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This rewarding book grew out of a series of seminars ‘The Topic of Cancer’ in 2011 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy (now part of the British Psychotherapy Foundation). As I started reading I recognized I too had
adopted the stance described by the editor Jonathan Burke when he asked colleagues to contribute, ‘I really don't know very much about this’; ‘I don't have a great deal of experience in this area’, ‘Sounds interesting-quite an undertaking. I wish you luck!’ (p. xxvi).
This common diffidence is admirably met by a collection of papers which certainly fill a gap in the literature. They confront our reluctance to engage with cancer until we are forced to by circumstance, despite knowing that one in three of us will develop the disease. It not only details the silence, avoidance, bravado, superstition and dread accompanying the ‘C’ word, but also shows the rewards of engaging directly with people's suffering and death, and with opportunities for relief, creativity and hope that can emerge. This is far from being a pious or Pollyanna-ish book, however. Each very different chapter specifically tries to enlarge our understanding of the psychological meaning and emotional impact cancer has on people's lives by focussing in-disturbingly, yet calmly-at very close range. The book movingly succeeds in managing to talk about cancer, ‘in a direct, compassionate, non-defensive and non-catastrophizing way’ (p xxi). I was at first startled by, and then grateful for, the uncompromising bodily descriptions of the disease and the intrusive treatments. The explicit writing helps to pave a path into that isolated ‘other’ country that cancer patients feel they have entered.
Burke has assembled an impressive list of authors whose expertise covers a variety of professional and personal fields, mostly from psychotherapy, medicine and the caring professions and, more unusually, a poet, journalist and rabbi. Several chapters detail the emotional impact of the writers’ own cancer.