The Medial Archetype: Retrieving the Feeling Soul

ABSTRACT Roberta Bassett Corson’s Stepping Out of the Shadows: Naming and Claiming the Medial Woman Today is a study in discovering, recovering, and reclaiming a part of the soul that has been forgotten or neglected. By using the power of stories as vehicles through four companions as well as her own experiences of being wounded, ignored, and dismembered, Corson leads us initiates through the narrative restoration of five participants: Angela, Clelia, Elizabeth, Kathryn, and herself. Anchored firmly in Toni Wolff’s Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (1956), Corson then interviews each participant on a host of qualities indigenous to the medial archetype: empathy, broad-mindedness, healing, truth-telling, and imagination. Despite the medial woman’s wounds, including being forgotten, marginalized, trivialized, devalued, and labelled as an outsider who does not belong in mainstream culture, Corson discovers in each narrative how the medial woman nonetheless learns to claim herself in her complex relation to the unconscious while living securely in the conscious world that must be negotiated in order to survive. The medial woman has a sixth sense of what the modern world needs but often does not realize: a counterbalance to logic and rationality, an ability to see-through, a connection with the divine, and a voice that can transform how the current anorexic myth is being lived out collectively.