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There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the "reality" of a disease. That reality has to be explained. For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter. (en) |
