Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing (review)

Stanley W. Jackson. Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xiii + 504 pp. $45.00.

Care of the Psyche is an ambitious and brilliant work, a sweeping history of how healers have understood and used psychological healing for those suffering physical or mental distress. Indeed, Stanley Jackson has staked out a vast terrain, encompassing religious, philosophical, medical, psychological, and psychiatric theories and practices from classical Greece and Rome to the contemporary period. While this is a daunting journey, Jackson is an erudite and clinically astute guide and, along the way, he unfolds what is certainly to become a classic account within the history of medicine as well as the history of psychiatry.

Jackson has two major aims. First, he sets out to chart a three-thousand-year history of psychological healing practices. Second, and more importantly, he wishes to uncover what he believes to be essential ingredients that transcend the specific historical contexts in which these activities occurred. Combining these two purposes, his narrative is not only a model of scholarly rigor, but also a nuanced unearthing of basic aspects of what goes on between healers and sufferers. Jackson identifies three elements as the bedrock of psychological healing: talking, listening, and the healer-sufferer relationship. From these crucial and invariant factors, he traces a number of other themes--such as compassion, understanding, consolation, comfort, and insight--that have emerged over the course of the last three thousand years in writings about the encounter between those in distress and those who attempt to ease their suffering.

What is especially remarkable about Jackson's narrative is the facility with which it moves from ancient medical, philosophical, and religious texts to modern medical and psychoanalytic works while, at the same time, creating a remarkably synthetic account. The chapter on consolation and comfort nicely illustrates this. First defining the meaning of consolation and pointing out its central role in most forms of psychological healing, Jackson traces its use from antiquity to the modern period. This leads to a far-ranging discussion of consolatory literature from ancient Greece, the early Christian consolatio, Renaissance humanist physicians, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century medical and Christian works, and nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric (especially French) texts. The chapter ends with twentieth-century psychotherapy. For each period, Jackson places the use of consolation within its unique historical context, providing a textured account of the ways in which practitioners--be they philosophers, priests, or physicians--employed and wrote about consolation, and the specific situations in which they encountered those in need. At the same time, he uncovers essential aspects of the relationship between healers and sufferers that a more focused account might have missed.

At its core, Care of the Psyche is a convincingly argued defense of why physicians and psychiatrists should care about their patients' minds as well as their bodies. Physicians' increasing dependence upon technology, the encroachment of managed care upon the doctor-patient relationship, and the turn toward a more biologically oriented understanding of psychiatric illness have tended to eclipse the importance of psychological healing. However, this book forcefully reminds us that there has always been more to caring for the sick than simply attending to the body. "Neglect of the psyche has meant," Jackson concludes, "more often than not, neglect of the sufferer and the sufferer's health" (p. 392). It is a lesson that will resonate with physicians as well as historians of medicine and psychiatry. Sadly, Stanley Jackson recently died--but Care of the Psyche serves as a wonderful testament to his long and distinguished career of scholarship and caring for patients.

Joel Braslow
University of California, Los Angeles

...