Bøger af Christine Downing

This work is an exploration of the ongoing significance of sister relationships throughout our lives, bringing together personal narrative with the illuminations provided by myth, fairy tale, and the depth psychological reflections of Freud, Jung, and their followers. The book suggests that an imaginal return to our relationship with the actual sister of our early years is only the beginning; it leads forward to an understanding of how that relationship reappears, transformed, in many of our friendships and love affairs, and to a challenging revision of our innermost self, and even toward a new way of imaging our relation to the natural world. The book in no way sentimentalizes sisterhood. In her retelling of the familiar story about Psyche and Eros, Downing focuses on Psyche's relation to her envious sisters who, she suggests, push Psyche in a way her soul requires. Reflections on this aspect of the story initiates us into an appreciation of how our sisterly relationships challenge and nurture us, even as we sometimes disappoint and betray one another.

In Women's Mysteries, Christine Downing celebrates the gains and achievements of women, psychologically speaking, as they have been recovered, reclaimed, and repossessed by women over the past several decades. Her title is itself a conscious appropriation, in homage, of a book Esther Harding wrote fifty years ago and an extension of her own much celebrated book The Goddess.

This intensely personal account of the little written-about sacred dimension of menopause combines religious studies with psychology to "understand menopause as soul-eventregarding its symptoms as symbols" and provides insight into what this transition can be like for those women who choose to embrace it as a meaningful part of their lives.

Mythopoetic Musings is a gathering of essays and reworked lectures written by Christine Downing during the years since the 2006 publication of her earlier collection Gleanings. Many represent returns to the themes and images, the stories and writers, that have played a central role in her writing and teaching since she began her scholarly career. Amplifications not retractions. As always, they intertwine the academic and the personal and communicate her conviction that a genuinely depth psychological engagement with any theme will inevitably lead us to ourselves. Our stories. As she says, "I have been a teacher and a writer, but really what I have been is a story-teller. I think I can safely tell myself, I'll never stop being one."

The story of the mother-and-daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone has seized the imagination of people in every age, from ancient times to the present. Considered today by many to be the archetypal myth for women, it touches on timeless themes in every life, such as the male-female relationship, love between women, initiations into puberty and old age, the mother-daughter bond, death, and ecological renewal. Christine Downing has combined essays, prose, poetry, and even performance art with her own insightful commentary to shed new light on the myth''s ancient meanings and to offer new insights in its implications for contemporary men and women.

Christine Downing has graced the campus of San Diego State University, returning like Persephone each spring for the past ten years to deliver the annual lecture named in her honor. Printed here in their entirety, the talks are autobiographical, poetical, literary musings on the subjects that have occupied her for the past ten years, including the Holocaust, memory, the Bible, the Goddess, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, the myth of Orpheus, Greek tragedy, and the Imagist poet H.D.Professor Downing's extensive publications on the role of myth in the psychologies of Freud and Jung, and in the contemporary quest for self-understanding, have made her an original source in these fields. Her books include The Goddess: Mythological Representations of the Feminine, Psyche's Sisters, Journey through Menopause, and Myths and Mysteries of Same Sex Love.