Symbolism in medieval thought and its consummation in the Divine comedy
(This book aims to show that Dante Alighieri was in full p...)
This book aims to show that Dante Alighieri was in full possession of his senses and had serious intent while writing the Divine Comedy, and that interpretations of his symbols all have validity.
Helen Flanders Dunbar was a psychoanalyst, leader in the American psychosomatic, and clinical pastoral education movement.
Background
Helen Flanders Dunbar was born on May 14, 1902, in Chicago, Illinois. She was the daughter of Francis William Dunbar, a consulting engineer and patent expert, and Edith Vaughan Flanders, a genealogist. As a child she suffered from pseudo infantile paralysis, a rachitic disorder related to nursing problems.
Around 1912 Dunbar's father became involved with extensive patent litigation on behalf of his employer, who nonetheless sold the defended rights. As a result, Mr. Dunbar withdrew and retired at age forty-six, moving the family to Manchester, Vermont, where Helen's mother ran the household, with the help of an ever-present aunt and a grandmother.
Education
At the age of eight, because of illness public school had proved disastrous, Dunbar began attending private classes at the University of Chicago's Laboratory School, where she continued for four years.
After three years with tutors in Vermont, Dunbar spent the spring term of 1917 at the Bishop's School in La Jolla, California. The trip west was prompted by a "metabolic disturbance" for which her physician prescribed a meat-free diet and travel. The following fall she enrolled at the Brearley School in New York City, from which she graduated in 1919; she then went to Bryn Mawr.
Dunbar studied psychology, mathematics, and premedicine, but her increasing absorption in the writings of Dante Alighieri led her, upon receiving the B. A. in 1923, to begin graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University. There she became a student of Dantean scholar Jefferson B. Fletcher, and completed her master's thesis in 1924. Dunbar continued on at Columbia, and also enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, where she received her Bachelor of Divinity degree magna cum laude in 1927. During 1926-1927 she also finished her first year at Yale University School of Medicine. Dunbar's dissertation, Symbolism in Medieval Thought and Its Consummation in the Divine Comedy (1929; reprinted 1961), earned her lasting prestige as a Dantean scholar, while her divinity thesis won her the Ely-Eby-Landon Traveling Fellowship, which she used from July 1929 to March 1930 in Europe. Having served a subinternship in medicine and obstetrics (1928 - 1929), she received her M. D. in 1930.
Career
Dr. H. Flanders Dunbar, as she now called herself, spent her fourth year of medical school at the General and Psychiatric-Neurological Hospital in Vienna, at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, and at the healing shrine of Lourdes, where she investigated the role of "religion as a unifying power in personal life. "
Beginning in 1925, Dunbar spent summers at Worcester (Massachusetts) State Hospital studying the symbolistic functions of schizophrenia and also worked with what was later to become the Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students.
After her return from Europe, she served from September 1930 to August 1937 as medical director of the council. At about the same time she also began research at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital as a psychiatrist assigned to the department of medicine.
In 1931 Dunbar was appointed director of the Joint Committee on Religion and Medicine of the Federal Council of Churches and the New York Academy of Medicine. During her directorship, which lasted until May 1936, Dunbar integrated the council into the Joint Committee's Department of Education, and her psychosomatic research program at Columbia into the Joint Committee's Department of Research. Thus she simultaneously provided support for both the clinical pastoral education and the American psychosomatic movements.
A direct outcome of Dunbar's research at Columbia, which included a pioneering psychiatric study of 1, 600 serial admissions to a generalhospital, was the publication of three classic books. From Emotions and Bodily Changes: A Survey of Literature on Psychosomatic Interrelationships: 1910-1933 (1935) she compiled the dissertation for her doctorate of medical sciences, which she received from Columbia in 1936 Psychosomatic Diagnosis was published in 1943, followed by Mind and Body: Psychosomatic Medicine (1947).
A promised sequel to Emotions and Bodily Changes, "on the relation of religion to health and . .. [the role of] religion . .. in directing and controlling emotion, " never appeared.
Although Flanders Dunbar, as she called herself, founded and edited the journal Psychosomatic Medicine from 1939 to 1947, and wrote eight books and twice as many articles over the next twenty years, her public career effectively ended after 1939. During the 1940's and 1950's, she increasingly devoted her time to private practice.
On August 21, 1959, the day her last and perhaps best book, Psychiatry in the Medical Specialties, came from the press, Dunbar was found floating face down in her swimming pool in South Kent, Connecticut Despite suggestive comments in the obituaries, an autopsy did not reveal any conditions contributory to death other than drowning.
Her holistic theories, focusing upon methods of observation, prevention, and effective intervention, rather than upon psychodynamic etiology or specificity, were little appreciated during the three decades after 1939.
Achievements
Helen Flanders Dunbar is an important early figure in American psychosomatic medicine and psychobiology, as well as being an important advocate of physicians and clergy co-operating in their efforts to care for the sick.
While Helen never lacked models for becoming a strong, steadfast woman, she grew up as a lonely, overprotected child, more at home with books than with people.
Though brilliant, Dunbar appeared shy and unsophisticated during her school and college years.
Connections
Dunbar married psychiatrist Theodor Peter Wolfensberger (later Theodore P. Wolfe, Wilhelm Reich's translator and editor) on October 6, 1932; they were divorced on December 12, 1939. Eighteen days later Dunbar's father died, and the double loss affected her profoundly.
On July 13, 1940, Dunbar married George Henry Soule, an economist and editor of The New Republic; they had one child, Marcia Winslow Dunbar-Soule. (She did not marry obstetrician Raymond Roscoe Squier, as alleged in his suicide note published in 1951. )
