This book explores the puella as an archetypal, symbolic and personality figure reaching into the classical foundations of Jungian analytical psychology, focusing on the modern conflicts reverberating personally and culturally to remove the obstacles for accessing our more complete selves.
Puella is youthful, charming and seductive and unfolds the creative, unusual wisdom of the feminine. Postmodern fluidity presents other realities, rethinking and reenacting the truth to oneself. If denigrated, psyche is halted from development, until addressed.
French version of this book presentation
Also read Susan Schwartz’s article as a teaser for this book.
The author employs a cross‑disciplinary approach and clinical vignettes from narratives of real people from diverse backgrounds reflecting Jungian thought and treatment, along with other psychoanalytical perspectives for the unfolding of puella.
Examining the puella as a key figure in psychological development within a diverse world, this book will be appealing to Jungian analysts, and also to mental health professionals of various paradigms interested in Jungian analytical and philosophical thought.
About the book
What does the puella part of the personality and femininity look like? What happens when we decouple femininity from female bodies? We are led to puella with imagination and hope, enchanted and curious about her elusive elements. Although the puella character can form within the psyche in various ways, this perspective focuses on the prominent effect of the absent father and the absorption in the mother who is emotionally missing without sufficient connection to her being.
Puella is described through archetypal images and the etymology of the word itself. Puella represents the young feminine on the brink of becoming and at a crossroads. She exists between her individual nature, energy, youth and the innovative, yet can be drawn back to traditional ways. Puella is the creative, unusual, desirous and different. Even so, often infirm in her position, she can become waylaid. Whether women or men, heterosexual, lesbian, gay or nonbinary, puella remains a concept and personality aspect to be understood and made conscious in all people.
Notions of woman, man and the feminine are altering dramatically, and more shifts are on the horizon. This presents challenges, not for pathologising but for psyche transforming. The Jungian perspective presents ways of understanding what this means in our current era.
Thinking about the feminine has changed with cultural attitudes and awareness of the varieties of conscious and unconscious identifications. These variations enlarge our understanding while also creating misperceptions. Gender stereotypes indicate the need to rethink gender assumptions influenced by traditional hegemonic codes shaping many of the current adaptations. The fundamental tensions for navigating gender represent radical and wide‐spread changes in the sociocultural environment.
We want to know about puella throughout the life cycle. The more we recognize the ongoing issues, the more definitive she becomes with personal and collective ramifications. Being conscious of puella, she ceases to be an object and she unfolds into being creative and potent, confident as she discovers her agency, connecting to self and others.
Content
1. Introduction
2. Archetypal girl/woman
3. Puella’s shadow
4. Where is mother?
5. The bones of the father
6. The empty chair
7. The diachrony of dreams
8. Beauty – inside the mask
9. Performativity
10. Bluebeard fairy tale
11. Puer quandary
12. Unreal to oneself
13. Into the void – loss of the symbolic
14. A fascist state of mind – the complex
15. End notes – gaining joy
Publisher: Routledge – 2024 – 170 pages – ISBN 9781032582887 – 234 x 156 x 9.9 mm
Susan E. Schwartz, PhD
Susan E. Schwartz, PhD trained in Zurich, Switzerland as a Jungian analyst. She appears on many podcasts and presents at numerous Jungian analytical conferences and teaching programs in the USA and worldwide.
Susan E. Schwartz has numerous articles in journals and book chapters on Jungian analytical psychology. Her books, all published by Routledge, are:
- The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds (2020), translated into several languages
- Imposter Syndrome and the ‘As-If’ Personality: The Fragility of Self (2023)
- A Jungian Exploration of the Puella Archetype; Girl Unfolding (2024)
- An Analytical Exploration of Love and Narcissism; The Tragedy of Isolation and Intimacy (2025)
Her website is www.susanschwartzphd.com.
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