Back to that epigraph: “So the female void” gets cured “by a remembering or a putting back together of the mother-daughter body.”
Yes. It’s the body. Healing involves the body as much as—if not more than—the mind. And it’s important to remember Eugene Gendlin’s statement: “The body is the unconscious.” Maybe memory is held in the body. When we access the unconscious and sort through its contents, we bring them to mind, where, perhaps, they were not stored.
I look in the mirror these days and wonder how this body that I see reflected came to be. How can it be mine? When I think about myself and what I look like, the image that comes to mind is not short and fat with enormous breasts. And that might be why I think I can wear (and look good in) a fabulous outfit worn by a tall, willowy woman. Can you imagine? I can, but not very accurately, it seems.
Disconnecting from my body certainly began in childhood and never even came close to getting arrested until about three years ago. Or did I start putting on the brakes before that? Maybe decades before, when I started scanning my body, over and over, for signs of trouble and then drawing the wrong conclusions: blaming everything on the food I ate so I wouldn’t have to become conscious of the real culprits: not only the black mold in the house, but the blackness that grew from marriage to a man whose unconscious instinct to make himself feel secure left no room for the feelings of anyone else.