Arione de Winter
Jungian Psychoanalyst
The Wolf Girl Trilogy is an inner exploration of outer space.
Book I - SHADOW WOMAN: OR ROMANCING THE DEAD (revision of Lady of the Beasts)
The Shadow Woman, a psychic whore and mythic novelist, has a split personality- a raging primitive as one self and heady intellectual as the other- and is in an erotic transference with her female analyst. She was incested at twelve and rejected the child, working the streets and avenging his birth and communes with her son in visions and dreams, as she learns to kill or to heal with the power of thought.
Her analyst lives through her patient’s fantasies and daring adventures in a dual existence that frees her of her sexual repression. In time, her patient becomes her analyst, using the shadow to heal her, bringing her back from the Abode of the Dead.
Book II - TURNING: OR MALICIOUS JOY
An art historian, born in Bergen-Belsen, re-enacts her mother’s torture, a prostitute in the death camp, who was murdered by her Nazi father. Her psychopathic brother, an art forger and thief, tracks her down from her book on the painting Isle of the Dead. He hires her to find the variation owned by Hitler, and seduces and murders the gay gallerist who hoards it. Spellbound by the shadow of their father, he repeats his sadistic acts, and projects the tortures of her mother on his masochistic sister.
Obsessed with the novel Shadow Woman and its author, she creates a mythical analysis, in which she eroticizes death and her psychopathic brother. To victimize and control her, he kills her lesbian lovers, and learning from the Shadow Woman how to kill with a thought, she avenges their deaths by driving him mad. In time, the author becomes her analyst, guiding her back to the Isle of the Dead, turning her addiction to death into a longing for life.
Book III - HAWKING: OR FEAR OF FLIGHT
The Shadow Woman imprisons the soul of her son, and projects his disembodied spirit in the living body of his brother, and possessed by each other they vie for her love. Both are transformed by her shadow as she confronts her own death, freeing the earthbound spirit that was under her spell.
The trilogy is an archetypal drama based on a fictional Jungian analysis, in which the reader can experience being both analyst and patient. It explores the compulsion of shadow- ’the dark side of self’, through waking dreams and ancient myth in the transformative process. By tracing the unknown past of the Shadow Woman, and making the transference conscious- confronting the primal chaos of shadow and unconscious merging, while suffering loss of identity and fear of the death of the self, a new psychic order is created, changing the nature of relationship. Jung on the mystery of transference reveals a kind of alchemical transformation as "a bond of such intensity that we can almost speak of [the change] when two chemical substances combine and both are altered.”
The story of Nola Lupa, the wolf girl, evolves in an Oedipal saga through time, reflected through the lens of Greek tragedy, Greco-Roman and Etruscan motifs, Christian mysticism, alchemy, and physics, linking the personal and archetypal dimensions of self, and healing the split between shadow and ego.
Quote from SHADOW WOMAN: OR ROMANCING THE DEAD
To learn how to love, one must learn how to die.
"The dead continue their journey through the souls of the living."
—Shadow Woman: or Romancing the Dead