The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

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Summary: Remembering Wounds and Meanings
Review: 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?

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Summary: A Renaissance of Consciousness
Review: 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.

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Summary: depth psychology inkarnate!
Review: 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.