Læknablaðið - 01.06.1961, Blaðsíða 56

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was aware of being quieter and
niore solid in herself. As she
put it, for the „first time in
my life I am looking forward
to spring.“ Tliis change eonti-
nued and deepened until early
May when a relapse began. It
hecame steadily worse, being of
psychotic proportions througli
Ihe fall and most of the winter.
At first she was predominantly
suicidally depressed. In the fall
and winter slie had episodes of
homicidal rage toward me.
Ahout March 1959 the emer-
gence from this long psychotic
])liase hegan. By May she liad
again relapsed and her subse-
quent panics were so exliausting
I had her liospitalized for 8
weeks. For 3 weeks in Decem-
her 1959 and 4 weeks in March
1960 she liad periods of more
solid well-being than ever he-
fore. The relapses llml followed
were each more intense than
tlie previous one. At the price
of great pain and suffering tliis
woman’s progress continues
through an awesome human
tenacity.
It is not accidenlal tliat the
people I selected to illustrate
my main thesis improved with
therapy, with individual thera-
py and tlie therapy of life. Life
is also a tlierapist, hut some-
times she is so cruel. The hurd-
ens and the insights slie im-
poses are too intensive and ex-
tensive and may occur in all
LÆKNABLAÐIÐ
too short a time, so that the
patient suffers more than he
gains. He does not grow tlirougli
his suffering. He hecomes
sicker. The examples were se-
lected to indicate that change
toward becoming healthier can
happen, and more often, the
more aware we are of the
human urge toward health, of
the existence of human assets
and that hetter theory and
therapy can more often help
make this an actuality. It was
not only for lack of time and
space, that I did not discuss
human sickness and human
liahilities and failures in the-
rapy. With these I beleive you
are all too painfully familiar
as am I.
And now to conclude. My
main thesis has heen tliat there
is an innate human urge toward
healtli which Horney called the
urge toward self-realization.
Implied in the notion of a
human urge toward health are
two major assumptions. One
is that we have some idea of
what we mean hv health. Health
I defined as a predominance
of investment of energies in
patterns or ways of living, in
assets that furtliered tlie urge
toward self-realization. In sup-
port of my second assumption,
the urge toward self-realization,
I presented three categories of
evidence; one, the presence of
such a premise in various reli-