Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness and the Search For Meaning - Hardcover

Bolen, Jean Shinoda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684822377 ISBN 13: 9780684822372

Publisher: Scribner, 1996

Synopsis

Describes how serious illness can actually be a soul-transforming experience that eliminates neurosis and leads to the essential truths of life

About this title

About the Author:

Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., is a Jungian analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

From Publishers Weekly:

The crisis brought on by a serious or disastrous illness is the concern of this richly probing essay by a Jungian analyst and medical doctor. Although various diseases are touched on, cancer?especially as it affects women?is Bolen's focus. Yet far from being a grim tract, this book is a kind of metaphysical how-to filled with hope, second chances and sound guidance. But from the very first "initiation story" the author narrates for us?the myth of the abduction to the underworld of Persephone, an ancient Greek emblem of spring, vitality, rebirth?Bolen makes clear that there are dark and dangerous realms to traverse to learn how to help make oneself well and whole again. In her view, there is no mind/body split, no dichotomy between psyche and soma: the mind is everywhere in the body and affects physiological outcomes. While the book's Jungian tone will keep some readers away (even as it attracts others), and while it's not full of original ideas, it is a skillful assemblage of views on the harrowing experience of physical illness and mental dissociation from which we can and may emerge with a new clarity about who we are and what we want our lives to be.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684822377
• ISBN 13: 9780684822372
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224