"This book is about taking the head off an evil witch," writes Marion Woodman in the preface to Addiction to Perfection, her second book on feminine psychology. Unlike the feminist literature that aims and minimizing the cultural consequences of the masculine and feminine differences which it denies, Woodman's book aims at differentiating the gender principles from their present state of contamination and inviting them to their separate mysteries.

Her basic thesis is that ever since the Zeus cult entered the Greek peninsula, in the earliest days of Western culture, the masculine principle—which aims at perfection—has "raped" the feminine principle—whose interests are in completeness—creating distortions in our relationship to the archetypal feminine. Centuries of misogyny have created a witch in our inscapes. Feminine eros has been calcinated by masculine logos, the solar consciousness of the scientific intellect and technological mind.

This book, however, is not an attack on the patriarchal principles that have so dominated our culture; rather, its therapeutic concern is with the misogyny that grows like a cancer in the feminine's rejection of itself.

Addiction to Perfection is a book about the Goddess in our afflictions. The chapters—Ritual: Sacred and Demonic, Assent to the Goddess, The Myth of Ms, Rape and the Demon Lover, The Ravished Bride—are peopled with gorgons, whores, witches and unicorns, valkyries and the Black Madonna even as the case material, drawn from her practice as a Jungian analyst, is filled with the mythological dreams of her bulimic and anorexic patients.

Not the least of this book's beauties is that it is written in the evocative language of a feeling heart, a language that speaks directly to our dreams and allows us to relate to our suffering soulfully, in an I-Thou style. The reader will be moved by the devotional language with which Woodman imagines into the symptoms that her patients carry for our culture.

Psychoanalysis has been discounted in recent times as a molly-coddling therapy for the worried well or an elitist entertainment for the idle rich. This book, however, puts the lie to these assessments while at the same time making the fruits of its introverted pilgrimage accessible to a general audience. The women whose stories fill its pages are not decadent malingerers; they are psychological explorers who have invited the sins of the seven generations into the temple of their more-than-personal despair. Their conscious suffering, we sense, helps to cleanse history of its secular debasement by retelling it in devotion to the psychologically meaningful.

Addiction to Perfection is a book of enormous vision. Perhaps only the theologically-minded reader will fully appreciate the Gnostic evangelism of Woodman's placement of eschatology inside the afflictions of the human psyche. Always illuminating her clinical discussions of obesity and anorexia, binging, purging, and compulsions in general is amplificatory material related to the archetypal feminine—Sophia as the feminine side of God and da Vinci's Mary in the lap of St. Anne giving birth to her divine child, the Incarnation in Man. Ψ