“Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is Self. In your body he dwells.”

 “Through the long succession of millennia, man has not known himself physiologically; he does not know himself even today.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“I can understand the function of the living body only by enacting it myself, and only insofar as I am a body.”

Merlau Ponty

“The ‘I’ is first and foremost a bodily ‘I’.”

Sigmund Freud

“… science is, to a quite unimaginable degree, through and through dogmatic; dealing with un-thought-through conceptions and preconceptions. It is of the highest importance that there be thinking physicians, who are not of a mind to leave the field for the scientific technologists.”

“…To be in a position to explain an illness genetically, we need first of all to explain what the illness in itself is. It can be that a true understanding of the essence of an illness…prohibits all causal-genetic explanation…”

“All explanation reaches only so far as the explication of that which is to be explained.”

Martin Heidegger

“A psychological medicine … obviously comes into conflict with the technological development of medicine, which has already become an Über-technology. This development is itself closely connected with modern economic structures, with industry, with the income sources of physicians, with the gigantic need for patients – and others – to be deceived.”

“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”

“One sees now, that psychology in medicine brings forth an unexpected result. It does not only bring knowledge of the soul, but illuminates the body in such a way as to let it appear in a new light. The body is no longer what is seemed before, and what anatomy and physiology teach.”

“Illness can be experienced as this – that through a bodily occurrence a development in awareness is created.”

“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this  is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”

“The greatest goal would be to understand how in every case, in what way an illness is just a muted final thought, a still insufficiently [fufilled] creative act.”

Viktor von Weizsäcker

“… health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life. “Health” appears thus as a value; its value consists in the individual’s capacity to actualise his nature to the degree, that for him at least, is essential.”

Kurt Goldstein

“…the body’s symptoms are not necessarily pathological, that is, they are not just sicknesses which must be healed, repressed or cured. Symptoms are potentially meaningful and purposeful conditions… as well as a royal road into the development of the personality.” 

ArnoldMindell

 “Patients turn their problems into illnesses, and … the physician’s job is to turn them back into problems.”

Michael Balint

 “An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a ‘clinical’ prosthesis for the broken relationships. People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves.”

“People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.”

“Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioural abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations.”

“A number of authors have … tried to debunk the status of mental deviance as a ‘disease’. Paradoxically, they have rendered it more and not less difficult to raise the same kind of question about disease in general.”

Ivan Illich 

“If people become ill, it is quite fashionable to say that the immunity system has temporarily failed – yet the body itself knows that certain ‘dis-eases’ are healthy reactions. The body does not recognise diseases as diseases in usually understood terms. It regards all activity as experience, as a momentary condition of life, as a balancing situation.”

“…a person in poor health should be seen by the physician in relationship to the family and also in relationship to the environment. Old-time family doctors understood the patient’s sensitivity to family members and to the environment, of course, and they often felt a lively sympathy and understanding that the practitioners of modern medicine often seem to have forgotten.”

Seth, in The Way Toward Health by Jane Roberts

“The idea of one basis for Science and another for Life is from the very outset a lie.”

K. Marx