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Jean Liedloff

http://www.continuum-concept.org/jean.html

Jean Liedloff lives in Sausalito, California, near San Francisco, on a houseboat that she shares with her cat.

The Continuum Concept is Liedloff's only book. Her work includes speaking engagements and consulting with people to help them apply the principles of The Continuum Concept — not only for parenting, but also for recovering from the adverse effects of a modern, "non-continuum" upbringing.

She says that "I never intended to do what I am doing, nor did I study the subject in school. It grew out of years of concern about what I have come to view as a vast pathology, a tragedy affecting all of us in Western society in some measure.

"My story began when I was in Europe for the first time and was invited to join an Italian expedition to the South American jungle. Their purpose was to look for diamonds, but any excuse would have done for me. I had always had a romantic attraction to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan story, W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions, even the word jungle itself. So I accepted the job of expedition photographer-writer without much persuasion.

"Over the course of five and a half months of hardship and adventure, I acquired a deep respect for the jungle and had just the faintest inkling that the Indians' Stone Age way of life had something to tell us about our human nature -- something essential that we have apparently misunderstood.

"Not until I made three more expeditions to a fairly unexplored region further west could I see the truth. Living and traveling with people of the Yequana and Sanema tribes presented me again and again with the evidence before it sank in. Back home in New York after the fourth expedition, I was at last able to do more than simply question our Western view of what we are and what is good for us. One more expedition, and I was ready to say that the way we treat babies and children is not appropriate for human beings and is, along with many other customs that abuse our nature, the cause of widespread alienation, neurosis, and unhappiness.

"[M]y book The Continuum Concept [was] written in England after that fifth expedition . . . ."

The information about Jean Liedloff on this webpage has been taken from the website of The Liedloff Society for the Continuum Concept, www.continuum-concept.org. Contact information for Liedloff can be found on that website.

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