Jan Goldstein – författare

In this immensely affecting and empowering guide, Jan Goldstein teaches readers how to take their most emotionally painful life events -- their spiritual wounds -- and transform them into a source of power and well-being.

Goldstein''s life-affirming program is inspired by his own heartbreak: the February morning when he was faced with the sudden news that his twelve-year marriage was ending, leaving Goldstein with primary custody of their three small children. Though paralyzed at first by feelings of loss and depression, Goldstein eventually discovered that the pain allowed him and his children a deeper appreciation for the simple moments of joy -- that his once "broken" family was succeeding not despite its wounds, but because of them.

In Sacred Wounds, Goldstein reveals the secret to finding strength in challenging and often traumatic events, outlining a life-changing nine-step process to help readers move through heartache and toward healing. In clear, compassionate language, he refutes the notion of pain as a destroyer, drawing on the compelling stories of many of the people he has counseled along the way: Rick and Sara, who are plagued by infertility; Yvette, an aspiring man who battles her secular desires; Steve, for whom a frightening diagnosis portends the end...and then the beginning of hope. Remarkably affecting and inspiring, Goldstein''s stories confirm that we are all well equipped to deal with the inevitable hurts and heartbreaks in life -- if only we release our preconceptions, acknowledge the strengthening power of our wounds, and follow the nine steps to a spiritual rebirth.

Indispensable for anyone suffering through spiritual and emotional difficulties, Sacred Wounds is the key to shifting our perceptions and finding new strength and success in the painful experiences we all endure.

A unique account of a peasant girl''s mental illness in nineteenth-century FranceHysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. Living near the spa at Aix-les-Bains, she became the charity patient of its medical director, Antoine Despine, who treated her with hydrotherapy and animal magnetism, as hypnosis was then called. Jan Goldstein translates, and provides a substantial introduction to, the previously unpublished manuscript recounting Nanette''s strange illness—a manuscript coauthored by Despine and Alexandre Bertrand, the Paris physician who memorably diagnosed Nanette as suffering from "hysteria complicated by ecstasy." While hysteria would become a fashionable disease among urban women by the end of the nineteenth century, the case of Nanette Leroux differs sharply from this pattern in its early date and rural setting.Filled with intimate details about Nanette''s behavior and extensive quotations of her utterances, the case is noteworthy for the sexual references that contemporaries did not recognize as such; for its focus on the difference between biological and social time; and for Nanette''s fascination with the commodities available in the region''s nascent marketplace. Goldstein''s introduction brilliantly situates the text in its multiple contexts, examines it from the standpoint of early nineteenth-century medicine, and uses the insights of Foucault and Freud to craft a twenty-first-century interpretation.A compelling, multilayered account of one young woman''s mental afflictions, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy is an extraordinary addition to the cultural and social history of psychiatry and medicine.