The Alchemy of Illness

Reflecting on her own experience with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, and integrating insights from psychology, religion, and other disciplines, a counselor sheds new light on the meaning of illness, recovery, and healing. 15,000 first printing.

Drawing on her own experience with CFIDS (chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome), the author of this collection of eight essays explores the mystery of human pain. "Illness is a familiar yet foreign landscape," she writes. "It remains a wilderness . . . despite its continuing presence in our lives." Duff spent "the better part of two years" in bed; during her sickness she read widely and voluminously, pursuing "the meaning and purposes of illness." Bringing together insights from psychology, religion and anthropology, and explicating the words of shamans and philosophers from many cultures, Duff tracks the universality of illness and the curious contradictions--the sense of freedom, for example--that emerge in its midst. Her own healing, achieved through "tedious, tenuous and life-giving labor," is a model of hope. Duff is a counselor in northern New Mexico.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the sickbed of a woman of ``mystical temperament'': very personal, sometimes quirky, essays on illness, blending 20th-century psychology with holistic spirituality. Duff, a counselor in private practice in New Mexico, became ill in 1988 with chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), an illness for which there is as yet no cure: The only remedy is a few years of rest. Because she has an illness that is poorly understood by medical science, Duff questions the Western approach to medicine and health and looks outside it for answers to her questions. Illness, she asserts, defies the rules of ordinary reality and shares in ``the hidden logic of dreams, fairy tales, and the spirit realms mystics and shamans describe.'' This is a world where Duff seems to be exceptionally comfortable. She finds deep significance in her own visions and dreams, and she draws analogies between illness and initiation rites, noting that each involves a loss and that each may result in a new wisdom, a new power. Some of her conclusions are extraordinary: A meeting with a shaman leads her to the idea that her own illness is somehow connected to her ancestors' unfair acquisition of Indian land in Minnesota generations ago. Less startling is the link Duff makes between the onset of her illness and her recollection of having been sexually abused as an infant and her subsequent work with this memory in therapy. Readers accustomed to more straightforward accounts may find Duff's musings difficult to accept; still, her insights into common attitudes toward illness, and into the changes wrought in an individual by illness, are often enlightening. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress-assigned subject headings ("Sick-psychology" and "Chronic fatigue syndrome-psychological aspects") suggest the gist of this book, which was written by "a white woman of sufficient means and mystical temperament nearing forty in twentieth century America" and unfortunately stricken with chronic Epstein-Barr virus, the yuppie flu. However, the LC listings fail to bring out the parapsychological aspects--the "alchemy" of the title--that are a major part of the story. Duff writes, "For the only way I can evoke and describe this ultimately ineffable dark heart of the universe, that black hole that opens up in illness, and begin to address the question of healing that rises from its center, is through storytelling: the telling of my dreams, the stories of goddesses, my experience and those of other sick people." Duff proceeds to recount her dreams. A shaman tells her that she was "a sacrifice dying so that others may live... we would not call you sick, but wounded." This reader just doesn't get it. For "Sick-psychology," Arthur Frank's At the Will of the Body ( LJ 3/15/91) and Norman Cousins's Anatomy of an Illness (LJ 9/1/79) are better titles.
- James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.