Written from within the Jungian tradition, Knowing Woman asks what becomes obscured when women’s psychology is treated merely as a variation on a masculine norm.

De Castillejo examines archetypes, dreams, marriage, motherhood, intuition, creativity and the unconscious, arguing for a specifically feminine mode of perception: diffuse, relational and often alert to realities before they can be cleanly articulated. She studied feminine psychology with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff, and the book draws on her long experience as an analyst rather than presenting a formal psychological system. 

This is also distinctly a work of its historical moment. De Castillejo resists the patriarchal reduction of women, but she is equally sceptical of feminism that understands equality as the erasure of psychological difference. Her account of “the feminine” can therefore read as illuminating, essentialist or both at once. That tension is the book’s real interest now: it records an attempt to build a psychology of women without simply borrowing the categories already supplied by men, while remaining entangled in ideas about sex, marriage and gender that later feminism would vigorously dismantle.

Best read critically rather than devotionally, Knowing Woman belongs beside Jungian psychology, second-wave debates over difference, and the larger history of women trying to describe interior life using conceptual tools that were never designed with them in mind.

Harper Colophon paperback, later printing of the 1974 edition. Light cover rubbing, edgewear and page toning; clean and sound overall.