Abstract
The last chapter contains a summing up of the theoretical contribution of the book, followed by drawing out some implications about what this point of view means for the organization of health care and the education and training of health care professionals. Some work-place strategies for treating persons with the “psychosomatic solution” are presented in order to help both students and professionals properly prepare these patients for a psychosomatic form of treatment.
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Notes
- 1.
This does not mean that every patient needs this form of dialogue. Some patients are perfectly content with the prescription block or the massage. Indeed, they would feel violated if the health care professional started to question them about their experiences of living with ill health. This type of communication should be simply something that one has at ones disposal, in those cases where it is deemed relevant.
- 2.
This is not really doing phenomenology as the goal is not to ascertain knowledge about phenomena, but rather to gain a deeper understanding of a particular person’s situation. But when one knows a bit about phenomenology, one can understand the concept of bracketing.
- 3.
It has been shown that patients are extremely sensitive to giving the “right” answers, and if the professional keeps asking about the objective body it will be the objective body the patient talks about.
- 4.
Frank writes: “The postmodern experience of illness begins when ill people recognize that more is involved in their experiences than the medical story can tell. The loss of a life’s map and destination are not medical symptoms, at least until some psychiatric threshold is reached. The scope of modernist medicine—defined in practices ranging from medical school curricula to billing categories—does not include helping patients learn to think differently about their post-illness worlds and construct new relationships to those worlds […] The woman reported by Bourdieu seems to perceive that medicine has taken away her voice: medicine assails her with words she does not want to know and leaves her not knowing what. But this woman does not perceive a need for what would now be called her own voice, a personal voice telling what illness has imposed on her and seeking to define for herself a new place in the world. What is distinct in postmodern times is people feeling a need for a voice they can recognize as their own.” (pp. 6–7) italics in original.
Reference
Frank, A. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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Bullington, J. (2013). Conclusions. In: The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9_7
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