The Society for Existential Medicine offers a forum for contributions and an expanding range of resources for all those devoted to challenging the medical model of health and illness from an existential, phenomenological, hermeneutic, biographical, psychoanalytic, holistic, relational, social and spiritual perspective.

Its aim is also to challenge the almost wholly unquestioned institutional separation between professional training and practice in ‘psychotherapy’ on the one hand (including 'existential' psychotherapy) and training in 'somatic medicine' on the other.

It will do so through sharing and contributing to the current evolution of new forms of existential-analytic, awareness-based, phenomenological and meaning-oriented approaches to illness that are relevant to healthcare in all its dimensions, both on an individual, social and global level.

Contributions are welcome in the form of comments, articles, further links, additions to our bibliography of literature - and case studies in the practice of counselling and therapy for medical patients, including the dying.

To join and contribute to the work of the Society, use the Contact Form or write to Peter Wilberg [pwilberg76@gmail.com] including links to any sites or articles you may wish to share.

Peter Wilberg

FROM MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 The essential realm in which biology moves can never be grounded in biology as a science.

We cannot say that the organ has capacities, but must say that the capacity has organs….capability, articulating itself into capacities creating organs characterizes the organism as such.

The significance, indeed the necessity of the genetic approach is clear to everyone. It seems self-evident. But it suffers from a deficit which is all too easily and therefore all too often overlooked. 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 ...

Those who wish to stick rigidly to genetic explanation, without first of all clarifying the essence of that which they wish to explain, can be compared to people who wish to reach a goal, without first of all bringing this goal in view. All explanation reaches only so far as the explication of that which is to be explained [ie the nature and meaning of an illness].

You cannot heal a single human being, (not) even with psychotherapy, if you do not first restore his relationship to Being.

A disposition can confine man in his corporeality as in a prison. Yet it can also carry him through corporeality as one of the paths leading out of it.

When I direct someone towards a windowsill with a gesture of my right hand, my bodily existence as a human being does not end at the tip of my index finger. While perceiving the windowsill….I extend myself bodily far beyond this fingertip to that windowsill. In fact, bodily I reach out even further than this to touch all the phenomena, present or merely visualised, represented ones.

We know by now a great deal – almost more than we can encompass – about what we call the body, without having seriously thought about what bodying is. It is something more and different from merely ‘carrying a body around with one’.

The bodying of life is nothing separate by itself, encapsulated in the ‘physical mass’ in which the body can appear to us …

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