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Dr. Jaffa Frank transmutes her decades of suffering from endometriosis by engaging the mythic imagination to craft a narrative of hope and empowerment.
Firmly grounded in the physical realities of the disease, she evokes its archetypal wisdom as a visitation of the Gorgon Medusa revealing healing and wisdom, even when medical cure is unavailable. Dr. Frank mythopoetically weaves together threads of endometriosis, Medusa, and Athene on the loom of her own lived experience of the disease and reclaims humility, joy, and the life-affirming reciprocity of death and regeneration as gifts of the Gorgon. By personifying endometriosis as Medusan, pathology is rendered sacred. By contemplating what it means to be human in embodied relationship with the divine, she provides a mythos of healing while living with chronic illness. Eyes of the Gorgon will be of interest to anyone who has been touched by endometriosis and longs to expand the story of the disease beyond the limitations of socio-cultural taboos and the medical model. It will also be illuminating reading for analytical, somatic, and depth psychologists; students of myth and mythopoesis; and medical professionals. |
Praise for Eyes of the Gorgon
"Depth psychologist C. G. Jung famously wrote that 'the gods have become our diseases,' but how may we truly understand the mythic meaning of this insight? Grounded in her own life story and leading-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, Dr. Jaffa Frank brilliantly elucidates how we may understand the archetypal significance of endometriosis. By personifying this malady in relation to the Gorgon Medusa and the goddess Athena, she provides women who suffer the disease with an embodied, healing process that offers not cure, but the means by which they may experience healing, resilience, and an empowered relationship to the sacred that inheres in their bodies." |
"Not only do mythic stories matter but, more deeply, they can and do appear in matter as matter. Dr. Jaffa Frank’s personal, yet well-researched rendering of the Gorgon Medusa’s myth within her own challenging and life-threatening experience of suffering through the pains of endometriosis, reveals an entirely new form of describing and defining illness through the mythic imagination. Eyes of the Gorgon is a revelatory, original and elegantly rendered story of a heroic journey through the landscape of somato-mythic illness. It should be read by all students of myth as well as physicians to broaden the truth of mythic presences in our lives." |
"Vaclav Havel wrote: 'Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.' It is a rare thing today for someone to painstakingly re-search the mythological face of a her own illness. Dr. Jaffa Frank has given us an extraordinary journey as she plumbs the depths of the goddess, Gorgon Medusa, as hidden in her suffering with endometriosis, a disease affecting some 176 million women worldwide. Thank you Dr. Frank for gifting us with your soul-searching wisdom and hard won truths. Your journey will help many to make sense of their own life and sufferings."
~Alexander John Shaia, PhD, speaker, Jungian Sandplay Therapist, and author of “Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation” and “Returning From Camino.”
