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 | | The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture) by Dennis Patrick Slattery ISBN-10: 9780791443828 ISBN-10: 0-7914-4382-5 ISBN-13: 9780791443828 ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-4382-8 Paperback 1999-12 State University of New York Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description An almost obsessive interest in the human body in literary and psychological theory over the past ten years has uncovered not just the physical body but the body as metaphor, political emblem, social construction, and symptom. The Wounded Body builds on this recent interest in the body by providing an ambitious interdisciplinary exploration of the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison. Guided by insights from phenomenology to Jungian archetypal psychology, Dennis Slattery argues that the body in its scarred, marked, diseased, tattooed, or otherwise afflicted state is not only an individual phenomenon but, in the hands of the poet, a cultural symptom, a place of suffering, as well as a way of seeing and ordering the experience of the one who is wounded. | ||
Reviews | ||
depth psychology inkarnate! What a joy it was to turn away from a discussion with a psychologist who believes in psyche as quantifiable brain extrusion (how come these hermetically sealed folks are always the politically correct ones as well?) and get lost in this wondrous work by a marked man known to frequent the Pacifica Graduate Institute, one of my favorite hangouts and a delphic magnet for depth-oriented subversives. The author has given us a finely researched prose-poem pulsing with creative insights and daring questions: a psychology of the gut for a malnourished time when so much psychology has become gutless as well as bloodless, dismembered and disembodied. A time that has recorded the inversion of Jung's dictum that the gods have become diseases, for when "the cry for myth" is strangled in the rationalist throat, diseases inevitably become our gods. A few quotations from the book: "The wound is a special place, a magical place, even a numinous site, an opening where the self and the world may meet on new terms, perhaps violently, so that we are marked out and off, a territory assigned to us that is new, and which forever shifts our tracing in the world." "Identity involves suffering, a suffering into the self through soul." "Where we have been marked is where the soft spot of our being is, where we are most finite; but it is also where the hinge is located that marks the pivot of our history and our destiny." This book won't catch you if you're into trance-ending your wounds and weaknesses, flying over them into a stratospheric spirituality that gleams with powdered sugar and positive thinking: a Promethean leap that disregards the shadow over which it later stumbles into a deflating, angry bitterness akin to that of Captain Ahab, the idealist-gone wrong who raged, "There can be no hearts above the snowline." But if you want to listen to the spaces opened up by hurts ("Invulnerable am I only in the heel," wrote Nietzsche), then this enfleshed poetic journey through literature, myth, and psyche itself will stir your blood and get your soul in motion. | ||
Deepening our wounds In a day when we are awash in advice about how to fix our bodies, and advice about how to heal them and discover our long-supressed spiritual selves as well, this book by Dennis Patrick Slattery comes as a welcome antidote. Reading about these great stories, with Slattery's provocative and insightful commentaries, we can better meditate on our common humanity, especially our common bonds of suffering. For all the pain and grief they entail, our wounds, personal and collective, appear to be at one with the Muses, and they bring forth poetry. I recommend this book to psychologists as well as to others who are interested in great literature. | ||
Remembering Wounds and Meanings In his book, The Wounded Body, Dennis Patrick Slattery weaves together wounds and meanings, intertwines psyche and soma, and plaits mimesis and memory into life stories. If, as he believes, our origins and our destinies are within the poetics of our bodies, then who would turn away from tracing origins through memory and destiny through desire? Who would not unravel some of the knots of their body's images? Dennis Slattery heeds Shakespeare's teaching that our wounds are mouths and teaches the reader to listen, as he does, with rapt devotion to their stories. His imaginative discussion recalls works by Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Melville, Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor and Toni Morrison. Slattery reminds the reader that wounds and fissures mark the places vulnerable to penetration by unknown deities. Our wounds are "where the hinge is located that marks the pivot of our history and destiny" (15). He poses the archetypal question: What is the wound asking of us? What story does it want to tell? The wound's meaning cannot be teased out logically. Only imagination will lead us to the story. Our wounds want to be recognized and dialogue with us. They want to matter, want to be incarnated. And as Hamlet teaches us, "perhaps the fullest form of embodiment is to be remembered in a story, for it is as close to immortality to which a mortal can aspire" (73). Read this book slowly, savouring its poetics, its reveries, its meanderings, and its gaps. The gaps invite the reader's memories to intertwine past with present and mingle with Slattery's reflections in a confluence of healing spider's webs for our wounds. Pay particular attention to the stories that resonate, for "the essence of mimesis is somatic, visceral, a shared physic element wherein we feel the action, the wounding, the marking of a body, in our own being" (13). Dennis Slattery, whose namesake is Dionysos -- the god of tragedy, reminds us that we must delve "deeply into the wound, the infection, the pollution that tragedy forces us to face; to escape from it is to invite its doubling intensity" (72). Then Dionysos leads us to Hermes, whose value "lies in being a mediator, an in-between figure who gives imagination depth and allows the ordinary things of the world to be remembered fully and experienced deeply" (143). By bowing deeply to both these gods, Slattery writes a vibrant and meaningful book about the wounded body. The most important part of writing a book is asking worthy questions. This author draws upon the most profound literature of twenty-five hundred years to refine his questions. If our wounds have stories to tell about our origins and destinies, who would dare to ignore their every imaginative appearance? Dennis Slattery never suggests that the wound's story will be redemptive. He cautions the reader that "the theory used to guide the study was itself wounded" (237). For in listening to our wound's stories, we hear about fragmentation, not integration. And I wonder, is fragmentation indeed redemptive? | ||
The Body as Being in the World Even in a world as worshipful of the body such as ours, the ancient split between matter and spirit, between body and soul is still so pervasive that it is an anomaly to think that the body is our way -- indeed the only way -- of existing in the world. Humans are not spirits condemned to the prison of the flesh, waiting for their liberation from matter and escape into the spiritual paradise. Rather they are incarnated spirits and ensouled bodies. They can achieve their wholeness only though their bodies -- and more precisely, their wounded bodies -- since the world in which they live is marked by diseases, pains, psychic sufferings and ultimately death. Through a series of insightful and profound analysis of literary, psychological, artistic and religious masterpieces -- from the ancient Greek tragedies to contemporary American novels -- Slattery offers us a way of imagining our wounded bodies, and through this imagination, reconnect them with the spirits. We owe Slattery an enormous debt for his powerful imagination. No one who reads this book will remain unchallenged and unchanged by his way of seeing the human body as an icon of the divine. I most strongly recommend his book to those seeking wholeness and spiritual transformation. | ||
The Way In In a society where technology is becoming the predominant timepiece, Slattery reminds us that the body is always there recording. In this remarkable exploration rooted in some of literature's greatest works, Slattery dares us to remember. He encourages us to peel off another layer, to turn off the machines and sit in ourselves with our woundedness. He believes that in exploring our wounds,we come to know ourselves. For Slattery,wounds are the way in and the way out. They mark the point of suffering while divulging the site of healing. A man of his word, he wears his perspective on his sleeve, introducing his book with a tale of his own woundedness. His book teaches that the body holds the memory and all possibilities are therein contained. This book is dressing for anyone who has been wounded. Applause, applause, applause . . . | ||