Abstract
An introduction to the blind-spot in medicine: human existence is systematically left out of healthcare. Two stories are told that introduce this blind-spot. The first is that of Kurt Goldstein, the World War I German neuropsychiatrist who describes a crisis in modern medicine. The second is that of Médard Boss, a World War II Swiss neuropsychiatrist who finds that medicine has trained him poorly to treat problems of meaning and existence. Time is spent differentiating existential health psychology from health psychology and complementary or alternative medical models.
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Notes
- 1.
Particularly those that are existential in nature or that pertain specifically to being that humans are.
- 2.
His influence is even more impressive when it is understood that Goldstein, as a Jewish physician, was denied professorships at major German universities and even arrested while seeing patients. He spent a year in jail before it was arranged for him to emigrate to the United States, which he admits never quite felt like home.
- 3.
Unfortunately, the latter position has become a typical one among psychologists and philosophers alike. An example of the growing popularity of the-brain-that-feels can be seen in the publication of Neuroexistentialism (Caruso and Flanagan 2018), where a broad mixture of authors discuss how the very existential I describe is being left out of medicine may be found in the nervous system.
- 4.
Embodiment is the existential dimension that includes the body. You and I do not have bodies; we are embodied. Our interactions with one another and with the world can only come by way of our bodies. The body does not bump into physical things and initiate a series of neurochemical impulses that terminate at our “minds.” Our bodies are our capacity for interaction.
- 5.
The original German title preserves Boss’s recognition that medicine and psychology shared the same existential foundation. There is not an existential psychology (focusing, e.g., on the “psyche”) that is distinct from the existential foundation of medicine (focusing, e.g., on the body). When it was translated into English.
References
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Whitehead, P.M. (2019). Introduction: The Blind-spot in Medicine. In: Existential Health Psychology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_1
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