Treating a Migrant Afflicted with AIDS: Understanding the Importance of Psychosomatic Unity to a Hindu Patient
Govindama, Yolande
Treating a Migrant Afflicted with AIDS: Understanding the Importance of Psychosomatic Unity to a Hindu Patient - 2008.
17
As Mauss demonstrated (1936), in non-Western traditional cultures, the body is the vector of the transmission of society’s values and taboos. Patients suffering from illness are caught between two forms of knowledge: that of their culture of origin and modern medicine. The beliefs that emerge when faced with the fear of death this illness may represent lead them to attribute a particular meaning to this “evil,” a meaning reminiscent of a curse linked to a transgression of the symbolic order pre-established by their founding referent. The refusal of a Tamil patient from Sri Lanka to undertake tritherapy corresponds to this dialectic to submit oneself to the will of God, who alone has the power to decide life or death. The medical team involved in this ethnoclinical consultation understands the significance of the patient’s behavior. The two forms of knowledge confront each other, binding the body and the spirit (an impure soul caused by transgression). The search for psychosomatic unity unique to the Hindu view is revealed by the patient. His illness, resulting from the transgression of enjoying a forbidden pleasure, is linked to the separation of body and mind (reason versus spirituality).The clinician cannot consider the cultural interpretation without taking into account the dimension of the subject’s psychical functioning with regard to a conscious culpability mobilized in the search for a need for punishment by the founding referent. This conscious guilt and the knowledge of the symbolic order pre-established by the founder and the clinician makes it possible to discover the origin of the unconscious guilt in its inter-subjective and intra-subjective dimensions.
Treating a Migrant Afflicted with AIDS: Understanding the Importance of Psychosomatic Unity to a Hindu Patient - 2008.
17
As Mauss demonstrated (1936), in non-Western traditional cultures, the body is the vector of the transmission of society’s values and taboos. Patients suffering from illness are caught between two forms of knowledge: that of their culture of origin and modern medicine. The beliefs that emerge when faced with the fear of death this illness may represent lead them to attribute a particular meaning to this “evil,” a meaning reminiscent of a curse linked to a transgression of the symbolic order pre-established by their founding referent. The refusal of a Tamil patient from Sri Lanka to undertake tritherapy corresponds to this dialectic to submit oneself to the will of God, who alone has the power to decide life or death. The medical team involved in this ethnoclinical consultation understands the significance of the patient’s behavior. The two forms of knowledge confront each other, binding the body and the spirit (an impure soul caused by transgression). The search for psychosomatic unity unique to the Hindu view is revealed by the patient. His illness, resulting from the transgression of enjoying a forbidden pleasure, is linked to the separation of body and mind (reason versus spirituality).The clinician cannot consider the cultural interpretation without taking into account the dimension of the subject’s psychical functioning with regard to a conscious culpability mobilized in the search for a need for punishment by the founding referent. This conscious guilt and the knowledge of the symbolic order pre-established by the founder and the clinician makes it possible to discover the origin of the unconscious guilt in its inter-subjective and intra-subjective dimensions.
Réseaux sociaux