CELEBRATION OF ANNE BARING’S NEW BOOK
In Spring 2013 the Association of Jungian Analysts has celebrated the
publishing of a major book by one of its better-known daughters, Anne Baring.
The Dream of the Cosmos, A Quest for the Soul, is a packed volume with a
profound message for the world’s future.
We assembled for a special event to welcome Anne back to AJA, and we
were delighted to hear her describe the inspiration, origins, and growth of the
ideas in the book, and the way it developed to cover the great issues of
concern facing the human race in our time. The guidance of dreams was
especially significant and moving to hear.
While the scope of the book is enormous, it derives from a personal feeling
level, imbued with the clear strength of the feminine perspective. Anne told
how her book grew from ideas begun in her seminal book The Myth of the
Goddess (co-written with Jules Cashford) published in 1991. The book grew
organically and contains twenty chapters, which she briefly outlined. One of
Anne’s purposes was a desire to extend and develop Jung’s ideas beyond the
world of therapy, reaching out to a wider readership.
Interconnected themes in the book include the long-standing separation of
spirit and nature, the suppression of the feminine image of the divine in the
patriarchal religions and the related oppression of women and lack of respect
for the earth and its forms of life; the destructiveness of war as a rape of the
soul, and the too-limited concept of God as totally transcendent. We are
witnessing new stirrings of a wider consciousness of which this book is a part,
and in celebrating Anne’s long labour now come to fruition, there was a
feeling of hope and joy in the air.
The book is the long-awaited result of two decades by a female writer
considered by many to be an eminent thinker and visionary with a worldwide
reputation. Anne Baring’s work is respected through her talks and books, and
her readable website www.annebaring.com, where this book has appeared
online generously over the years. We were all aware of how resistant the
mainstream media and academia have been to the profound ideas explored
by Anne Baring, and we wish the book success in reaching the wider acclaim
it deserves in the years to come.
Lindsey Harris