Author(s): Violet Sherwood; Mary Harrell (Foreword by)

Adoption | Trauma

The disturbing experience of psychological infanticide reflects the darkest aspect of the wounding of the Sacred Feminine - the Death Mother archetype that annihilates rather than nurtures life. Through myth, story, classic literature, biography, poems, art and dreams, Dr. Violet Sherwood weaves together symbolic aspects of psychological infanticide with psychoanalytic theory of traumatic attachment and the literal truth of a centuries-old history of infanticide. She illuminates the Death Mother archetype in the dynamic between the unwilling (or unsupported) mother and the unwelcome child. Her personal and archetypal journey into, through, and beyond the underworld, offers hope and guidance for the restoration of the relationship between the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Child. She draws on her professional experience as a psychotherapist and her lived experience of psychological infanticide as a result of closed stranger adoption to explore the intimate connection between life and death, revealing the life task of the infanticided psyche is to embrace death and discover the life that lies beyond the realm of the underworld.