Now, Norah Vincent portrays Virginia Woolf as undergoing a partial recovery of the feminine era in her own psyche before her mother died. Out of her partial recovery of the feminine era in her psyche when she was a girl and her mother was still alive emerged her fine novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927). As Norah Vincent portrays her, Virginia Woolf as a young had a profound experience of what Bruteau refers to as communion consciousness with nature and the cosmos. I find Norah Vincent's portrayal of the experience that Virginia Woolf had as a young girl before her mother died as perceptive and penetrating and convincing.
Norah Vincent portrays Virginia Woolf as talking with the fictional character named Adeline, her younger self (also known as the Inner Child, or the Child Within).
Later, Norah Vincent also portrays Virginia Woolf's adult lesbian love affair with Vita Sackville-West, whose family had for centuries been part of the landed aristocracy in England. In Norah Vincent's view, Vita served as a substitute mother-figure for Virginia, just as earlier in Virginia's life her sister Vanessa had.
In this regard, Norah Vincent is moving beyond Lawrence and Freud, and moving toward C. G. Jung and the great mother archetype that Neumann writes about.
Let's review. As a young girl, Virginia Stephen's mother had died. For whatever reasons, Virginia was not able to mourning her mother's death in a healthy way. As a result, she was saddled with melancholia/depression, against which she had to battle the rest of her life, until the end when it got the better of her and she committed suicide.
Regardless of how psychologically incestuous it may sound, Virginia needed to work out her unresolved bereavement due to her mother's death through a nurturing, supportive, embracing relationship with a woman lover such as Vita.
Unfortunately for Virginia, her powerful and re-vitalizing relationship with Vita did not in the final analysis enable her (Virginia) to successfully resolve her unresolved bereavement due to her mother's death.
In my estimate, Virginia through her psychologically incestuous relationship with Vita probably worked through certain significant issues in her personal unconscious that were constellated around her mother. But Virginia's relationship with Vita evidently did not enable Virginia to experience complete archetypal healing of the archetypal wounding of the mother archetype in her psyche.
In my estimate, nobody, not even Jung, has yet figured out a panacea for resolving all of our inner psychological issues involving our mothers and the mother archetype in our psyches. As a result, our understanding of the deep psychodynamics involved in archetypal healing of archetypal wounding, when such healing actually occurs, remains a work in progress.
But Norah Vincent's brilliant psychoanalysis of Virginia Woolf in her novel contributes significantly to advancing our understanding of the psychodynamics involved in Virginia Woolf's substantial experiences of psychological healing of her own personal woundedness from her past due to her mother's death when she was a young girl.
Next, I want to take a bigger step back.
Now, the classicist Eric A. Havelock discusses the decisive separation of the knower from the known in ancient Greek philosophic thought -- in in all subsequent Western philosophic thought -- in his landmark book PREFACE TO PLATO (1963).
Before the historical emergence and dominance in prestige culture in Western culture of the decisive separation of the knower from the known that emerged in ancient Greek philosophical thought, as Havelock explains in his 1963 important book, all cultures had culturally conditioned people in what Bruteau describes as the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche.
In the book SPECTACLES OF TRUTH IN CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THEORIA IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT (2004), Andrea Wilson Nightingale of Stanford University shows that ancient Greek philosophic thought -- and by extension, the separation of the knower from the known -- involved the historical emergence of visual cognitive processing, which the French philosopher Louis Lavelle and the American cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong, S.J., had discussed in their books, even though she does not happen to advert explicitly to them or their books.
However, before the decisive separation of the knower from the known in ancient Greek philosophic thought, people in primary oral cultures -- to use Ong's terminology to describe such cultures -- were a wee bit more aware of the possibility of communion with nature and indeed with the cosmos in a profound healthy experience of what Bruteau refers to as communion consciousness, because they were still close culturally to what Bruteau refers to as the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche. But Virginia Woolf represents the still emerging new feminine era in the human psyche.
In the book THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: THE NATURE OF RELIGION (1959), Mircea Eliade points out that all people everywhere at all times have lived in ordinary space and time -- which he describes as "profane" space and time. However, in extraordinary moments, people may experience a profound sense of communion with nature and indeed with the cosmos -- which he describes as experiencing the "sacred" in one's psyche.
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