The author explains her use of pre-patriarchal goddess imagery as a therapeutic technique of healing and empowerment for women

Through the Goddess: A Womans Way of Healing

Politics & Social Sciences

Reis, Patricia

Social Sciences

Crossroad Pub. Co

Drawing on her wide background in depth psychology, art, and archeology, Patricia Reis gives a unique feminist reading to the meaning of the Goddess. Through personal experience and reflection, through women's creative productions, and above all through examples from the lives of women she has guided in her practice of therapeia, Through the Goddess shows the indwelling Goddess to be a much-needed resource for physical, spiritual, and psychological healing. Utilizing pre-patriarchal Goddess images for inspiration and information, Reis shows how the earliest Goddess images provide important bedrock symbols of female wholeness that are lacking in the later Greek Goddesses who are often patriarchally influenced and reflect instead the suffering and fragmented aspects of women, which correspond to contemporary women's struggles for self-acceptance. Reis further develops a newly emerging archetype: that of the female body. Through the work of women poets and artists, Reis shows how women today can heal personally and collectively from abuse, incest, eating disorders, and from the sometimes devastating effects of breast cancer by initiation into and through the Goddess.

Through the Goddess: A woman's way of healing

Religion & Spirituality

Continuum

Although feminists have turned prodigious energies toward describing mothers and daughters, the father-daughter relationship remains conspicuously ignored. In Daughters of Saturn, Patricia Reis explores various aspects of this relationship with a particular focus on the father's effect on a woman's creative life. Beginning with the myth of Saturn, the archetypal devouring and melancholic father, she explores the many ways that Daughters of Saturn have come to name their experience and have used language to tell their stories. Through myth, dreams, and women's experiences, Reis creates a map marking a journey from life in the Belly of the Father through the First Gate of Awakening. She documents women's resistances and rebellions against the dominant culture of patriarchy, the treacherous Battlezone of Culture, and records the lives of four women writers - Emily Dickinson, H.D., Sylvia Plath, and Anais Nin - outlining their struggles and strategies to live creative lives. Reis marks the trails into what she calls "The Wildzone", a place that has existence outside the law of the fathers; a woman-centered ground of being and knowing.

Daughters of Saturn: From Father's Daughter to Creative Woman

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Continuum Intl Pub Group

"This book is a must for any woman who wants to connect with her deepest resources for empowerment and healing". -- Marija Gimbutas

Through the Goddess: A Woman's Way of Healing

Philosophy

When she was twenty, Patricia Reis’s mother asked, “What about your spiritual life?” Years later, this question drives her midlife quest to reconcile the desires of her body with the mandates of her spirit. Motherlines is a candid and compelling story of sex with men and with women, of celibacy, illegal abortions, making vows and breaking them, dreams, body wisdom, creative ambition, and inspiring relationships with memorable characters. This unflinching memoir illuminates the unvarnished truth of growing up female in the 1980’s a rich and fertile period in American history when gender roles were undergoing a revolution, a time that includes feminism, the women’s spirituality movement and liberation theology. In her soul-searching quest for meaning, and longing for maternal connection, Reis discovers an unlikely confidante in her aunt, a free-spirited Franciscan nun. Their letters and relationship are a thread that weaves throughout this memoir – an increasingly intimate and honest exchange between two women who are living very different lives yet are both kin and kindred spirits. A spiritual journey and a creative tour de force, this memoir is a potent and tender love song to the Motherlines that connect us all.

Motherlines: Love, Longing, and Liberation

Parenting & Relationships

She Writes Press

Unsettled: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

Sibylline Press

Patricia Reis examines how the father-daughter relationship effects a woman's creative life. First describing the mythology of Saturn-the archetypal devouring and melancholic father-she then matches Saturn's mythological daughters-Hestia, Demeter, Hera, and Aprodite-with four modern women writers-Emily Dickinson, H.D., (Hilda Doolittle), Sylvia Plath, and Anais Nin-and uses these stories, as well as the dreams and stories of other contemporary women, to reveal a path women can follow outside the realm of the fathers to a woman-centered ground of creative authority.

Daughters of Saturn

Spring Journal, Inc.

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Books by Reis, Patricia