First Published in 1988

The Meaning of Illness offers new ways of understanding the nature of disease and explores the idea that health and illness have a special interdependence. Experiences which illness brings to our attention—limitation, vulnerability, and dependence—are explored here as inescapable and valuable dimensions to human existence which we ignore at our peril.

The contributors include medical practitioners and consultants, psychotherapists, Jungian analysts, a homoeopath, an acupuncturist, and two women actively involved in self-help. They have few illusions about the pain, terror, and suffering caused by illness, yet convey a shared sense, expressed in many different ways, that illness needs to be rescued from its exclusively negative connotations.

Their contributions approach the phenomenon of illness not just as a curse, but as a potential gift. In particular, they explore the function illness can play as a message-bearer from the world of the neglected unconscious, and as an agent of consciousness and change.

This challenge to the familiar mechanistic medical model is part of a wider re-evaluation of the modern Western world-view—especially the problem-solving approach to healing, and accepted notions of limitless progress.

The Meaning of Illness is relevant to all those whose lives are touched by illness, and is particularly important for those in the medical and caring professions.