If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

Mothering, Breast Cancer and Selfhood

by Lynette Walker

204 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0297; ISBN 1-55369-484-8; US$21.50, C$25.00, EUR17.50, £12.50

This three-part story approaches breast cancer from a psychological perspective and illuminates an introspective process in coming to terms with breast cancer and mastectomy and then gradually with the long-term subjective components underlying the disease.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book This three-part story illuminates an introspective process in coming to terms first with breast cancer and mastectomy and then gradually with the long-term subjective components underlying the disease. Part I documents my first attempt to make sense of breast cancer. I show how I dealt with the diagnosis and treatments, payng particular attention to the nature of my thoughts, feelings, dreams, and fantasies. I show how, amid the terror, anger and sadness, my creative self-expression in journalling, active imagination, poetry, ceramics and colored drawings made a positive difference. Part II asks the questions, What was going on in my life in the months prior to the diagnosis that would predispose me to breast cancer? How was I living my life? Were there warning signs? Drawing from minutely recorded details in my journals, I explore my breast cancer experience in a larger context. I show that, in ways fairly typical of our society, I inadvertently participated in the disease process by way of compulsive attention to others and inadequate consideration of myself. My journal exposes a sordid picture of alarming dreams, warped inter-personal patterns, distorted self-evaluations and chronic psychological and somatic disturbancesin my life, all signaling danger for this late 20th century woman. What better metaphor than breast cancer to represent habitual self-defeating patterns of mothering, running madly out of control. What does it take to fully come to terms with breast cancer? What does it take to illuminate the disease of the soul? In a final attempt to make sense of breast cancer, I follow the metaphor to its source-to the nature of mothering and being mothered. Does the compulsion to "mother" the world and neglect oneself arise from excess or deficiency? What are the implications of selfessness? How does it arise? Part III reconstructs my childhood steeped in my parents' Jungian milieu. It offers a rare and intimate look into the influences of intellectual and psychological immersion on early childhood development. It exposes the precariousness of generations of women in my family who have been, in one way or another, motherless. It remembers my relationship with my overpowering but vulnerable mother who was too much with me-yet still missing. It recognizes the life urge to differentiate from the biological mother and connect with the great, life-affirming Mother spirit. This candid story of consciousness building and psychological reconstruction will appeal to adult readers who are searching for meaning in illness and adversity. This is not a book on definitive causes of breast cancer. It is not a book on how to have breast cancer and be happy. It is not a guidebook solely for breast cancer patients, though they will likely be guided and inspired by what I tell. It is the tapestry that honors the complexity of life, the intra-psychic, interpersonal, and archetypal worlds rolled into one. The psychological perspective I offer invites the reader to own and embrace the shadow at work in the psyche. It provides a mirror for serious self-reflection, written in accessible language.

---

About the Author Lynette Walker is a Jungian oriented psychotherapist, writer, lecturer, homemaker, mother and grandmother. She has been a self-reflective journal keeper all her life, one who searches and questions the meaning of experience. She has to her credit a M.A. thesis on Self Analysis, and a series of lectures presented in California, Washington, and British Columbia on Jung's Psychological Types, Defensive Mothering, and Creative Responses to Breast Cancer. A past breast cancer patient, Ms. Walker contributed to the First Canadian Forum on Breast Cancer in 1993 in Montreal. Also in 1993, her germinal essay, "Breast Cancer and the Creative Process" was aired on the CBC radio documentary series IDEAS. In 2002, Ms. Walker presented an expanded version of her original work at the World Conference on Breast Cancer in Victoria, B.C.

---

Sample Excerpt

from Part Three:

With all this in mind, I abandoned the interpretive commentary I'd been writing for months and went back to my original experience as my source and my only piece of solid ground. I returned to persistent thoughts and questions concerning my failure to mother myself adequately.

Mostly I asked "Why?" Why was I so inclined , even compelled, to indulge or rescue others from discomfort? Why was I willing to suffer and do without for their sake? Why did I vanish from the picture and abandon my thoughts and intentions when social contracts were being made? Why did I ignore or displace my pain, my feelings, and my own desires? Why was that prompting for my self-sacrifice stronger than the alarming signals in my body?

Further, and perhaps more importantly, why-even when I knew all this and tried to correct it-was it so impervious to lasting change? Why, within a few weeks or days, did my resolve repeatedly break down? I groped for an explanation. Was this a socio-cultural problem? A spiritual crisis? A psychological problem? Was it a women's issue? A parenting issue? My private neurosis? Was it the result of my difficulty at birth, as my mother has often suggested? It had to be very deeply seated to persist so compelling against all desire and intelligence. But what could it be?

It dawned on me only gradually and belatedly, as I began to dig more deeply, that I was still very much tangled up with my mother-actually and symbollically-and that my beliefs about our relationship had been grossly confused and misrepresented. As I began to focus on my true and varied experiences with my mother, I came to see that the nature of our relationship, above all others, has been at the very heart of my under-relatedness to myself. At a subterranean level, something had been to fundamentally disturbed.

No wonder I spent months writing in circles, producing clever, third-person generalizations. It was safe. I could speak of a hypothetical mother and child when, as I have come to find out, I really had something to say about my mother and myself as embodied human beings. With this dawning, I sighed deeply and turned my face-not to the wall-but toward the "true subject," whatever that might turn out to be. I lowered myself down into an ominous depth, more ominous than the one from which I had returned in writing my retrospective.

I decided that if I was to get to the heart of my experience with breast cancer, my disease with the breast, somehow I must try to navigate my way through a middle course to get in touch with my mother. I realized I must touch my mother critically and honestly because, if I failed to look critically at her I would never see myself fully and objectively. Hadn't that been one of my big problems all along, not being able to see myself?

At the same time, I knew I must find a way to embrace my mother, because my capacity to love and esteem myself depended upon it. So I set out in search of myself through my mother: the mother who had been there abundantly for me, as well as the mother whom I discovered had gone missing.

---

Catalogue Information

---