Customer Reviews

Wounded Body, The (SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

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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.

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?

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.

Reviewer: Ginette Paris, Ph. D. Research Coordinator. Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California. -------------------------

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 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? Dennis Slattery in The Wounded Body, shows that the talent to make sense of our suffering is all given with our culture, it is all there is the 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, 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 underliner in hand.

Slattery writes well about incarnation and the wounded body, but all along, the soul is his real subject and we follow him.

My oldest friend, at 80, is an M.D. He still considers himself a country doctor. On a drive through the desert near his retirement home, he confessed his inability to understand the the young who tattoo, scarify, burn, brand, cut, and pierce their bodies. He doesn't understand the concept or reality of bodymind. If only...if only he could read and comprehend Dennis Slattery's 'The Wounded Body'. But this is not for his generation. My friend will die in a Newtonian universe.

Slattery holds us to the mirror of soul; the wounded body is not a pathological manifestation, rather, "within the scars and pains of our wounds is the blossoming flower of freedom; the wound has the capacity to open up to liberation" (p.213). The wound is gold. A door opens.

Each of us plays upon the stage of life, yet for the most part the lines we speak are not our own. Slattery points true North; the direction to an individuated life. Morover, he gives us a map; the map that is always written in our bones, muscle, fascia, and skin. "What we see through the body marked and violated is that memory itself is deeply wounded, scarred, and is in need of a counternarrative that heals" (p. 209).

Now we know what Patricia Berry meant when she said that the way we tell our story is the way we form our therapy, or what James Hillman meant when he wrote that the way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives. Slattery gives voice to our wounds; gives our wounds a connection to the drama of our lives, to the collective, and to the planet. An ecopsychology is inferred; to honor the wound means tending the soul of the world. 'The Wounded Body' is essential reading in depth psychology.

I reccomend this book for psychotherapists, physical therapists, survivors, true artists, medical practitioners, historians, sociologists, political scientists, physicists, mythologists, revolutionaries, ecologists, and shamans.

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.

Reading this book compelled me to begin imagining not only literary works but the life of our bodies in ways I hadn't thought of before. As the author states in his chapter on Oedipus Rex, "a kind of knowledge is offered through the wounded or violated body that helps us to understand the poetic work's entire meaning." This is the first book I've come across that imagines the world of our body as a kind of text, to be read and meditated upon. Its meanings and its secrets will reveal themselves if we only take time to listen, to be attentive. For those of us that have been wounded in life, which I'm sure is most of us, we have felt our wounds beckoning to us. If not to be read, at least to be listened to. This book gave me a great charting on how to begin this kind of meditative activity. I've already begun to include it in my graduate studies as a way to re-imagine many of the classics I thought I had a handle on. Over the past several years we've had alot of books that have dealt with "Soul". This is a welcome book that reunites both body and soul.

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 . . .

Dennis Slattery's The Wounded Body does for literary studies what Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer did for pastoral theology. Nouwen argued that without an intimate understanding of one's own woundedness, one could not truly minister to another. Similarly, Slattery's exploration of the recurring images of woundedness and scarring in literature point us to our own discovery (or recovery, if you will) of what it means to be embodied creatures seeking meaning in an increasingly fragmented world. Readers will appreciate anew what they had assumed were familiar texts: The Odyssey, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, Beloved, among others. The Wounded Body is a rewarding read--for those whose livelihood is bound up with the teaching of literature as well as for those who seek an imaginative reflection on what it means to experience grace. One of Slattery's concluding remarks serves, I hope, as an apt enticement: "Our blemishes, diseases, wounds, scarrings all mark our pilgrimage through this life and, for those who accept it, from this life to the next."

2.11.2000

Slattery like many of his literary and spiritual ancestors is a discoverer and a pathfinder. Here in "The Wounded Body" he points the way with authority, humor and grace.

The Glory of The Wounded Body

My friend, your wounded body has become for me an ark a vessel To cross the imaginal seas of this phenomenal and fantastic world.

As Shankara said in his prayer to Lord Shiva 1300 years ago " how shall I cross the ocean of the world?

Here late at night now I know...now I know! I shall cross the ocean of the world in the bark, the vessel of my friend's wounded body. His body, cut and open, bleeding, torn, returned to and remembered Sings the great song of the soul's dance...the soul's feast here on the surface of the earth, Here in the great forest of forms which we call the world.

I have found my friend singing of his wounded body Like a pagan priest chanting in the night before a great fire. Chanting the names and the deeds...the beauty and speed of the animal Which in the light of day the hunters will catch and cut, wound and kill.

Your limping and your lost hip have carried me back to Oedipus And further still to Osiris, mangled., lost , mutilated and finally remembered by Isis who would not give him up....though he was invisible and dead. She remembered him so well that he became a Bridge between the worlds.

Your cut flesh, your body's insistent song, the lost bones of your left hip Drag me, summon me to the sacremental table, to the inescapable presence of the soul's food to remind me that I have been invited to a feast.

There is only one way to leave this table hungry. And that is simply not to eat.

A.T. Wood April 17th, 2000