Main description:

This book focuses on our emotional responses to cancer by offering a range of perspectives: psychoanalytic, medical, spiritual and religious, as well as literary. Once suppressed, akin to a taboo, the topic of cancer is now very much in the public consciousness. The prevalence of the disease and well-publicised medical advances in its treatment demand it. Topic of Cancer begins with Freud's cancer, widely known of but rarely understood in its historic and analytic context. Psychotherapeutic reflections are then offered on our understanding of the adult and adolescent with cancer, and the challenges of sustaining a thoughtful presence in the face of the trauma experienced when a child is diagnosed with cancer, and during treatment. The dilemmas and challenges faced by today's psychotherapist with cancer are explored next and, for the first time in cancer literature, an account of the emotional demands on nurses involved in sensitive, intimate care. With an increasing number of people living longer with cancer, "survivorship and palliative care are the focus of the chapters that follow.

Contents:

Foreword , Preface , Introduction , Bearing the Unbearable , Freud's cancer , Understanding the patient with cancer , The emotional impact of cancer on children and their families , What the illness may reveal , The ill psychotherapist: a wounded healer , The cancer nurse specialists' caseload: "contending with the fretful elements" , On survivorship , Palliative care: what, when, and how? , The nature of religious/spiritual concerns in addressing the psychological needs of people with cancer , Containment and Creativity , Finding creative expression , The cancer memoir: in search of a writing cure?