| Cooking is an everyday, ordinary practice. It is a simple, yet complex ritual that provides a perfect metaphor for valuing and understanding body wisdom. Hidden within the commonplace experience of cooking is an extraordinary rite that ensouls life. The prayer "Give us this day our daily bread" expresses simply and profoundly the deep relationships between food, the body, and the sacred. While the divisions between food and, feelings, mind and body are unclear, we may, through the art of cooking, understand our biological hunger as the body's need to replenish itself and in addition, the soul's desire to give meaning to life. The cooking process, as focused upon in this study, places food and eating in the larger contexts of spiritual and psychological development.; The symbolic matrix of the cook, all the different parts that combine to make the cook who and what she or he is, serve the individuation process in a fundamental way. Everyone has to eat. Growth is contingent upon the taking in of nourishment. We cannot live apart from our relationship to the cook.; Depth psychologists are involved with psychic transformation, helping patients learn how to eat the mental foods that support their psychological development. When the psychologist has done his or her job well enough, the patient becomes the eater in life and develops into the cook for his or her own psychic transformation. Depth psychology encourages those processes, which support the psychological aspects of life that ask that something be eaten or assimilated. Cooking, from a depth psychological perspective, is about saying yes to the food in one's life. It is about opening to the process of cooking, eating, and living one's life well. The cooking process attends to wholeness and growth. To become the cook of one's life is to become more deeply engaged with the interiority of psychic material, which feeds body and soul. To be familiar with nature's ingredients and comfortable in the kitchen, and to know how to use one's mind, senses and body in holistic ways, is to build an awareness of the spiritual connection between food, cooking, and other psychological planes.; The contemporary films, "Babette's Feast" and "Like Water for Chocolate", provide a deepening of contextuality for depth psychology and the psychological examination of cooking, food and eating. These films serve as research material for expanded understanding, offering images of the ingredients that make the invisible visible.; This theoretical dissertation utilizes a hermeneutic methodology and a mythopoetic perspective, it examines cooking images from a personal level of individuation within a younger cook in the film, "Like Water for Chocolate." It also explores the larger context of community through the examination of cooking images of an older cook in the film, "Babette's Feast."; Cooking then, is learning, it is life. Eating is more than just feeding the body; to eat is to feed the soul's longing for life: the soul's timeless desire to learn the lessons of earthly existence---love and hate, pleasure and pain, fear and faith, illusion and truth. Therefore, our attitudes towards cooking, food, and eating reflect our attitude to life itself. |
