Receiving Woman - Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine

We live in a time of unparalleled opportunity for women and a time, just because of that opportunity, of great stress. It is a time when every woman can find her own particular style, to develop her skills, to acknowledge her needs and failures, and to claim both her satisfactions and dissatisfactions. The old stereotypes are all but dead. But another danger threatens; of new stereotyped roles for women in the very range of choices and opportunities presented to the.

"RECEIVING WOMAN grew out of a decade of reflections on women’s experiences - my own, my patients’, and my students’," writes Professor Ulanov. "From all of them, a common voice emerged speaking about each woman’s struggle to receive all of herself. Each was trying to find and put together different parts of herself into a whole that was personal, alive, and real to her and to others.

I know that women want to be all of themselves and want to be their own selves, not examples of types. They want to work out their own individual combinations of what have been called the masculine and feminine parts of themselves. This book focuses on that possibility, on women receiving themselves, all of themselves, wisely and gladly."


Ann Belford Ulanov, M.Div., Ph.D., L.H.D., is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Emerita, at Union Theological Seminary, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She is the author of many books, her most recent including: Madness and Creativity (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, 2013); The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness and Deadness in the Self (2007); Spirit in Jung (2005); Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work (2004); and Attacked by Poison Ivy, A Psychological Study (2002). She is the co-author, with her late husband Barry Ulanov, of Religion and the Unconscious; Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer; Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Witch and The Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality; The Healing Imagination; and Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus.