You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book attempts to look at the psychological, psychosocial and behavioural aspects of cancer. Much of the discourse is given weight by encompassing a range of research and frequent references to the literature. It has many good, common-sense approaches and understandings, of which this gives a flavour (p. xvi):
The most important one [fact] …is given to us by the patient himself. He shares with us a dramatic moment, of extreme emotional intensity. To train oneself in ‘psycho-oncology’ is perhaps to explore one's own limits, and above all to be prepared to listen to patients and to comprehend their distress, before, possibly, knowing what to do to help them.
However, the foregoing thoughtful example, of a reference to ‘one's own limits’, which could imply an attempt to be aware of the impact and meaning for us, the worker, (and ultimately, I think, could mean to pay attention to the countertransference and to projective mechanisms) is not developed or maintained throughout the book. That makes it unsatisfactory for me although I think it would be a useful resource for clinicians in a general overview way. It may also be useful, in a factual ‘do-it-yourself’ way, for people with cancer.
There is an interesting chapter which briefly traces the history of approaches to cancer over the centuries wherein ‘loss’ and ‘lack’ seem to underlie a predisposition to cancer (p. 2):
To surmount the loss, the patient appears to have denied suffering so as to hyperadapt to reality, to the detriment of his emotional life.
Indeed, there are many interesting examples of the issues which arise in a debate on the psychogenic approach, such as Greer and Morris (1975) successfully predicting the result of breast lump biopsies on the basis of a psychological questionnaire. They found that the rate of malignancy was inversely proportional to the capacity to express aggression. However, these findings are not conclusive for there is other research which points to emotion not influencing malignan