Epigraph Releases Becoming Fire: A Freudian Analyst’s Spiritual Journey by Sally K. Severino, MD

Rhinebeck, NY, June 28, 2009 --(PR.com)-- “The current economic climate is forcing people to re-evaluate their deepest needs. In some ways, what we are seeing is a failure of the American Dream,” says Dr. Sally Severino, author of Becoming Fire: A Freudian Psychoanalyst’s Spiritual Journey, just released by Epigraph Books (143 pages, 2009). “We’re discovering that underneath our material abundance is often a pervasive spiritual poverty. And conventional science doesn’t help: in the final analysis, we are deeply hungry for something beyond the answers science offers. But it can take a time of breaking down to open us up and turn things around.”

Dr. Severino’s story is a persuasive case in point. The influential Freudian psychoanalyst possessed all the indicators of success—a big house, expensive car, designer clothes—but when she sustained three major losses in one year, she became aware of her own spiritual emptiness. “My mother died, my marriage fell apart, and my sons left home, all in the space of a few months. I was left sitting in a kind of void. Just as many people are discovering now, I realized that wealth and status didn’t help. They didn’t bring me any kind of comfort or spiritual satisfaction. Not only that, I was an angry, unhappy person: my fierce motivation toward success came at a price. But everything began to shift when I read Open Mind, Open Heart, by Fr. Thomas Keating. In it, he describes a contemplative prayer practice that synthesizes psychiatry and spirituality. Embracing this practice eventually led me to a contemplative retreat in the mountains of Snowmass, Colorado, where I actually got to meet Father Keating. My experience there helped me to heal. After a lifetime of striving and will-based achievement, I learned to let go and to trust. It was the genesis for my life-work, bridging psychiatry and spirituality.”

Becoming Fire, Dr. Severino’s recently-released memoir, bridges the very different worlds of science and faith, taking its place in the pantheon of books like Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight. “As science transforms our understanding of the deep interrelatedness of all things, and as spirituality broadens and becomes more inclusive, we need personal stories that affirm the integration of science and spirit,” says Dr. Severino. Becoming Fire, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling Eat, Pray, Love, is a gripping personal story told with insight and humor. But Dr. Severino’s dramatic personal odyssey also furthers the synthesis of psychology and spirituality, offering answers on how to live in the most joyous way possible—in the place where our finite minds meet our infinite souls.

This story of an atheist who had everything, but who abandoned wealth and power to live simply as a Christian contemplative, rich in her sense of oneness with God, is an unusual one. From a childhood of hardscrabble poverty in Depression-era Kansas to becoming the first woman President of the American College of Psychoanalysts, Dr. Severino embodied the ideal of hard work leading to success, especially difficult for a woman in what was then a male-dominated profession. The story of her failures and losses, and her ultimate triumphant redemption through the power of divine love, makes for inspiring reading.

Becoming Fire: A Freudian Psychoanalyst’s Spiritual Journey
by Sally Severino
ISBN-10: 0982453000
ISBN-13: 978-0982453001
April 2009
160 pages, hardcover
$24.95
Published by Epigraph, an alternative publishing imprint of Monkfish Book Publishing Company, an independent press in Rhinebeck, New York publishing books of spiritual and literary merit. www.epigraphPS.com www.monkfishpublishing.com

For more information about Dr. Sally Severino, visit www.neuropsirit.net

For additional information or to arrange an interview with Sally Severino, please contact: Linda Woznicki, (845) 417-8811, linda@monkfishpublishing.com.

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