“I have had the privilege of caring for thousands of women patients during my career as a physician. They have been my greatest teachers. My practice, in return, supports Dr. Carl Jung’s theory that ALL WOMEN can transform themselves to their benefit by improving their health and well-being. Even our most traumatic experiences do not sentence us to a life of misery and failure. The power to change and overcome is within us all.

Resilience, wisdom, compasion, and courage have been associated with the essential female self, the feminine archetype, since antiquity. In contemporary American society, women have an urgent need to awaken within themselves the archetype of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and healing. Athena lived and excelled in a patriarchal society. She, like many of my women patients, was born into conflict. According to tradition, Athena was denied infancy, childhood, and maternal nurturing. She sprang, fully grown and fully clothed in protective armor, from the head of her father, Zeus, Athena was despised by her stepmother and became the target of her half-siblings' envy. She was a victim of deceit, personal attacks, and abuse. In spite of those challenges, she used practical thinking, intelligence, skill, courage, and reason to save herself and those she loved from defeat and injustice. She had a strong sense of self-worth, and she achieved altruistic goals without self-sacrifice. She maneuvered herself confidently and effectively in a male-dominated culture and in society at large.

Athena achieved her success by developing skills that can be used today by any woman willing to pay the psychic cost of transforming herself and her world. It is my hope that the suggestions in this book will help that effort. The practices that I recommend are readily available and affordable, and they offer many benefits. I appeal to all women to awaken Athena in themselves and to join me in seeking wisdom and self-healing."