The separation between self and other, self and world is a false one, maintained only by has been termed ‘the immune self’ – that self which seeks to maintain an identity immune from ‘contamination’ by any sense of otherness. In reality however, our experience of self is never separable from an experience of otherness in the world – whether in the form of events, times, places, situations or other people. Thus even the experience of wonderful sunset or of changes in climate – natural, social or cultural – will, if we are open to them and do not reduce them to mere perceptual objects, alter and transform sense of self, even if only temporarily. It is only the immune self that experiences itself otherness as something innately separate from and ‘foreign’ to its own, unchanging fixed identity – and as a threat to that identity which fills its with a sense of un-ease or ‘dis-ease’.  What we call ‘health is not an unchanging state – one of feeling at ease with ourselves through a familiar sense of self. Instead health is essentially an on-going life process – a process of becoming more whole which involves, in its very essence ‘becoming other’. This means learning to experience and embody – through our experience of others and otherness - new and different aspects of self, the many ‘other selves’ that make up our self as a whole – our ‘soul’. That is why the true result of the healing process is not is not a return to or ‘recovery’ of a previous and familiar sense of self but the birth a new bodily sense of self – one which adds to and enriches our whole self rather than diminishes our identity or limits our self-experience. This is also why ‘the illness process’ itself can play a central role in ‘the health process’. It does so by giving somatic expression to new and hitherto unacknowledged aspects of self which the ‘immune self  ‘rejects’ like foreign tissue and may end up transforming into symptoms of illness through its immune responses.  The illnesses themselves are seen as caused by ‘foreign bodies’  such as bacteria of the sort that biomedical immunologists themselves literally describe as ’non-self’ – even though our bodies contain ten times more such ‘non-self’ cells than those which medicine metaphorically describes as ‘self-cells’.  

Biomedicine is based on an identification of self with a fixed immunological identity. Existential Medicine on the other hand, recognises that whilst all  ‘dis-ease’ is indeed accompanied by underlying bodily sense of  ’not feeling ourselves’, a true phenomenology of the health, illness and healing processes depends on how this sense of ‘not feeling ourselves’ is subjectively interpreted and responded to - in particular whether it is allowed to lead the individual to ’feeling another self’. The key question is whether the new bodily sense of self associated with a sense of dis-ease is accepted and incorporated into the individual’s identity and existence or instead rejected by the ‘immune self’  – blamed either on other people or on foreign, ‘non-self’  bodies such as ‘pathogenic’ microorganisms or cancer cells.

The Health Process Summarised. How this altered sense of self – of bodily identity – is intepreted and responded to is the key to

  1. feeling ourselves in a familiar and ‘normal’ way
  2. not feeling ourselves – feeling in some way different or other than ourselves
  3. being open to and affirming this feeling of difference or otherness.
  4. actively identifying with the feeling of difference as we sense it in an immediate, wordless and bodily way.
  5. feeling another self – experiencing the difference in our bodily sense of self as a distinct self in its own right, a new inner bearing towards the world.
  6. embodying that bearing in new ways of being in the world and relating to others.

The Illness Process Summarised

  1. feeling ourselves in a familiar and ‘normal’ way.
  2. not feeling ourselves – and experiencing this as a felt sense of dis-ease.
  3. not being open to or affirming the sense of dis-ease but experiencing it only as a something ‘other than self’ or ‘not me’.
  4. identifying the dis-ease with some ‘thing’ that is ‘wrong’ with us – such as a symptom or disease.
  5. seeking a ‘cause’ for our symptoms in some ‘foreign body’ such as a virus.
  6. seeking a ‘cure’ for our symptoms by some means of medically counteracting, annihilating or cutting out that foreign body.

The Healing Process Summarised

  1. feeling ourselves in a familiar and ‘normal’ way.
  2. not feeling ourselves and experiencing this as a felt sense of dis-ease.
  3. identifying the dis-ease with symptoms that are taken as a sign of something being ‘wrong’ with us – an illness or ‘disease’ of some sort.
  4. affirming and ‘feeling into’ our symptoms to the point where we begin to sense them as expressions of an different state of being or ‘self-state’ – a different self.
  5. not identifying with our symptoms but with the different sense of self we are feeling through them.
  6. embodying that different sense of self in our way of being in the world – thus removing the need to ‘somatise’ our felt dis-ease through disease symptoms.

If the health process is blocked then the illness process gets underway in order to stimulate the healing process. Yet if the illness process not only progresses to but also  becomes stuck at the stage of somatisation of the individual’s felt disease, thus leading to acute or chronic symptoms, then biomedical intervention may be the only way of alleviating those symptoms – albeit in a way that will not prevent the pregnancy, gestation and birth pangs of another self taking the form of other symptoms and illnesses that may be worse that those ‘cured’.