She by Robert A. Johnson

I first read this book at roughly the same time last year, and I found that revisiting it was worthwhile.

This is a book subtitled: Understanding Feminine Psychology, and it is Johnson's explanation of the feminine psyche (in both men and women) using the myth of Eros and Psyche.

There isn't much to critique from a book like this, but it has some personal significance to me, so I will make a few comments.

I did not consider myself a Jungian in any sense of the word prior to reading this book, and was in fact highly skeptical of dream analysis or mythological comparison having any usefulness in my daily life. I would not say that Johnson's book radically or suddenly altered my opinion: when I first read it I completely neglected the dream analysis portion of the back of the book, and scoffed at certain chapters. Much of it reads like a self-help book in the abstract - the "lessons" of the myth are frequently as simple and cliched as "take things one at a time" or "maintain perspective lest you get lost in insignificant and overwhelming details," etc.

These certainly work against the book as a piece of literature, and I am not sure what redeems this book for me. It may be that its very simplicity is welcome. In the face of heavy and complex literature, it might be a good idea to remind oneself that the mythologies much of today's stories draw on are, in fact, quite simple. They require that you, the reader (or listener) apply meaning to them, and it is a fun mental exercise to consider how or why these same stories have survived many generations and floated through different cultures. Such ideas are better addressed in the works of Joseph Campbell, I'm sure, but not everyone wants to start out on that heavy level.

If you have an open mind, and are interested in ways that myths might apply to our modern psychologies, this is a very simple and unassuming place to start. Treat it like a primer. Johnson has also written He and We, neither of which I have read, but I would like to obtain a copy of each soon.

She, in particular, is to blame for a subtle shift in the way I began to think about women and how they interact with men, each other, and themselves. It made me think of personal psychological progress in a different way. And it certainly affected the way I thought about meeting my partner's Mother (believe me, that capital M belongs there).

In other words, although this may fall into a literary category somewhere between storybook and psychobabble, there is inherently nothing dangerous about exploring some of the (admittedly) abstract ways our lives can connect to the lives of gods and goddesses from thousands of years ago. It can infuse meaning, or it can be merely a distraction during your lunch hour. It is an extremely short and simple book, after all.