The authors’ promise of an intelligent and thought-provoking archetypal journey leading to renewed strength, love and creativity is fulfilled throughout this book. Transforming the Death Mother’s influence within ourselves for the sake of healing and wholeness will take courage, perseverance, and time.  Fortunately for the reader, Massimilla and Bud prove themselves to be trustworthy and compelling guides who help you to travel safely.

Massimilla and Bud Harris identify and track the archetype of the feminine, a metaphor for the elemental, essential energy of life in both its nurturant and destructive forms as it courses through the lives of each of us. However mediated by the personal mother, this elemental energy proves generative, is blunted, or is diverted into the realms of death, neurosis, somatoform disorders, or soul sickness. The Harris’s provide examples both of those suffering from the loss of and those coming to integrate this “feminine” energy. Their book is thus tocsin, or clarion call to action, and an accessible agenda for redeeming this energy and healing the sundered soul.

Into the Heart of the Feminine goes directly to the heart of one of the most urgent and pressing psychological challenges in our culture – the reclamation and restoration of the healthy feminine to a place of influence in the psyche. Using myth, fairy tales, compelling clinical vignettes and revealing personal experience, Massimilla and Bud Harris build a compelling case for the healing potential of the ‘eternal feminine soul.’ This is a book I will encourage all of my clients to read.

In this compelling book, Jungian analysts Massimilla and Bud Harris explore the power of the Death Mother complex that ‘drains our energy, saps our vitality, and drags us down.’ Drawing upon personal experience, clinical practice, archetypal stories, and the myth of Medusa, the authors describe not only the paralyzing effects of the Death Mother complex, but the steps needed to transform it into healing and vitalizing energy. This engaging, moving work offers wisdom to both men and women who seek to liberate their deepest creative potential.