Health-in-Sickness and Sickness-in-Health

Over the last few decades, many of us working in research and applications of health care have come to realize that “health” is not a measurable value fixed by science, but rather is an experiential concept in flow. It is a discussion between scientific models of biological processes, personal experiences of well-being, cultural values of what is “normal” and who defines it, political debates about public health and corporate interests, and how all of these intersect with collective identities such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and age, to name a few.

Pierre Morin brings a fresh perspective into this conversation, challenging the mainstream views on health and illness.

His work builds on the foundation of Processwork. In the late 80s, physicist and psychologist Arnold Mindell introduced the dreambody concept, proposing that the subjective experiences of body symptoms are symmetric to patterns found in night dreams. In short, the “unconscious” (as termed by depth psychologists Freud and Jung) expresses itself creatively in our dreams while we sleep and in our body experiences during our waking lives. Simply, Mindell stated that symptoms should not be considered only harmful, but also as potential elixirs of health and even of well-being.

This view reflected a general timespirit of that epoch, manifest as an effort towards depathologizing experiences in mental health. R. D. Laing’s existential approach in psychiatry, Stan Grof’s understanding of extreme states as spiritual emergencies, and Mindell’s city shadow concept were all part of a movement away from a deficit oriented view of what is “normal.”

In Health-in-Sickness, Pierre Morin suggests that the classical approach to defining illness and health not only lacks the elixir perspective on disturbances, an approach that is suggested by alternative medicine, but in fact, also has an “opposite placebo” effect, in creating a sense of being victimized and at fault for having the symptom.

His book contains many practical examples and is useful to both health practitioners as well as patients. First and foremost, it begins a long overdue conversation about the very concepts of health and sickness, and what is considered to be “normal.” We are delighted to publish this book and anticipate that it will stimulate broad transdisciplinary discussions regarding individual and collective well-being.