The All Souls' Waiting Room

All Souls' Waiting Room : A Black Comedy about Karma and Killing Yourself is a 2002 semi-fictional autobiographical novel by Paki S. Wright.

Plot

Johnnine Hapgood had been born in the 1940s in New York City to a family heavily influenced by Reichian psychoanalysts.

At eighteen she attempts suicide and has a near-death experience which finds her in the All Souls' Waiting Room—a copy of the city of Vienna where psychoanalysis had been born. It includes replicas of Sigmund Freud's counseling room, the Bibliothek (Library at the Hofburg), the Hotel Sacher and so on.

During the experience she is shown a film about her life and learns about spiritual development, reincarnation, and the female principle represented through a person named Xofia. She meets Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Carl Jung, before being returned to her apartment.

The work mixes fictional characters and events such as Xofia and The (Akashic) Recorder, as well as nonfictional ones like Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, mingling fact with pseudoscience when it introduces Reich's sightings of UFOs during his tinkering his Cloudbuster.

See also

• Wilhelm Reich

Further reading

• Wright, Paki S. The All Souls' Waiting Room. 1st Book Library, 2002. ISBN   0-7596-5617-7