The Soul in Grief/The Wounded Body (Book)., By: Paris, Ginette, Mythosphere, 10273670, Nov2000, Vol. 2, Issue 4

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The Soul in Grief/The Wounded Body (Book)., By: Paris, Ginette, Mythosphere, 10273670, Nov2000, Vol. 2, Issue 4 download (copy) and printed (paste) for my and your individual use. Please do not mass distribute by email.

THE SOUL IN GRIEF/THE WOUNDED BODY (BOOK) The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation . Robert Romanyshyn. Berkely: Frog 1999; 1-55643-315-8, paperback; $14.95. The Wounded Body Remembering the Markings of Flesh. Dennis E Slattery. Psychoanalysis and Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. xiv+293 pp.; 0-7914-4382-5, paperback; $22.95. Romanyshyn: There was no warning, not even the beginning of a symptom. In fact Janet Romanyshyn, at forty-five, seemed in perfect health when she fell to the floor and died of a heart failure. Robert Romanishyn, her husband, writes in The Soul in Grief. “In the early days after her death, I would phone the house to hear her voice. But those moments were even worse than witnessing the sad, lifelessness of her clothes. The gap between the recorded message as I was hearing it now, after her death, and as I had heard it before she died, was too great. […] The voice of the dream was more alive; the voice in the dream more real than the voice on the machine.” Written as a reverie, a meditation on grief, this book is much more interesting than those self-help books that list the steps and stages of the mourning process. By intimately sharing Romanyshyn's losses, we go down with him, in that cold and dark place where the soul grieves and through the poetic rendering of this experience, we come to understand the wisdom of the following sentence: “In my grief I was forced to learn that the past matters only in light of a future and that without such an opening the past is a prison which locks you out of life.” Although he teaches depth psychology, the author is first of all a phenomenologist and a poet—well known to distrust and reject giving or receiving advice, admonition, counseling, or sermonizing. The book is delightful to read: “Every day I would read out loud some words of this or that poet, and it was the absence of advice which comforted me. I did not have to struggle to take anything in, to make some sense of it, to make it fit the loss I had suffered.” By avoiding the usual pitfalls of clinical psychology, which has a tendency to consider grief as a symptom to treat, this book offers a much more profound understanding of the psychology of grief. We are offered a bit of wisdom instead of the usual remedies from the helping professions. Slattery: When misfortune happens in the body, we call it a wounding. Depth psychologists have in common one belief: that wounding can be a window or a door leading to the Underworld, a place worth a visit. It can be a gift, reminding us of the value of life before it is really too late. It can be a mentor, teaching us to listen to bodies, ours and those of others. Wounding can put us through an initiation and there is no wisdom without initiation. Being sick can be a humbling—which is a cure for our despotic egos. Bedridden, confined, shut-in and flat on one's back, the imagination suddenly starts to fly high and wide. If our illness is long enough, we might experience the quest for healing as an odyssey. If we don't come back healed, at least we might be psychologically educated and spiritually enlightened. What makes the difference between simply being sick, beaten and bored, and having an epiphany? In The Wounded Body Dennis Slattery shows that the talent to make sense of our suffering is all given with our culture, it is all there in literature, one has only to become conscious of the gift. The pain of incarnation, the life of the body is one of the more profound of all metaphors, permeating all literatures. Slattery takes us on a review of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Flannery O'Connor, and Tony Morrison, revealing how “to be wounded is to be opened to the world; it is to be pushed off the straight, fixed, and predictable path of certainty and thrown into ambiguity, or onto the circuitous path, and into the unseen and unforeseen.” Slattery's introduction, where he tells the story of his titanium hip replacement, is moving, funny, poetic, and a pleasure to read. From there, he moves into a more scholarly tone, as this is a work of academic richness, each page filled with insights and interesting quotations, each little note reading like a whole commented bibliography, the kind of book one reads with a yellow highlighter in hand. Slattery writes well about incarnation and the wounded body, but all along, the soul is his real subject and we follow him. It may seems trivial to streets the historical precedence of myth [over philosophy] since this is hardly a debatable point, but in the analysis to come much more will be made out of this precedence. A very common view holds that ancient culture was lost in the darkness of ignorance until “liberated” by the advent of philosophy. Although the birth of philosophy was momentous and important event in human history, the notions of ignorance and liberation are nevertheless highly problematic. This chapter, of course, has argued against the view that myth is a form of ignorance. In addition, our analysis of Greek philosophy will show that its development was slow and gradual, and in fact never a complete break with myth. Rather, philosophy first grew out of a mythical heritage and continued to exhibit elements of that tradition up through Plato and even to a certain degree in Aristotle. Greek philosophy was never completely free of myth, it simply re-formed much of its mythical origins. Of course, that re-formation did break with tradition in many respects, but not in all respects, as we shall see. If I may briefly forecast one of the conclusions I hope the reader will draw from this study: no form of thought, silence included, is ever completely free of a certain mythical sense. Myth does not explain the world; it is the “worlding” of the world, its unconcealment. Prior to myth the world, as a context of meaning, is “not there” (concealment). Conceptual reason interprets a world already there. In other words, some context of meaning, which conceptual reason serves, must first be in place. Before the world can be objectified (detached from the existential situation) it has to have existential significance. A mythos is the telling (logos) of the human story in a world situation, where existential meaning is embedded in the world. Only then is something like scientific objectivity possible. No culture, and no person, first comes across the world objectively. Moreover, there is never such a thing as a purely detached state of mind. Even the scientist must be motivated, attracted to, and excited by science. The value of science, both personal and collective, the spirit of the search, the draw of the unknown—these area all preobjective animations which are inseparable from the scientific enterprise. In other words, science must first matter, and this is a prescientific matter. Here we can notice echoes of the mythical. Ultimately the meaning of myth should not be limited to specific images of gods, heroes, and the like. The absence of such Imagery does not mean that a general mythical sense is absent from a culture. Even our age of extensive objectification, qualification, and mechanization can be seen to be guided by certain mythical motifs (e.g., “mastery of the earth”). Lawrence J. Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (LaSalle: Open Court, 1990);40–41. ~~~~~~~~ Reviewed by Ginette Paris, Core Faculty and Director of Graduate Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Copyright of Mythosphere is the property of Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.