With A Woman's Voice: A Writer's Struggle for Emotional Freedom - Hardcover

Daniels, Lucy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568332505 ISBN 13: 9781568332505

Publisher: Madison Books, 2001

Synopsis

Having written a bestselling book at 22, survived a harrowing battle with anorexia nervosa, and pursued a successful career as a clinical psychologist, Lucy Daniels has led a remarkable life. In With a Woman's Voice: A Writer's Struggle for Emotional Freedom, her first book in 40 years, Daniels shares the experience of overcoming emotional hardships and gaining valuable insights from them, through psychoanalysis, that has enabled her to help others.

With a Woman's Voice is Daniels' memoir of the struggles she faces as a writer and a doctor of psychology, struggles that began at a very young age and continued long after the success of her two novels. As the child of a wealthy newspaper family, Daniels was emotionally deprived by her demanding parents and plagued by her own feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. Sent to a mental hospital for treatment of her anorexia, she spent years enduring brutal regimens of electroshock therapy, insulin injections, and force-feedings. It was during this time that she wrote Caleb, My Son.

Caleb, My Son became a national bestseller, earning accolades for its portrayal of racial and generational conflict in the South of the 50s. Her second book, High on a Hill, was a fictional account of the time she spent in the hospital. Her novels won her a Guggenheim fellowship and extensive praise.

After this early success, Daniels succumbed to writer's block that lasted several decades. She tells in her memoir of her decision to examine and resolve her problems, leading her to seek psychoanalytic treatment while pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology. After years of examining her difficulties and learning how they could be treated, she created a foundation that helps artists overcome emotional disorders and gain creative insight from both self-examination and psychotherapy.

With a Woman's Voice recalls these achievements, and the difficult years that led up to them, with insight, humor, and wisdom. Daniels provides a moving account of

About this title

About the Author:

Lucy Daniels is a writer and clinical psychologist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the founder of the Lucy Daniels Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering emotional and creative freedom through education, outreach, research, and psychoanalytic treatment; and the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood, a preschool program that uses psychoanalytic principles to promote the emotional development of young children and their parents.

From Library Journal:

In 1951, at age 17 and just over 50 pounds, Daniels was admitted to a mental hospital, where she remained for several years. While enduring electro-convulsive shock therapy, insulin injections, and force feedings, she wrote a best-selling novel, Caleb, My Son, addressing generational conflict and racial inequality in the South in the 1950s. A few years later, with a Guggenheim fellowship, she wrote High on a Hill, a fictionalized account of life in a mental hospital. With this memoir (clearly steeped in Freudian psychoanalytical theories and principles), Daniels provides accounts of her anorexia nervosa, writer's block, continuous psychotherapy sessions, and the road to finding her voice. Reliving the past in writing the memoir (her first book in 40 years) must have been both painful and releasing for Daniels, who has been a practicing clinical psychologist since 1977. Readers will experience her sense of loss and her struggle to clarify childhood experiences that became the focus of adulthood therapy sessions. The result is occasionally difficult and painful reading. Most suitable for public libraries and for autobiographical collections. Jeris F. Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Madison Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1568332505
• ISBN 13: 9781568332505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352