The Myth of Normal 36

record in the laboratory. Her discoveries, as she justly claimed, would help fuel “a synthesis of behavior, psychology, and biology.”[1] There is nothing novel about the notion of the mind and body being intricately linked; if anything, what is new is the belief, tacitly held and overtly enacted by many well-meaning doctors, that they are separable. Traditional healing practices the world over, while lacking the wondrous technology and scientific know-how developed in the West, have long understood this unity implicitly. Despite Western medicine’s artificial cleaving of the two, most people still know—if only on a gut level—that what they think and how they feel have everything to do with each other. It is run-of-the-mill, for instance, to speculate about which life stresses have contributed to one’s ulcer, what mental strain is behind a headache, or what unprocessed fears lead one to experience panic attacks. The same principle applies when we look not just at individual symptoms but at most types of diseases. Emotional perturbances stemming from relationship troubles, financial worries, or any other source of chronic upset impose physiological burdens that can result in illness. Pert coined the term “bodymind” to describe this oneness. The official website dedicated to her work and legacy takes care to note that this expression was “intentionally written without a hyphen in order to emphasize unity of its component parts.” Body and mind, while not identical, cannot be understood separately from each other. We can ignore or deny this paradox, but we cannot escape it. Since Pert’s groundbreaking work, the biological impacts of emotions—those “nonthings” whose non-recognition she lamented—have been extensively researched and documented in many thousands upon thousands of ingenious studies. It’s worth looking at a few of these, bearing in mind that each is only the tip of an iceberg of similarly compelling findings. A 1982 German study presented at the fourth international Symposium on the Prevention and Detection of Cancer in London found certain personality traits to have a strong association with breast cancer. Fifty-six women admitted to hospital for biopsy were evaluated for characteristics such as emotional suppression, rationalization, altruistic behavior, the avoidance of