The owl was a baker's daughter

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“If she voices what she feels, she becomes a threat to everyone, so that she begins to experience herself as a Cassandra. She learns to keep her mouth shut and articulates her thoughts through her pen in secret. The real personality is in the writing. This may lead to salvation or destruction. Her natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left. If she fasts, she quickly experiences her hypersensitivity to each of her five senses, and her hyperacuity to her own unconscious. Once she experiences the intensity of fasting and the power in herself which that releases, she may find it "rich to die/ To cease upon a midnight with no pain." For her, this is no longer a negation of life, but an active desire for the perfection of death.”

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“Sufficient to say here that the fat body may be both a womb and a tomb. If she sees it as a tomb, the woman may be too ready to give up her search for her own life force which is buried alive within her. If she has the courage to look in the mirror and actually see her own dark side without identifying with it she may be able to see her fatness symbolically, and thus find the objectivity to suffer the pain of awareness. The fat has to be “put in the fire” in order to produce growth. She must face her own shadow in order to find the treasure; consciously relating to her body can give her the opportunity to relate to her own unconscious feminine feeling. Instead of escaping into eating or animus activity, the obese woman must take up her own cross and carry it. This for her is accepting the opposites and enduring the pain until the resurrected body can be born.”

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“She must try to understand how her relationship to her body is mirroring the attitudes of significant people in her experience and, even more crucial, her attitude towards her own life.”

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“Obesity is one of the chief symptoms of neurosis in the Western world. The millions of dollars spent on research, diets, and exercise spas attest to the futility of our efforts to cope with it. Thinness has become a mania tending to focus the neurosis on food, but the roots of the problem remain diseased. Many thousands of anorexic girls, starving and running themselves to collapse, are denying the traditional female role, preferring to regress into childhood. Many thousands of their fat sisters are in the equally agonizing throes of a slow process of destruction. Both are in a blood pact with Death.”