Woodman was born on August 15, 1928 in London, Ontario, the eldest of three children of Ila and Andrew Boa, a clergyman. She completed a degree in English literature at the University of Western Ontario. Later in life she studied psychology at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland.
Career
Woodman taught high school English for more than twenty years. Suffering from anorexia, she took a sabbatical with her husband a college professor, and traveled first to India and then to England, where she became interested in the theories of Carl Jung. She entered analysis with Jung's British colleague, E. A. Bennet. She subsequently enrolled in the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, and trained as an analyst. In 1982, Woodman wrote a book about analytic psychology, Addiction to Perfection, which was published by the new company, Inner City Books, set up by her colleague Daryl Sharp. Woodman continued to write on the subject of feminine psychology, focusing on psyche and soma. She has also lectured internationally. She has written collaboratively with Thomas Moore, Jill Mellick and Robert Bly. Woodman was listed in Watkins' Mind Body Spirit Magazine in 2012 as the 100th most spiritually influential living person. Her collection of audio and visual lectures, correspondence, and manuscripts are housed at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, OPUS Archives and Research Center, in Santa Barbara, California.
Personal
Her husband Ross Woodman was Professor at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley, and Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism, both published by the University of Toronto Press. Ross Woodman died at their home in London, Ontario, on 20 March 2014. Her younger brothers were the actor Bruce Boa and the Jungian analyst Fraser Boa, both of whom predeceased her. In November, 1993, Woodman was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She recorded the subsequent two years of cancer treatment in a journal, which was later published as Bone: Dying into Life. She died at her home in London, Ontario on July 9, 2018, aged 89.
Notable books
The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter : Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine, 1980 Inner City Books.
Addiction to Perfection : The Still Unravished Bride, 1982 Inner City Books.
The Pregnant Virgin : A Process of Psychological Transformation, 1985 Inner City Books.
The Ravaged Bridegroom : Masculinity in Women, 1990 Inner City Books.
