From: f1221-AT-cc.nagasaki-u.ac.jp
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 21:29:24 +0900
Subject: Re: destratify; cancer, schizophrenia


At 7:17 PM 99.1.4, Daniel Haines wrote:

> I don't know about any schizophrenia/cancer link one way or the other
> (or between) so I can't comment  - but i think it is a mistake to say
> that the ideas of "psychic rigidity" and "your own fault" are somehow
> synonymous... [...]

I did not say they were synonymous.
I said they were frighteningly close. And I say so for purely practical reasons:

I recall that in my medical student days there was a considerable
debate about the so-called >cancer personality<. The characteristics
of this personality were supposed to be >repression of emotions< and
others that may be summed up by  >too much rigidity in one`s psychic
structure<, if you like. But the  statistical evidence for an actual
coincidence of these characteristics and cancer were very
weak at best. Still, the term >cancer personality< made it to some
textbooks and the non-medical press.

Some of my fellow students were quite ardent believers in this theory.
And one of them, just out of Med School and into the hospital, explained
it to a patient, who turned to him with the question: >Why do I have cancer ?<.
Gently and calmly he told how psychic >rigidity< [he did use that very
word] may have a relation with cancer. No, he did not speak of fault or
punishment, but what do you think, the patient made out of it ?


sY
-Yamazaki