Title: What her body thought : a journey into the shadows /
Authors: Griffin, Susan.
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco,
Year: 1999
Subjects: Diseases; Syndromes.; Sick Psychology; Chronic diseases Psychological aspects; Medicine and psychology.; Medicine, Psychosomatic
Abstract: In this boldly intimate and intelligent blend of personal memoir, social history and cultural criticism, Susan Griffin profoundly illuminates our understanding of illness. She explores its physical, emotional, spiritual and social aspects, revealing how it magnifies our yearning for connection and reconciliation. Griffin begins with a gripping account of her own harrowing experiences with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a seriously disabling illness that was at first misconstrued through the label psychosomatic. As she makes a descent into memory, describing terrifying bouts of pain, weakness, diminished thinking, the public marginalization of her illness and a fear of abandonment shadowed by early childhood loss, she searches for a part of her soul she has lost to this trauma. Alongside her own story, Griffin weaves in her fascinating interpretation of the story of Marie Duplessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, a nineteenth-century courtesan whose young life was taken by tuberculosis. In the old story, Griffin finds contemporary themes of money, bills, creditors, class, social standing, who is acceptable and who not, who is to be protected and who abandoned. In our current economy, she sees how to be sick can impoverish, how poverty increases the misery of sickness, and how the implicit violence of this process wounds the soul as well as the body.
Contents: Two stories -- A childʼs body -- Sustenance -- The social body -- Theater -- Erotic bodies -- Democracy -- The body electric.