Carol C. 2001-07-02
37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
I admit, I didn't get it. I bought this book on the strong recommendation of a psychology major, who praised He, She & We (all three books by Johnson). Perhaps my lack of understanding of Jungian theory interfered with my ability to glean meaning from the text.
The book is a short, readable eighty pages, developed around the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche. In Johnson's explanation of how femininity evolves (including the man's feminine side, or anima), a person must go through certain rites of passage, in sequential order, to develop fully as a woman. Psyche must complete four tasks assigned by Aphrodite. Failure to complete any task before nightfall will result in death. The tasks include sorting a pile of many different seeds, collecting golden fleece from rams, filling a crystal goblet with water from the river Styx, and collecting a cask of beauty ointment from Persephone, goddess of the underworld. Johnson explains how each of these tasks represents an evolution in a woman's life (choosing one of the many seeds a man gives to a woman to begin the miracle of birth, gathering the fleece as acquisition of a bit of masculinity necessary to survive in the world, the single goblet of water from Styx as focusing on a single item at once from the vast choices in the universe). The text is rich with metaphor -- marriage as both death and resurrection for a woman, a beautiful oil-burning lamp as a woman's natural consciousness, etc. Interesting, but (at least for me) not particularly enlightening. Overall, I enjoyed the story, but I didn't come away with an enhanced understanding of female psychology.