Helen Flanders Dunbar: Physician, medievalist, enigma

Hart, Curtis W.

doi:10.1007/bf02354944

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…They were loyal to her because of her intense commitment to the cause of relating the clergy to physicians in a constructive way and because of her genuine religious interest. 78 It is not difficult to see in this description a defensive male response to a woman trying to assert herself in a hostile environment. That Dunbar was also a beautiful woman must have produced conflicting feelings.…”

Section: Emily Brontementioning

confidence: 99%

Helen Flanders Dunbar: The Unfinished Pursuit of Unity

Kaplan¹

2023

JOSHA

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Helen Flanders Dunbar, the mother of psychosomatic medicine, was an outstanding pioneer whose life was to end tragically. A brilliant academic career led her to becoming an authority on Danté, a leading psychosomaticist who studied the healing shrines and one of the first to promote the work of clerics in hospitals. She did several large studies that put psychosomatic medicine on the map. With Franz Alexander she was regarded as the leading authority in the field, becoming the first editor of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Inspired by her Danté studies, Dunbar believed in combining art and science, manifested in a holistic attitude. She differed from Alexander's organ specificity model, instead using the term personality constellation. Not a traditional Freudian, she was more interested in the symbolism of Jungian and Reichian typologies. Her studies also led to the finding of accident proneness which, tragically, could apply to her own life. She mixed easily with figures like Margaret Mead and Eleanor Roosevelt and had a considerable public profile with her articles on a range of subjects. A Renaissance figure, Dunbar was dynamic, charming and attractive. This mostly worked, but also led a hostile reaction from some in the male-dominated world she was forced to operate in. After the thirties, Dunbar's life went on a downward trajectory. She antagonised many, withdrew from academic life, relationship difficulties multiplied and she slid into alcoholism. Dunbar's death at 57 was a sad end for an intelligent, inspiring and charismatic figure whose potential was not allowed to be realised.

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Section: Emily Brontementioning

confidence: 99%

Helen Flanders Dunbar: The Unfinished Pursuit of Unity

Kaplan¹

2023

JOSHA

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“…Second, studying Stenbäck's medical life enriches the existing histories on the relationship between psychiatry and religion. When the role of faith in the history of psychosomatics has been examined, sentimental or emotional healing experiences have usually occupied the central stage (Hart, 1996;Powell, 2001;Harrington, 2005;Harrington, 2009). However, more attention should be given to normative aspects of religion, since religious doctrines are also meant to organise life and give it meaning in theologically nuanced ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The third incentive to examine Stenbäck's story is that it ties in with debates on how individual pathologies can be taken as indices of broader social problems (see e.g. Hayward, 2012, and the related special issue) and how concepts of stress and psychosomatics can be harnessed to further social reconstruction (see Greco, 1998; Jackson, 2013; Rosenberg, 1998). In Stenbäck's case, this potential pertains to the changing social status of Christianity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sin embodied: Priest-psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck and the psychosomatic approach to human problems

Hyrkäs

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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Combining theological and medical perspectives is indispensable for the historical study of the interconnections between mind, body, and soul. This article explores these relations through the history of Finnish psychosomatic medicine, and uses published and archival materials to examine the intellectual biography of the Finland-Swedish theologian turned psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck (1913–2006). Stenbäck's career, which evolved from priesthood to psychiatry and politics, reveals a great deal about the tensions between religion and medicine, the spiritual and scientific groups that impinged upon psychosomatic medicine, and ideas on how health and Christian morality were interconnected. The biographical approach is adopted to unearth the values encoded in medical concepts, and through this, to point towards another, underexplored dimension of the health–religion relationship. In addition to their emotional aspect, religious doctrines are intended to organise life and give it meaning. Stenbäck's ideas tied these experiential and normative spheres together by defending an irrationalist substratum of the world in the secular age of medicine. His work illustrates how the inner experience of faith can become both medically and politically purposive. It is worth combining these perspectives in historical research as well in order to better understand how the theological, medical, and political worlds are in dialogue when it comes to human problems.

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“…The use of battle imagery to describe the relationships between organisms and their environments has been critiqued by feminist scholars such asHaraway (1989) andMartin (1990Martin ( , 1994. For an overview of these and other critiques of immunological discourse, see Jamieson(2015).6 SeeHart (1996) for more on Dunbar's interest in integrating religion and health care. SeePowell (1978) for more on Dunbar's career and achievements, andPowell (1974) for her work on religion.7 Despite her many remarkable accomplishments, Dunbar remains a fairly shadowed figure in the histories of psychosomatic medicine, general medicine, and psychiatry.…”

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confidence: 99%

Between the Sciences Psychosomatic Medicine as a Feminist Discipline

Jamieson¹

2017

Catalyst

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Psychosomatic medicine was an interdisciplinary medical field established in the late 1930s in response to growing dissatisfaction with the Cartesianism assumed in both general medicine and psychiatry. Seeking a method that could address the many health conditions that fell outside the scope of any particular specialisation, advocates of this movement were doctors, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who insisted on treating the organism as a whole. Among these was Helen Flanders Dunbar, an enigmatic psychiatrist and philosopher, who insisted that the success of medicine rested on its ability to apprehend the interrelationality of mind and body as an object in its own right. This article shows that Dunbar’s ambition to develop a practice of medicine that would more faithfully address the organism as whole, rather than fragment, evokes the larger issue of how we can know and study life objectively. Drawing on the works of feminist STS scholars Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, I show that Dunbar grappled with the situatedness of knowledge practices – and specifically, the relationship between object and method – as a central concern of her discipline. I argue that psychosomatic medicine is an example of feminist thought as science because its very practice relies on holding alive questions about the nature of objectivity, truth and the ontological entanglement of ‘what’ and ‘how’ we know

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Helen Flanders Dunbar: Physician, medievalist, enigma

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

Helen Flanders Dunbar: The Unfinished Pursuit of Unity

Helen Flanders Dunbar: The Unfinished Pursuit of Unity

Sin embodied: Priest-psychiatrist Asser Stenbäck and the psychosomatic approach to human problems

Between the Sciences Psychosomatic Medicine as a Feminist Discipline

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