Feminine and the Love of the Other / Le F�minin et l'amour de l'autre: Marie-Madeleine, avatar d'un mythe ancestral

Mary Magdalen is one of the figures of the feminine in popular mythology. The couple she forms with Jesus stands for all the couples in Antiquity who were victims of dramatic separations and whose stories contain the heritage of the mystical cults of the Mother Goddess to the powers of Nature. Those cults worshipped the divine, not as a unique god, but as a male-female couple, marked by the tragedy of loss ? which is the experience of the feminine within the human couple. In today's society, with its bankrupt values and crumbling mythology, several factors would seem to announce a return to a female content which has been repressed by the three great monotheistic religions. France Schott-Billman examines mythology, dance music as a popular art form and psychoanalysis. She then seeks to determine if what the first says poetically, the second aesthetically and the thied theoretically are in harmony. If they are, she argues, our understanding of what all three illuminate ? i.e. the enI'ma of female desire ? will be greatly improved.This book provides clues that help us understand the I'mense popularity of The Da Vinci Code, and the author's multidisciplinary approach illuminates some of the underlying causes of the malaise of our apparently aimless contemporary society.France Schott-Billman, a psychologist, psychoanalyst and dance therapist, is a founding member of the French Society for Psychotherapy through Dance and vice president of the European Association for Dance Therapy. She is responsible for pedagogy in the Theatre Arts section for the degree course on ?Art in Therapy and Psycho-pedagogy?, at the University of Paris-V-René Descartes, and the author of Le Besoin de danser (2001), published by Editions Odile Jacob.