Discussions

I appreciate this opportunity to discuss Dr. Eckardt's paper, and I want to thank her for sending it to me in time for careful study. I hope my comments will do justice to her thoughtful work on a subject I regard as profoundly important, not only to psychoanalysis, but to all students of our modern culture.

Addressing myself to the first part of the paper, I heartily endorse the clinical approach Dr. Eckardt advocates. Unquestionably, because of our preoccupation with pathology and our basic orientation in pathology and in disease, we approach the patient looking for illness, rather than health. There is growing evidence that this negative approach is gradually disappearing. Hitherto, we have been dedicated to Aesculapius, the God of Medicine, but now we are turning more toward Hygeia, the Goddess of Health. Once preoccupied with pathology you become judgmental. You begin to equate the unusual with the eccentric, and with the eccentric you go from the neurotic to the destructive. And who is to say what pathology is? I would remind you here that the history of surgery 125 years ago shows us that what was referred to as evil, ugly, and foul, and was rejected and repeatedly removed by forceps because it offended man's esthetic and his moral sense, is now referred to as laudable pus. We should remember this in our approach to our patients. How many of nature's early attempts to cure, nature's early attempts to overcome emotional difficulties, to promote awareness, greater consciousness and self-expression—how many of these today are rejected because we regard them as wrong, evil, immoral, and bad? How much pathology results from our disapproving, ignorant, impatient, and repeated interference with nature's early attempts at cure. None of our psychological devices, strategies, maneuvers, defenses was invented by man. Circumstances were such that he was driven to use them. Nature provided the individual with various means to assist him in the struggling process of self-re