This book review is reprinted from the British Homoeopathic Journal Volume 81, Number 1, January 1992, with permission from Peter Fisher, Editor.
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Psyche and Substance.
Essays on Homeopathy in the light of Jungian Psychology.
Edward C. Whitmont, MD.
North Atlantic Books; $12.95.
[Editor's note: As of August 1996 Minimum Price Books' price is $14.95]
ISBN 1-55643-106-6.

It is very welcome that these essays have now been republished with two additions. Most important is the one entitled 'Illness and Healing' in which the author attempts a survey of his thoughts on the fundamental problems underlying the similia principle and of the meaning of illness and healing. The second new essay since the first edition (1980) is devoted to Aurum metallicum.

Dr Whitmont is a practicing analytical psychologist and a leader of the Jungian school in the USA. He has had an exceptionally wide experience of those growing points in medicine where the attempt has and is being made to get beyond the dualism of mind and body and the associated mechanical, cause and effect, thinking which still dominates the 'scientific' medicine of to-day. The predominant influence in his interpretations is the work of C. G. Jung. Naturally he draws also on those aspects of atomic and subatomic physics where the causality principle breaks down. Jung developed his principle of 'synchronicity' from actual experience of 'coincidence' and the ancient Chinese oracle the 'I Ching'. Whitmont records how he has worked with this and the phenomena which arise in its use, totally non-causal but meaningful. Patterns, gestalts, are extensively investigated as they play so essential a part in homoeopathic theory and practice. It is a question, of course, how far notions of 'fields' drawn from physics can be applied to the realms of living beings and of soul phenomena. He quotes Erwin Schrodinger to the effect that form, not substance, is the fundamental concept underlying the dynamism of matter. Incidentally Schrodinger also suggested that whereas physics dealt with the realm of the statistically probable, biology dealt with that of the statistically improbable.

For many readers I expect that the studies on particular remedies will be the most stimulating section of this book. Most of these studies have appeared in the British Homoeopathic Journal. They cover Lycopodium, Sulphur, Natrum muriaticum, Sepia, Phosphorus, Calcarea and Magnesia, Lachesis, Carbo animalis and Aurum. In addition there are studies of Latrodectus nactans, Clematis and Mandragora. These are most valuable attempts to reveal the whole within the potpourri of the materia medica. I have been most delighted personally with his interpretation of Sepia in the light or darkness of the Jungian Shadow. But they are all delightful and illuminating.

Personally I feel that they should be taken with other attempts to see the whole in the bits and pieces of the symptoms collected in the materia medica. William Gutman produced some excellent studies in a Goethean spirit. Karl Koenig, an old associate of Whitmont from Vienna days, produced some on the basis of Steiner's anthroposophical ideas. Otto Leeser proceeded from orthodox pharmacology, adding the refinements of provings to the experimental data. All these and others seem to me to be essential for the task of bringing the raw material of homoeopathy forward.

Whitmont, in his discussion of Illness and Healing, goes properly beyond what was possible for Hahnemann. Illness he shows, in line with Jungian thinking, is not just causatively determined from the past but also pregnant with new possibilities for the future. Healing is not to restore patients to the state of health they were previously in but to help them through to a new phase of life. Illness should be creative.

There are also valuable essays on problems of prescribing and practice and care studies.

A most valuable contribution to homoeopathic thought and literature which should be digested by everyone seriously concerned with the future healthy development of medicine and with overcoming the schizophrenic divide of mind and body.

L.R.TWENTYMAN

British Homoeopathic Journal
Volume 81, Number 1, January 1992