With Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society, Greg Friccione has given us a rare gift. He has not only created a remarkably useful, erudite, and meaningful book, he has harvested the deep currents within himself to bring forth a masterwork of interdisciplinary synthesis that works not only because it is so well argued, but also because it is aligned with his deep aspiration to benefit medicine and humanity by expressing the truths that matter most to him. This he does skillfully and with loving care. His synthesis of science and spirit, and of elements of himself and his life work is a genuinely integrative offering, a tour de force of mind, heart and soul.
His ideas developed in the crucible of life and death, the "most spiritual place in the world" -- the bedside of patients facing serious illness and the potential of losing everything. In the face of such separation threats (made into opportunities) we humans are primed to seek healing connection with others and create a deeper sense of meaning - an attachment solution. Our brain has in fact evolved to do just this. Evolution utilizes natural selection but there is a bias, a selection preference. The law is still the survival of the fittest, but the fittest are those individuals and groups that find inclusive, connection-enhancing solutions to separation challenges.
Friccione demonstrates the explanatory power of this theory across diverse disciplines including biology, psychiatry, human development, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, and physics and cosmology (a bit). A consummate clinician and researcher, his synthetic creativity is infused with a longstanding spiritual sensibility and characterized by brilliant theorizing in which he mobilizes the work of scores of expert resources but refracted through his own analytic, integrative, compassionate mind and heart.
I met Greg in his small book-filled office at Mass General Hospital where he is the director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine (BHI) and a professor of psychiatry and assistant chief of psychiatry at Harvard University School of Medicine. He greeted me warmly and we talked prior to a meeting with Herb Benson, director emeritus of BHI, a pioneer in mind-body medicine and integration of Western and Eastern medical practices. Herb joined us via conference call. I must have been straining to hear Herb when Greg invited me to move my chair closer to the phone, and to him. There were the three of us, huddled up closely, Herb on speakerphone, having a stimulating and close conversation about healing, with many intertwining threads. After reading his book, I see that Greg's inviting me in closer was part of his creating an "attachment solution to a separation challenge," instinctively responding to Herb being at a distance, and my not knowing either of them. I felt very comfortable.
I love it when professional and personal identities and qualities are aligned, as they are in Greg and his work. His book presented its own separation challenges as the level of scientific detail he mobilizes to buttress his thesis is significant. But I kept returning, developing my own attachment solution, buoyed by having experienced the book's thesis in the actions of its author. I skipped over some of the evidentiary detail in the science sections, awaiting the clear summary paragraphs, and relishing the integrative forays. But reading his book stretched and inspired me.
I recognized my own motivations and personal and professional life path in his theory. It helped me understand more about why so many spiritual teachers have navigated early traumatic loss (philosophers too, he writes). This anguish is the experiential ground for exploration and connection with deeper experiential meaning. And connection with altruistic love, the source of meaning for Greg. Compassionate love expressed in all its particularity by real people in real situations. Liberating its expression, our full evolutionary potential, is no small part of Greg's motivation. It is this love that drives the evolutionary bus and will keep us growing as individuals and as a species if we make use of the separation challenge-attachment solution imperative.
In a subsequent email exchange Greg commented on our societal struggles with this imperative:
"It seems clear to me from the evolutionary saga that the answer to our challenges, which can all be understood as separation fear induced, can be found in our creative implementation of attachment solutions. This emerges from our biological pores as our spiritual imperative to be connected. However it is still an open question whether we have actually evolved far enough to actually institute more encompassing attachment solutions that mutualize the interests of out-groups as well as in-groups. I think this is the lesson the Hebrew writer of the Noah story was trying to tell. We can blow it as a species and then the evolutionary process would continue along with another "chosen" species enjoying a selection bias by accruing traits that provide attachment solutions and their attendant survival advantages. So we sure are involved in an evolutionary adventure!"
This is such a momentous time for our species, with so much riding on the choices we make. Reading Greg, I feel part of a great sweeping saga, including but not limited to humans. Embedded in multiple registers of meaning, all woven together. Some time ago, a disappointment in love led me to write a poem, an excerpt from which I include. This book helps illuminate the poem and the excerpt may in turn illustrate the book's thesis.
a bitter pill in a nicely wrapped package
funny, originally the I-Ching said
"biting through"
it confused me
"bites on dried grisly meat, receives metal arrows,"
"bites on dried lean meat, receives yellow gold"
spasm into outpouring
widening love, yellow gold
loving the whole world and all
its creatures
(Hedda said: "separation can be engaging,"
still chewing on that.)
