The Soul (Put to Work) in Medicine

In his 2019 essay, Arthur Kleinman laments that medicine has become ever-competent at managing illness, yet caring for those who are ill is increasingly out of practice. He opines that the language of ‘the soul’ is helpful to those practicing medicine, as it provides an important counterbalance to medicine’s technical rationality that avoids the existential and spiritual domains of human life. His accusation that medicine has become soulless merits considering, yet we believe his is the wrong description of contemporary medicine. Where medicine is disciplined by technological and informational rationalities that risk coercing attention away from corporealities and toward an impersonal, digital order, the resulting practices expose medicine to becoming not soulless but excarnated . Here we engage Kleinman in conversation with Franco Berardi, Charles Taylor, and others to ask: Have we left behind the body for senseless purposes? Perhaps medicine is not proving itself to be soulless, but rather senseless, bodyless – the any-occupation of excarnated souls. If so, the dissension of excarnation and the recovery of touching purpose seems to us to be an apparent need within the contemporary and increasingly digitally managed and informationally ordered medical milieu

Conversation · Epistemology · Existentialism · False accusation · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Rationality · Sociology · Soul · Empathy and Medical Education · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology