Routledge Footbinding: A Jungian Engagement with Chinese Culture and Psychology

In this book Shirley See Yan Ma provides a Jungian perspective on the Chinese tradition of footbinding and considers how it can be used as a metaphor for the suffering of women and the repression of the feminine, as well as a symbol for hope, creativity and spiritual transformation. Drawing on personal history, popular myths, literature, and work with clients, Footbinding discusses how modern women still symbolically find their feet bound through this ancient practice. Detailed case studies from Western and Asian women demonstrate how Jungian analysis can loosen these psychological bindings allowing the client to reconnect with the feminine archetype, discover their own identity and take control of their own destiny. This original book will be of great interest to Jungian analysts looking for a new perspective. It will also be of interest to anyone studying Chinese culture and psychology. Review "This pioneering work is an invaluable contribution to Analytical Psychology, as well as to studies in Culture, and Consciousness. It is exceptionally informed in its archetypal depth, and reveals the power of a symbol for psychological understanding across cultures."  - Marion Woodman, From the Foreword "I have a deep appreciation for the depth and scope of  Footbinding: A Jungian Engagement with Chinese Culture and Psychology. It is fascinating to learn about footbinding and appalling to know of the pain that little girls endured, as they were slowly crippled to make them marriageable. Like female genital mutilation in Africa, footbinding in imperial China was done by mothers who themselves had endured this so that their daughters would be acceptable brides with "lotus feet," which measured 3 –4" in length and made walking or running normally impossible. In patriarchal societies, where daughters are shaped physically and psychologically to make good marriages, the crippling that results is symbolic. This book will provide important insights for women of Chinese ancestry and their therapists, especially, but it is applicable to women raised in families where the father is the most important person, and to women in the hierarchal or corporate world of masculine power. As Dr. Shirley Ma so effectively points out, when feminine qualities and women are devalued, footbinding then becomes a powerful metaphor." - Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of Goddesses in Everywoman and Urgent Message From Mother "This remarkable book opens the door to a deeper appreciation of the struggles of Chinese women to be themselves, disclosing how the tools of their own emancipation have long lain in their own hands yet have often been misused to bind women to the expectations of others. The author shows that Chinese history and philosophy were never as firmly patriarchal as the West imagines, and she reveals that the strength of Chinese mythology, so often underestimated, lies in its images of the feminine as an agency that can survive and endure. How so destructive and limiting a practice as the binding of the feet of girls in order to realize an arbitrary aesthetic ideal for women took hold in Chinese society and survived for so long is the burden borne by the scrupulously honest author of this book, Jungian analyst Shirley Ma. Ma gives a sensitive, thorough, and fair account of footbinding’s history, but where her book really comes into its own is in its moving presentation of the work of Chinese women in analysis trying to discover how to let themselves be. In the midst of their efforts to set themselves loose psychologically from the double binds of their culture, Ma’s patients encounter the paradox that cultural complexes can both shield us from the difficult work of learning to be ourselves and at the same time hold the energy that is needed to move beyond the ways we have restricted our development to social goals that are too narrow. Skillful in her use of Jungian concepts, this compassionate therapist has given us a book about t