Mary Hamilton, co-author (with Marion Woodman) of Leaving My Father's House : A Journey to Conscious Femininity, is pleased to announce the publication of her new book, Under the Horse's Ass: A Love Story - Human and Divine.

The title comes from a true story. When Mary was seven years old, her mother bought a single bed, put it in the corner of the den, hung a picture of a horse's ass over the headboard and announced that her husband was to sleep there. Mary knew that the horse's dung would fall on her father's pillow. A second painting later appeared at the foot of his bed, a watercolor of dead ducks. "Duck" became her father's nickname. The birds' limp necks and the horse's ass became living symbols in Mary's psyche.

The story is the inner biography of the battle of the sexes. The healing process is a transformation of demon lover energy to spiritual maturity. Through family stories, parental love letters and her own dream process, Mary traces the evolution of repressed instinctual energy to differentiated passions. Repressed sexuality expressed through an addictive will for control over life becomes a root grounded in flesh. The root grows, sustaining spiritual awareness in the body. Through active imagination with dream symbols, Mary reveals how the unconscious relationships of one generation thrive in the psyche of the next. ancestral voices, silenced for years, are brought to consciousness and recognized in the context of present day psychoanalysis.

Updated 3-Nov-2000

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