women are addicted in one another because our patriarchal culture emphasizes specialization and perfection.
Driven to do our best at school, on in our relationships in every corner lives we try to make ourselves into of art.
Working so hard to create our perfection we forget that we are human beings.
On one side we try to be the efficient, disciplined goddess Athena, the other we are forced into the voracious repressed energy of Medusa.
Athena chained to Medusa as surely as Medusa chained to Athena.
We are trapped extremes of the gods, territory that belong to us. Meanwhile the one who forgotten is the maiden Andromeda, chained to the rock, in danger of being sacrificed to a monster from the unconscious.
She is the forgotten one ”still unravished bride” in our culture. long as she is chained to a rock she remain still and unravished.
She remains like a figure on Keats’ Grecian urn, her passionate loveliness frozen into immobility,
For ever warm, and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart highsorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching This book looks into the heart of the Athena, the anguish of the writhing Medusa, and suggests ways of releasing maiden into her vibrant womanhood she is sacrificed to the perfection of Only by loving our own maiden, and allowing her to find the deep down within herself, can we dare to open ourselves to the raging goddess at of the addiction.
Only through love transform her and allow her to transform us.
When my own maiden falters, I encourage her with a Zen koan:
Ride your horse along the edge of the sword Hide yourself in the middle of the flames Blossoms of the fruit tree will bloom in the fire The sun rises in the evening. ~Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, Page 7-10
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