Rapture Encaged

Contents

Written in five chapters, Rapture Encaged centers on Isabel de la Cruz, a Spanish mystic El Saffar considers "one of the last exponents of the medieval age of mysticism". Providing a rhetorical question on "whether there exists an authentic female vision that patriarchal cultures, from the Greeks to the present day, have systematically sought to deny and expunge", El Saffar confronts two pairs of subject matter between each other: Cruz's mystical nature against Jungian theory, and femininity against masculinity.

El Saffar criticizes Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytics as "incapable, for cultural and historical reasons, of imagining a fully realized female Self", and she criticizes the anima and animus for its androcentric and excessively argumentative nature and Jungian individuation for not providing a presumption for "a well-established ego". She subsequently uses the concept of Jungian archetypes to approach the visions of mystics like de la Cruz. In the third chapter, El Saffar examines the relationship between the collective unconsciousness and contemporary, with 16th-century Spain effectively depicted as an Oedipal crisis, while also drawing comparisons with the perceivedly-gendered patterns of the Spanish Empire and medieval women's Christian mysticism.

El Saffar uses her experiences as a Jungian analyst to approach the book's material through the lens of "a critical reading of psychoanalytic theory, the European Renaissance, and ultimately Western civilization", recalling Isabel's life before the convent through the lens of "a mature mother [instead] an objective reporter" and depicting it as a case history similar to Jung's. Using Jungian theory on the anima and animus, El Saffar posits that the transformed animus showed Isabel and her fellow mystic Teresa of Ávila a vulnerable Jesus which, in her words, "represents the shadow of the masculine animus and is able, because of his lowliness, to attract the trust of the ravaged ego of the self-deprecating female religious". El Saffar then cites Isabel's experience and subsequent friendship with a literate nun who helped with Isabel's issues with illiteracy as an example of good object relations, and argues that the titular "rapture" ceased to be in the titular "encaged" state when Isabel's Self emerged with her animus losing its masculine qualities.