Research Catalog

Title

What her body thought : a journey into the shadows / Susan Griffin.

Author

Griffin, Susan.

Publication

San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, ©1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvii, 328 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• 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.
• Griffin believes that we must tell our stories to maintain our own integrity and authority, so that the sources of suffering become visible and validated. She writes passionately of a society in which we are all cared for through the rooted-ness of our connections. How the wound of being allowed to suffer points to our need to meet at the deepest level, to make an exchange at the nadir of life and death, the giving and taking that will weave a more spacious fabric of existence, communitas, community. Her views of the larger problems of illness and society are deeply illuminating. What Her Body Thought is a companion volume to A Chorus of Stones: the Private Life of War. Both books are part of a series entitled This Common Body: A Social Autobiography. Includes information on chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome.

Subject

• Diseases
• Syndromes
• Sick > Psychology
• Chronic diseases > Psychological aspects
• Medicine and psychology
• Medicine, Psychosomatic
• Disease
• Syndrome
• Sick Role
• Psychosomatic Medicine
• Chronic diseases > Psychological aspects
• Diseases
• Medicine and psychology
• Medicine, Psychosomatic
• Sick > Psychology
• Syndromes

Contents

Two stories -- A childʼs body -- Sustenance -- The social body -- Theater -- Erotic bodies -- Democracy -- The body electric.

ISBN

• 0062514350
• 9780062514356
• 0062514369
• 9780062514363

LCCN

98043253

OCLC

• ocm40113397
• 40113397
• SCSB-576364

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library