Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East

Amazon.com Price: $16.95 (as of 09/03/2019 18:45 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

This work, the third panel of a triptych dedicated by the creator to the notion of illness derived from the patristic and hagiographic texts of the Christian East from the first to the fourteenth centuries, makes an essential contribution to the history of mental illnesses and their therapies in a domain very little studied until now. Confronted by the a large number of problems still posed today in understanding these illnesses, their remedy, and their relationship to people who find themselves sick, he shows the importance offered for reflection and current practice by early Christian thought and experience. After indicating how the Fathers understood the psyche and its relationship with body and spirit, the creator gives a detailed analysis of the different causes they attribute to mental illness and the more than a few treatments really useful. At the same time he shows how, relying on fundamental Christian values, they manifest a constant solicitude and respect for the sick, and how they’re at pains to integrate them into community life and have them participate in their own healing, foreshadowing in this way the needs and aspirations of our own time. The last part discloses the deep significance of one of the vital strangest and most fascinating forms of asceticism the Christian East has known: ‘folly for the sake of Christ’, a madness feigned with the goal of attaining a high degree of humility, but also a way well-suited, through a close experience of their condition, to help people who find themselves continuously among, today as previously, the most destitute. Jean-Claude Larchet is docteur dès lettres et sciences humaines, docteur en théologie, and docteur d’État en philosophie. The creator of Thérapeutique des maladies spirituelles (Paris: Editions de l’Ancre, 1991) and The Theology of Illness (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), he is a specialist in questions of health, sickness, and healing. He is today one of the vital foremost St Maximus the Confessor specialists.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Medical Books » Medicine » Clinical » Psychiatry » Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East

Recent Products