Through the Goddess: A woman's way of healing

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.