| Popis: |
In this text, clinical immunologist and psychotherapist Brian Broom draws attention to the fact that as patients we are all persons, and more than that. We are persons-in-relationship. Any therapy that reduces us to a more limited view of persons, such as objects to be technologically manipulated, is going to have serious limitations, if not in many cases be profoundly inadequate. Broom provides an account of the emergence in New Zealand of a non-dualistic, whole person-centred form of clinical practice, particularly in relation to the treament of physical disease of all kinds. He translates into clinical reality the dispositionalist call for a more holistic understanding of the causes of health and illness, as presented in Part I. The original move towards whole person-centredness in New Zealand was stimulated by the phenomenological recognition of physical diseases emerging in close association with the person’s significant life events and meanings. Most challenging, and yet most stimulating, was the appearance of symbolic disorders, which drove the theoretical struggle towards a unitive view of persons. The resulting non-dual assumptions concerning the personhood of patients and their illnesses mean that clinicians have a multidimensional, multifactorial and multicausal attitude to their work with people. It turns out that from a clinician’s perspective the work is impossible unless there is, firstly, a clear habitual non-dual framework and, secondly, the clinician acquires listening skills based in deeply relational principles. This combination is profoundly meaningful and helpful to many patients and appears to drive the healing processes. |
