Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
Drawing on her wide background in depth psychology, art, and archeology, Patricia Reis gives a unique feminist reading to the meaning of the Goddess. Through personal experience and reflection, through women's creative productions, and above all through examples from the lives of women she has guided in her practice of therapeia, Through the Goddess shows the indwelling Goddess to be a much-needed resource for physical, spiritual, and psychological healing. Utilizing pre-patriarchal Goddess images for inspiration and information, Reis shows how the earliest Goddess images provide important bedrock symbols of female wholeness that are lacking in the later Greek Goddesses who are often patriarchally influenced and reflect instead the suffering and fragmented aspects of women, which correspond to contemporary women's struggles for self-acceptance. Reis further develops a newly emerging archetype: that of the female body. Through the work of women poets and artists, Reis shows how women today can heal personally and collectively from abuse, incest, eating disorders, and from the sometimes devastating effects of breast cancer by initiation into and through the Goddess.Editorials
Library Journal
Reis is a proponent of feminist archetypal psychology, and presents in this work her thesis and the development of her methodology. Included is an analysis of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Viking, 1962) and frescoes in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii. At the outset, she states that current images of goddesses are reworked through the patriarchal imagination, leaving women voiceless and seeking their own images and mythologies. Using pre-patriarchal goddess images, Reis shows us a more earthy, many-faceted goddess in whom creation and destruction, life and death are all contained--a figure closer to women's experience of life than Greek and Roman examples. Recommended for most women's studies or psychology collections.-- Marilyn E. Schafer, Canadian Memorial Chiropractic Coll., TorontoBook Details
Published
December 31, 1997
Publisher
New York : Continuum, 1991.
Pages
225
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780826405272