EXISTENTIAL MEDICINE

Welcome to the Existential Medicine Forum!

…a message from Peter Wilberg to all current subscribers

Firstly, I am pleased to announce that the Existential Medicine site, whilst only relatively recently established, has received a lot of interest and thousands of ‘hits’ – despite its relatively narrow small but important target readership. What follows is a report on some updates on the site and its aims.

For all those who have read the essay entitled Introduction to Existential Medicine (also published in the Journal for Existential Analysis under the title ‘From Existential Psychotherapy to Existential Medicine’) may I remind them that an important second essay following it is also on this site. This has now been made more clear and visible by being placed under the new uppermost heading of my writings entitled Latest Articles.

As suggested by its title – which refers to The Foundations of Existential Medicine – the aim of this second essay is to rethink what Medard Boss called The Existential Foundations of Medicine. In doing so, it re-inteprets the central Heideggerian notion of Dasein as a foundational awareness or Gewahrsein – thus offering a new understanding of ‘Existential’ or Daseinsanalytic Medicine as Gewahrseinsanalytic or ‘Awareness-Based’ Medicine. Hence also the essay’s subtitle: from Daseinsanalysis to Gewahrseinsanalysis.

Also included in the new Latest Articles section of the site is a short essay entitled Biomedicine as Money-Driven Medicine. This deals with the inherently sickness-generating nature of capitalist economics, together with the way in which illness has become ‘big business’ – and patients a source of profit for the ‘medical-industrial complex’. The essay was written out of an acute awareness of how not only ‘complementary medicine’ (itself a secondary health ‘industry’) but also proponents and practitioners of psychosomatic, psychoanalytic and even existential approaches to illness tend to either ignore or downplay its social, political and economic dimensions.

Along with the essays referred to above, the site’s book list now includes three additional recommended works. These are:

Why People Get Ill? Authored by Darian Leader and David Cornfield, this book offers perhaps the most readable and well-written psychoanalytic approach to illness to be published for decades – and one which even makes significant Lacanian insights into illness accessible to the lay reader.

Over-Diagnosed – making people sick in the pursuit of health by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch. This is a new and most timely post-Illich challenge to excessive biomedical screening and diagnostic testing and the resulting over-diagnosis and over-treatment of entirely symptom-free patients – often at grave expense to their quality of life.

Speaking of the pioneering work of Ivan Illich – Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health – I am pleased to say that the whole of the 2nd chapter of this work is now accessible on-line.

Also added to the books listed on the site ( and despite what would now be seen as its sexist title) is a seemingly out-of-print but nevertheless evermore relevant ‘classic’ – The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness by Michael Balint.

With regards to the page of the site entitled ‘Life Doctoring – therapy for serious or chronic illness’ this has now been transformed into an independent site under two different domain names ( http://www.lifemedicine.org.uk and http://www.lifedoctoring.org.uk ) The new site is intended principally for clients/patients unfamiliar with the language of existential philosophy.

There is much I would like and intend to add both to this site and its sister site – including case studies and an introduction to some original methods that play a central role on my own practice as a therapist. These involve inviting the patient to not just talk about but also to simply and silently show their felt dis-ease in their facial expression and eyes. This offers an opportunity for the therapist to employ some sophisticated arts of ‘face-reading’ which I teach. Through these a therapist can learn to feel in their own bodies what they see in the face and eyes of their client – and in this way attain a direct bodily and feeling sense of the patient’s inwardly felt ‘dis-ease’. This in turn allows the therapist to their own face and eyes to both mirror and transform that dis-ease through a fully embodied form of inter-subjective resonance. I call this form of therapy (one which requires neither talk nor touch, but is based purely on close-up, face-to-face eye-contact) ‘transformative resonation’. Some brief, but not case-specific descriptions of it can be found in my book on Heidegger, Phenomenology and ‘Scientific Method’ – as well as in a recently published work entitled From Psychosomatics to Soma-Semiotics.

This brings me to a another purpose of this post to the Forum – namely to emphasise my availability to offer training in ‘existential medicine’ or ‘life doctoring’ – and specifically in the unique practice of silent ‘transformative resonation’ referred to above. In this context I should add that all the forms of training I offer are conducted on a highly-individualised basis, requiring one-to-one training and/or supervision sessions of up to four hours in length (either on a regular bi-weekly or monthly basis, or, for those visiting me from overseas – for periods of one or more weeks).

Finally, I would like to encourage all current U.K. and international subscribers to contribute themselves to this Forum (not least if they have either case studies of their own to share) as well as inviting them to write to me directly if they wish with any questions they may have. I also invite subscribers resident in the U.K. to participate, here in Whitstable in Kent, in an on-going education, study and discussion group on Existential Medicine and Life Doctoring.

It is my hope that through further contact with subscribers, authors, therapists, doctors and analysts who share the fundamental goal of this site, i.e. questioning the false division between psychotherapy and somatic medicine – a Society for Existential Medicine (SEM) may eventually be established through which this separation is challenged and overcome – both philosophically and in therapeutic and medical practice. The establishment of a small steering committee for the creation of this Society would be a valuable first step.

So I also invite any subscribers interested not only in training possibilities but also in this aim to contact me, sharing also relevant information on themselves and on the nature and background of their own interest in Existential Medicine.

Given the increasing depersonalisation and technologisation of biological medicine, the importance of a fundamental new approach to illness – one which does not isolate it from the entire existential context of the individual’s entire life world – cannot be over-emphasised.

Any readers of this Forum wishing to share their own experience of illness and of different forms of conventional biomedical diagnosis and treatment are therefore particularly welcome to write to me.

Contact: peter_wilberg@tiscali.co.uk