THC: What about in your own practice as a clinician—how has this research affected your own clinical work?
AN: One of the things is the importance in a doctor’s work with a patient for him to understand his patient’s worldview, because unless you understand that aspect of the patient you will not have an understanding of who that patient is and how they will confront illness and death—and all of these other aspects that you would find out if you understood a patient’s worldview. Modern medicine is just beginning to realize that that’s a very important part of a patient’s personal history and not unrelated to often what the state of their emotional patient is. There’s been a lot of research now to show how one’s worldview influences outcomes of certain illnesses.
THC: You teach a similar course at the medical school. Do you think that medical schools need to embrace more of this kind of learning?
AN: It’s very similar [to the undergraduate course] except that it has more of a clinical orientation. I think that there has been a change over the past ten years in medical school curriculums that now include courses that focus on understanding patient’s worldview.
THC: How is this book particularly important or relevant to us today?
AN: Every 12 months, about a quarter of a million people decide there is no meaning and they attempt to end their lives. A lot of those are college students, which seems bizarre when you think about it, with all that they have. So is there any meaning to life? Why are we here? How do we live our lives? We all have some kind of code—where does that come from, and will it be most fulfilling for us? What is happiness? I think when people attempt to take their lives, the cause is usually depression, which is sadness, which is the opposite of happiness. We live an average lifespan of 40,000 days; how are we to live those days? What is happiness, and how is it related to love? What are the different forms of human loves and how do they influence our relationships? I ask my students at Harvard if they’re happy, and the answer is almost universally no; and the reason is the lack of meaningful relationships. When you form meaningful relationships, you are happy. Both Freud and Lewis had a great deal to write about the question of sexuality. And there’s the problem of suffering: if 96 percent of people believe in some kind of intelligent being that’s omnipotent and all-loving, how do you equate that with September 11. How can somebody allow that many innocent people to be slaughtered? How do we confront the fact that we’re not going to be here forever, what Freud calls “the painful riddle of death”? We don’t think about these things, because they make us anxious; but sometimes we wake up at 3am and say “Is there any meaning to my life, what am I going to do with my life?”
THC: I really want to ask which one of the two worldviews is correct—but I figure that’s cheating.
AN: The students always ask me, “What do you think?” I tell them that I’ll answer that after their last paper’s in. My approach has always been to be the objective dispassionate observer, and I try to establish in my students the desire to make a critical and objective assessment, to understand the arguments of both whether they embrace it or not. If the course doesn’t change their worldview it has helped them understand and crystallize their own world view, because a lot of people just don’t know — they haven’t thought about it that much and they’re in the agnostic category.
books
The Question of God
By Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.
Free Press
244 pp., $25