Customer Reviews

The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine--A Psychological Study (139p)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Marion Goodman is one of the foremost Jungian Analysts in the world. I have found ALL of her books, including "Owl Was A Baker's Daughter" to be exceptionally compassionate towards women. She has great reserves of empathy and profoundly subtle insights into feminine psychology. This book explores a very painful aspect of many women's lives, and the exploration is undertaken with scrupulous honesty, integrity and wisdom.

Woodman wrote about eating disorders before they were vogue. Her personal insights through her own eating disorder and those of ther clients offer a deep look into these disorders. If you don't buy the Jungian perspective don't buy this book. But if you do you will find it well worth the price.

I highly recommend this book to anyone struggling with obesity or anorexia for the amazing insights Woodman has...for example, across the board those with these problems had negative, non supportive mothers. An important and unusual helpful perspective on this subject. Very profound book.

Sometimes this gets a little braniac for me, but it addresses some interesting emotional causes.

I find Jungian analysis interesting however this book is the most hateful book towards women, and fat people that I have ever read. The author has the most hateful attitude towards anyone that has any weight problems. She uses all the worse stereotypes towards people in these predicaments to forward her "theories" which ignore everything scientific about the human body. I guess in Woodmans world, we are all supposed to be stick thin and if we are not, this means we are psychologically disturbed. I think this author somehow felt morally superior to the women she was writing about. The horrible thing is she had case studies about "obese women" and they averaged ONLY 160lbs! Shocking. A sad disaster of a book. A hate manifesto disguised as intellectual enterprise.