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Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Medicine
Helen Dunbar Flanders was born in Chicago on May 14, 1902. An important leader in U.S. psychosomatic medicine, psychobiology, and the concept of physicians and clergy working together in their care of the sick, she also explored the psychic aspects of healing and disease and was known to have visited Lourdes and other healing shrines in Germany and Austria. Although married twice, she kept her maiden name throughout her life. In 1932, she first married Theodor Peter Wolfensberger (1902-1954), later known as Theodore P. Wolfe. Her second husband was George Henry Soule (1888-1970), economist and editor of The New Republic. In 1942, they had a daughter, Marcia. Most likely due to the fact that she was a woman working in the male-dominated medical establishment of that era,in 1929, she began signing her name "H. Flanders Dunbar" and then later further shortened her signature to Flanders Dunbar.” Dunbar’s career included the following; the first Medical Director of the Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students in NYC, Director of the Joint Committee on Religion and Medicine of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and The New York Academy of Medicine and an instructor at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1942, she founded the American Psychosomatic Society[1] and was the first editor of its journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Medicine, published by Random House in 1947, is the second of six books she penned. Although her career was tragically cut short in 1959, when she was found drowned in her swimming pool, Flanders Dunbar's life has been studied and documented by multiple scholars and she has received many post-humous awards for her significant contributions.
- GenresPsychology
263 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1948
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November 22, 2020Helen Flanders Dunbar, B.D., Ph.D., M.D., Med. Sci. D., author, and psychiatrist. In addition to writing four editions of Emotions and Bodily Changes (1935, 1938, 1945, 1954), she wrote the first handbook in the field: Psychosomatic Diagnosis (1943), and the first best-seller Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Medicine (1947). She also founded the American Society for Research in Psychosomatic Problems (later the American Psychosomatic Society) and its journal Psychosomatic Medicine (1939). While not a scientist in the positivistic sense of the term, Dunbar did have a brilliant mind, and she more than met the criteria of the group that guided her medical career. When members of the Joint Committee on Religion and Medicine sought a director, “a clergyman with a special interest in this field whose interest in religious therapy was distinctly religious and not a form of amateur psychiatry,” they apparently felt that Dunbar, with her degrees in theology, philosophy, and medicine, fit the bill.
One might ask the intentions of this curious committee, directed by Dunbar from 1931 to 1936, which sponsored the epoch-making book Emotions and Bodily Changes. Six months after assuming office, Dunbar defined the committee’s aim as “to investigate the border territory between religion and medicine, in other words, to study the problem resulting from the dichotomy of psyche and soma with a view to a better understanding of integrating forces and of the psychophysical organism as a whole.” To accomplish this goal, the committee maintained two divisions: the Department of Research, to supervise Dunbar’s work in psychosomatic medicine, and the Department of Education, to administer the “Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students,” of which Dunbar had been a director since 1930.
A quick look at the Council reveals that its founder, the Rev. Mr. Anton T. Boison, claimed Dunbar as one of his first students, that as “research chaplain” in a mental hospital he had developed a theory of schizophrenia respectfully acknowledged by both endocrinologists and psychoanalysts of his day, and that he attributed both his insight on schizophrenia and his calling to found the Council to a psychotic episode of his own that occurred in 1920. Even more interesting, in terms of Dunbar’s thought, is the fact that Boisen considered his work as “one in which religion and medicine meet,” for he believed that in some cases, “insanity ... is a religious rather than a medical problem.”
Rounding out the story is an intriguing link between Boisen as teacher (1925) and colleague (1926-37) of Dunbar, and Boisen as patient (1921-22) and assistant (1922-24) of the Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester, founder in 1906 of the “Emmanuel Movement” for medically supervised religious psychotherapy, and later advisor to the Joint Committee in its choice of a director: Dunbar. Worchester, Boison, and Dunbar repeatedly passed through each other’s lives during the 1920s and 1930s, effectively intertwining their lives’ work: the Emmanuel Movement, the clinical pastoral training movement, and the early American psychosomatic movement. While Worcester focused on “functional nervous disorder,” Boisen on acute psychosis, and Dunbar on psychosomatic disorder, each emphasized the cooperation of religion and medicine in obtaining “the wholesome unity of mind and body” through the healing power of God and nature. Frequently using the same vocabulary, these three called for a consideration of the whole man as a unique individual, an organism trying to cope with its internal, external, spiritual, and social environments.
Worcester, Boisen, and Dunbar spoke the same “language” across the years from 1906 to 1936, and themes that emerge in Dunbar’s medical writings gain greater meaning when seen against a background of her earlier non-medical works and the writings of Boisen and Worcester. Thus of the two sides to Dunbar’s life and work, the medical and the religious, I have chosen to concentrate on the latter, tracing its echoes back through Boisen and Worchester, for this is the side of psychosomatic medicine least known.
My purpose, then, is to look into an era quite different from our own, an era when phrases such as "the organism as a whole," "the organism in its environment," and "mind-body unity" were used with a special degree of sincerity. I delineate these years of "healing and wholeness" by the consistency of the language and themes being used, and by contemporaries' recognition that something new had arisen when Worcester inaugurated medically supervised religious psychotherapy, and that something old...had passed when, by 1940, Dunbar's work began to seem out of date. through regenerating certain aspects of this alternative world-view: the organismic viewpoint of the period from 1906 to 1936, I hope to suggest the conceptual integrity of Dunbar's form of psychosomatic medicine in its own time.--Robert Charles Powell, M.D., Ph.D.
While I was doing the certification process for Diplomate in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Supervision via College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy, Inc. at New York-Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center in the early 1990s, I found myself intrigued by Helen Flanders Dunbar. This mysterious woman was unknown to many of my colleagues. I found only a slim chapter or two in the reference books I could get my hands on. She had been typically written out of the history of the patriarchal CPE movement since her death in the late 1950s.
I did some digging, and the more I found out about her, the more I realized Dunbar had a powerful influence at the beginning of CPE's foundation, along with Anton T. Boison. It seemed that almost immediately after she died in the late 50s, few of the books about the Clinical Pastoral Education organizations mention Dunbar at any depth. I dug around and found enough information to present a paper at one of our weekly gatherings of CPE supervisors in training. While printing copies of the paper from the Chapel’s Office computer, an anomaly occurred, causing my paper to be printed in some other printers throughout the hospital. Within minutes, I got a phone call from the hospital's Chief of Psychiatry, whose name I cannot remember, asking me if I had time for a coffee. Not knowing anything about the printer glitch at the time, I was surprised when he thanked me for sending my paper to his printer. I was even more shocked when he told me he knew Dr. Dunbar and worked with her while she was the Chief of Psychiatry there. He gave me several books of hers and a copy of Dr. Robert Charles Powell’s dissertation. –Thom Keely
One might ask the intentions of this curious committee, directed by Dunbar from 1931 to 1936, which sponsored the epoch-making book Emotions and Bodily Changes. Six months after assuming office, Dunbar defined the committee’s aim as “to investigate the border territory between religion and medicine, in other words, to study the problem resulting from the dichotomy of psyche and soma with a view to a better understanding of integrating forces and of the psychophysical organism as a whole.” To accomplish this goal, the committee maintained two divisions: the Department of Research, to supervise Dunbar’s work in psychosomatic medicine, and the Department of Education, to administer the “Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students,” of which Dunbar had been a director since 1930.
A quick look at the Council reveals that its founder, the Rev. Mr. Anton T. Boison, claimed Dunbar as one of his first students, that as “research chaplain” in a mental hospital he had developed a theory of schizophrenia respectfully acknowledged by both endocrinologists and psychoanalysts of his day, and that he attributed both his insight on schizophrenia and his calling to found the Council to a psychotic episode of his own that occurred in 1920. Even more interesting, in terms of Dunbar’s thought, is the fact that Boisen considered his work as “one in which religion and medicine meet,” for he believed that in some cases, “insanity ... is a religious rather than a medical problem.”
Rounding out the story is an intriguing link between Boisen as teacher (1925) and colleague (1926-37) of Dunbar, and Boisen as patient (1921-22) and assistant (1922-24) of the Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester, founder in 1906 of the “Emmanuel Movement” for medically supervised religious psychotherapy, and later advisor to the Joint Committee in its choice of a director: Dunbar. Worchester, Boison, and Dunbar repeatedly passed through each other’s lives during the 1920s and 1930s, effectively intertwining their lives’ work: the Emmanuel Movement, the clinical pastoral training movement, and the early American psychosomatic movement. While Worcester focused on “functional nervous disorder,” Boisen on acute psychosis, and Dunbar on psychosomatic disorder, each emphasized the cooperation of religion and medicine in obtaining “the wholesome unity of mind and body” through the healing power of God and nature. Frequently using the same vocabulary, these three called for a consideration of the whole man as a unique individual, an organism trying to cope with its internal, external, spiritual, and social environments.
Worcester, Boisen, and Dunbar spoke the same “language” across the years from 1906 to 1936, and themes that emerge in Dunbar’s medical writings gain greater meaning when seen against a background of her earlier non-medical works and the writings of Boisen and Worcester. Thus of the two sides to Dunbar’s life and work, the medical and the religious, I have chosen to concentrate on the latter, tracing its echoes back through Boisen and Worchester, for this is the side of psychosomatic medicine least known.
My purpose, then, is to look into an era quite different from our own, an era when phrases such as "the organism as a whole," "the organism in its environment," and "mind-body unity" were used with a special degree of sincerity. I delineate these years of "healing and wholeness" by the consistency of the language and themes being used, and by contemporaries' recognition that something new had arisen when Worcester inaugurated medically supervised religious psychotherapy, and that something old...had passed when, by 1940, Dunbar's work began to seem out of date. through regenerating certain aspects of this alternative world-view: the organismic viewpoint of the period from 1906 to 1936, I hope to suggest the conceptual integrity of Dunbar's form of psychosomatic medicine in its own time.--Robert Charles Powell, M.D., Ph.D.
While I was doing the certification process for Diplomate in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Supervision via College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy, Inc. at New York-Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center in the early 1990s, I found myself intrigued by Helen Flanders Dunbar. This mysterious woman was unknown to many of my colleagues. I found only a slim chapter or two in the reference books I could get my hands on. She had been typically written out of the history of the patriarchal CPE movement since her death in the late 1950s.
I did some digging, and the more I found out about her, the more I realized Dunbar had a powerful influence at the beginning of CPE's foundation, along with Anton T. Boison. It seemed that almost immediately after she died in the late 50s, few of the books about the Clinical Pastoral Education organizations mention Dunbar at any depth. I dug around and found enough information to present a paper at one of our weekly gatherings of CPE supervisors in training. While printing copies of the paper from the Chapel’s Office computer, an anomaly occurred, causing my paper to be printed in some other printers throughout the hospital. Within minutes, I got a phone call from the hospital's Chief of Psychiatry, whose name I cannot remember, asking me if I had time for a coffee. Not knowing anything about the printer glitch at the time, I was surprised when he thanked me for sending my paper to his printer. I was even more shocked when he told me he knew Dr. Dunbar and worked with her while she was the Chief of Psychiatry there. He gave me several books of hers and a copy of Dr. Robert Charles Powell’s dissertation. –Thom Keely
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