I have always believed that being a doctor means sharing in the experience of those who come to me seeking help to understand their physical and psychological condition.
And with each passing day, it becomes clearer to me that much of the illness people suffer from in our society involves the psyche, or is bound up with it in some way.
It follows that any approach to illness which ignores the patient and fails to see him as a whole person is increasingly harmful—and, unfortunately, increasingly common in our Western culture.
This means that in my profession, I cannot avoid questioning my own life as well.
My conviction grew out of a concrete experience. I once had to intervene in the case of a young man with Down syndrome who, as he entered late adolescence, began to feel the absence of a girlfriend—something he saw his peers enjoying.
It was a heavy suffering, one that seemed unbearable and that shook his family as well.
What could I offer him? Perhaps arranged experiences that might leave him without a mature answer? Or tell him that such a desire was not his to have?
On what grounds could I deny him all hope for the future, however difficult to imagine?
I confess it was a real problem, and it demanded that I place myself in a reality often overlooked.
So I tried to talk with him, drawing on my own experience, telling him about my own struggles, and gradually trying to set this problem within a larger horizon of growth.
The girlfriend was not to become a conquest or a possession. She was a relationship to be built with respect.
I felt he needed to understand that what seemed to him like a permanent impossibility—which I believe was his unconscious fear—was a situation others lived with. He had to learn to live with certain limits.
I tried to help him value other aspects of his life: his capacity for work, his reliability in seeing a task through to completion, and above all his ability to matter in the lives of those around him.
I can say that this dialogue—simple, yes, but also complete in its honesty—built a trust between us that helped us both.
Slowly that problem lost some of its sharp edges, though it was never fully resolved.
Perhaps simply being able to speak of it openly had given him a necessary release.
This is not a treatise on psychology, of course. It is only an observation that perhaps attention and genuine engagement offer a path worth taking—and one that yields results.
- A. D. (physician), 1995
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