Why Do People Get Ill?
Explores the psychological dimensions of physical illness and the mind-body link.
Why Do People Get Ill? sets a Lacanian analyst, Darian Leader, alongside a philosopher of science, David Corfield, to reopen a question modern medicine tends to bracket: not what a disease is, but why a particular person falls ill at a particular moment. Drawing on case material, medical history, and psychosomatic research, the authors argue that biography, loss, and unspoken conflict register in the body, and that statistical medicine has narrowed its gaze to the lesion while losing the patient who carries it.
For the consulting room, the value lies less in a theory of causation than in a stance. The book presses the clinician to attend to the timing of a symptom, to what preceded it in a life, and to the meaning a patient may be unable to put into words. It treats physical complaint as material worth listening to, without collapsing into the claim that mind simply produces disease.
About the authors
Darian Leader
Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst and author working in the Lacanian tradition. Born in 1965, he was a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR) in London and serves as president of the College of Psychoanalysts (UK). His books include Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, What Is Madness?, and Hands. He is also a trustee of the Freud Museum.
David Corfield
David Corfield is a British philosopher whose work centres on the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. He was for many years a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent, and he wrote Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics. With the psychoanalyst Darian Leader he co-authored Why Do People Get Ill? (2007), where his role was to bring philosophical rigour to questions about the mind-body relationship and the ways illness carries meaning. He is a philosopher, not a clinician.
Details
- 2007
- Hamish Hamilton
- Hamish Hamilton
- 384
- 9780241143162