Heroes Not Zombies

I don’t really like the term “mind body medicine” because it assumes a duality which is a delusion. That delusion isn’t just a problem which prevents real understanding of a patient’s suffering, it has wider and deeper effects…..as John Dewey (1859 – 1952) describes –

“The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of ‘intellectuals’ from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice — all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole.”

I really like that phrase “habit of division” – a nicely different way of referring to reductionism and one which recalls Ian McGilchrist’s brilliant analysis of how we use our two cerebral hemispheres. Like all dualities, each part offers something unique, but either part, on its own, is just missing something important…….