ABSTRACT

Roberta Bassett Corson’s Stepping Out of the Shadows: Naming and Claiming the Medial Woman Today is a study in discovering, recovering, and reclaiming a part of the soul that has been forgotten or neglected. By using the power of stories as vehicles through four companions as well as her own experiences of being wounded, ignored, and dismembered, Corson leads us initiates through the narrative restoration of five participants: Angela, Clelia, Elizabeth, Kathryn, and herself. Anchored firmly in Toni Wolff’s Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1956), Corson then interviews each participant on a host of qualities indigenous to the medial archetype: empathy, broad-mindedness, healing, truth-telling, and imagination. Despite the medial woman’s wounds, including being forgotten, marginalized, trivialized, devalued, and labelled as an outsider who does not belong in mainstream culture, Corson discovers in each narrative how the medial woman nonetheless learns to claim herself in her complex relation to the unconscious while living securely in the conscious world that must be negotiated in order to survive. The medial woman has a sixth sense of what the modern world needs but often does not realize: a counterbalance to logic and rationality, an ability to see-through, a connection with the divine, and a voice that can transform how the current anorexic myth is being lived out collectively.

摘要

罗伯塔·巴塞特·科森（Roberta Bassett Corson）的《走出阴影：命名并宣称当今的内侧女性》是一项关于发现、恢复和重新找回被遗忘或忽视的灵魂部分的研究。通过四个同伴的故事力量以及她自己被伤害、忽视和肢解的经历，科森带领我们通过五个参与者的叙事恢复：安吉拉、克莱莉亚、伊丽莎白、凯瑟琳和她自己。牢牢扎根于托尼·沃尔夫的《女性心理的结构形式》(1956)，科森随后采访了每位参与者，了解了医学原型所固有的一系列品质：同理心、宽广的胸怀、治愈能力、说真话和想象力。尽管中间女性受到了创伤，包括被遗忘、边缘化、轻视、贬低以及被贴上不属于主流文化的局外人的标签，但科森在每个叙述中发现中间女性如何在与无意识的复杂关系中学会主张自己同时安全地生活在意识世界中，为了生存必须进行谈判。中间女性对现代世界需要但往往没有意识到的东西有第六感：逻辑和理性的平衡，透视的能力，与神圣的联系，以及可以改变当前厌食症神话的声音正在被集体地活出来。