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The Female Trickster

The Mask That Reveals, Post-Jungian and Postmodern Psychological Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Culture

• By Ricki Stefanie Tannen

• Price: $34.95
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 304
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 22nd February 2007
• ISBN: 978-0-415-38531-2

About the Book

The Female Trickster presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture.

Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women’s imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include:

• imagination and metaphor
• the traditional trickster
• law and the imagination
• humour: Eros using logos
• the postmodern female trickster.

This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies.

Reviews

Reading this amazing book puts one at the heart of that rare event - a major, discernible shift in human culture and behaviour. The Female Trickster is a really new take on women in Western society. - Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex

A stunning tour de force, The Female Trickster unites depth psychology, mythology, cultural theory, feminism, and literature in an incisive revelation of the feminine in a postmodern age. The analysis of the fictional female detective as trickster is a startling and valuable contribution to gender research. Tannen is to be congratulated on a book important for students of the humanities and clinicians alike. - Dr Susan Rowland, Reader in English and Jungian Studies, University of Greenwich, Chair: International Association for Jungian Studies 2003-6.

In this excellent and provocative book, Ricki Tannen displays creativity and a refreshing lack of inhibition in her criticism of traditional mores and exposure of the flaw in our cultures that do not recognise the female trickster...I have recommended this book to my colleagues and my patients - Marilyn Newman Metzi, from PsycCRITIQUES Vol 52, December 2007

Table of Contents

Preface. Part I: Introducing the Female Trickster. Introduction. Meetings with Remarkable Women. Location, Location, Location. Part II: Calling Upon the Ancestors. Imagination and Metaphor. Where Have all the Virgins Gone? Law and the Imagination. From the Madwomen in the Attic to Mainstream and Mysterious. Part III: Honoring the Traditions. The Traditional Trickster. Humour. Part IV: Re/Storation. Women are Funny. The Postmodern Female Trickster. Blanche White, Re/Storation Agent. New Sightings, Sex and the City. Conclusion.

About the Author(s)

Ricki Stefanie Tannen, L.L.M., Ph.D is an Analytical Psychologist, attorney, author, artist and former professor of women’s studies, law and rhetoric. She has published and lectured internationally on the subjects of gender bias, depth psychology and constitutional law.