Dr. Jean Raffa will have a discussion and book signing for her fourth book, The Soul’s Twins, at Shakespeare and Company Booksellers this Saturday, Aug. 7.
After several years of studying her dreams, Highlands seasonal resident Dr. Jean Raffa has released her fourth and Nautilus Award winning book The Soul’s Twins.
Drawing on Jungian psychology and wisdom traditions from world religions, Raffa offers a self-guided journey to heightened self-awareness and compassion for oneself and others.
Raffa dove into Jungian psychology, which is comprised of several concepts including active imagination, individuation, collective unconscious, Logos and Nekyia.
“In my early 40’s I discovered Jungian psychology,” Raffa said. “This is the psychology of C.G. Jung, a Swiss psychologist, who talks about how everybody, psychologically, has a feminine and masculine side. He called them feminine and masculine archetypes. The book is about my desire to unite those archetypes in my personality so that I can use the strengths of both. So often we see these archetypes as antagonists working against each other. It is often quite problematic to our relationships and ourselves. So, I started researching Jungian psychology and I studied my dreams for the past 31 years.”
At the age of 10, Raffa had a reoccurring dream that she never forgot.
“I grew up in the 50s and at the age of 10, I had a very powerful wake up dream,” Raffa said. “The Lone Ranger shot me. It terrified me. I was 10 years old, and I told myself that I would never forget this dream. Years later, I began to realize that the message of this dream was that boys got to be heroes and girls did not. Girls got to be victims. I felt very keenly that women were seen as sort of second-class citizens. As I grew up, I became a college professor and a T.V. producer and then started studying C.G. Jung.”
Raffa said she has studied 5,250 dreams.
“I have learned a lot by studying Jungian and studying my dreams,” Raffa said. “Obviously men and women are very different, but we are all born with the same female and male archetypes. My goal is to create partnerships between our feminine and masculine sides and between men and women so that we can reduce stereotypes and biases that are so rampant in society.”
On Saturday, Aug. 7, Raffa will host a talk and book signing at Shakespeare and Company Booksellers. She said she hopes that people will walk away with an understanding of the potential of their feminine and masculine archetypes.
“I hope they will learn to accept the strengths of both and not feel pressured by societal norms,” Raffa said. “I know that young people are finding this a very hot topic right now about gender equality, but I’m not really talking about the physical, although they do go together naturally with our minds. I am talking about the psychology behind our own feminine and masculine sides and how we can live better, more conscious and more balanced life if we can learn to accept the strengths of both archetypes.”
While researching and writing The Soul’s Twins, Raffa said her mindset and relationships grew.
“My dreams have shown me the masculine and feminine parts of myself that I have learned to recognize in my waking life,” Raffa said. “Once I could recognize them, I found it much easier to see myself acting in ways that were either stereotypical or ways that were not helpful in my own relationships. I found myself being much more mindful and aware that I didn’t want to have any attitudes that were in any way stereotypical. I wanted to really heal my relationships. I found that working with my masculine and feminine archetypes helped me grow to be a more loving wife, mother and grandmother.”
After seeing the response to her partnership profile in the Soul’s Twins, Raffa is working on a guidebook to go along with her fourth book to help people see the certain feminine and masculine qualities in themselves.
“The partnership profile has turned out to be one of the most popular and exciting things in the book,” Raffa said. “People are really loving this idea that this self-assessment can help them see which archetypes they tend to favor. This self-assessment will see a sort of blend of four feminine and four masculine archetypes in themselves and help them to develop ones that they can see that they are not so satisfied with. There is an area of the self-assessment that is called ‘Life Satisfaction,’ which they can use to see which areas of their life they need to improve. This is a very exciting direction that I am headed in with writing this this guidebook. While discussing the partnership profile, I have learned that there is a lot more that I need to learn, and it is very exciting.”
For more information on Raffa, visit her website at www.jeanbenedictraffa.com.
The discussion and signing at Shakespeare and Company Booksellers is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 7, from 3 – 5 p.m.
By Christopher Smith