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Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and Medical Perspectives on Euthanasia and Mortality
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About Denial Of The Soul: Spiritual And Medical
Product Description The author of The Road Less Traveled, the bestselling and most influential book of psychiatric and spiritual instruction in modern times, now offers a deeply moving meditation on what euthanasia reveals about the status of the soul in our age. Its trenchant and sensitive treatment of the subject will define our humanity for generations to come. From Library Journal The author of several best sellers, including The Road Less Traveled (which at last count has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for 687 weeks), Peck here discusses a complex and timely matter?euthanasia. Peck wants to address the "spiritual" aspects of the decision, which he feels have been ignored in this too-secular world. He's taken on a huge task: to define physical and emotional suffering, to come up with guidelines for considering physician-assisted suicide, and to foster further dialog by society as a whole on these issues. This is not a book of answers; Peck instead encourages discussion about "learning through dying," what a soul consists of, and choosing hospice care when it's clear the end is near. Peck is a wonderful writer, engaging, intelligent, and full of stories from his long psychiatric practice; as usual, he takes on big issues with seriousness, sensitivity, and balance. Highly recommended.?Barbara O'Hara, Free Lib. of Philadelphia Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Peck, very productive of late, may never have written a timelier, more cogent, more fluently readable book than this one. He believes that no current ethical-legal issue is more important than euthanasia and that there is not enough discussion of and even contention over it. He presents and considers the medical, spiritual, and social issues of euthanasia. Medicine, though it has finally conceded that "pulling the plug" on the terminally ill is a moral accession to the naturalness of dying, has yet to grant the necessity of fully relieving physical pain--that is, even to the point of eventually lethal doses of painkiller--and has barely begun to acknowledge hellish emotional pain as a condition from which suicide may be a wholly natural release. Spiritually, Peck insists that suicide done out of the individualistic desire to control one's life and to deny one's God-given soul must be discouraged, for life is a learning experience that ought to be fully realized, even through suffering. Yet Peck cites circumstances in which assisted suicide seems morally justified (one great strength of the book is the cases from which Peck educes the complexities he discusses--all of them real, drawn from his and other physicians' practices). He concludes, however, that at present society isn't spiritually strong enough to legalize physician-assisted suicide, which is perhaps the greatest reason that euthanasia must become the subject of a great and completely open debate, one that he has masterfully and engagingly begun. Ray Olson From Kirkus Reviews The bestselling author of The Road Less Traveled offers a nuanced and thought-provoking contribution to a debate that, he believes, is going to make us face important questions about our direction as a society. Although assisted-suicide practitioner Dr. Jack Kevorkian gives Peck the shivers, our author credits him for having almost single-handedly made euthanasia a national issue in the US. Peck has not written about euthanasia before, and he does so now, he says, because of his alarm at the lack of passion, the ``vast, tacit approval of euthanasia,'' that has followed Kevorkian's activities. Peck's own position is a mixture of pragmatism and principle. He is not totally against assisted suicide in cases of severe and prolonged physical pain, but he believes that hospice, with its concept of palliative medical care and liberal use of morphine pumps, should make this option unnecessary. Of more practical concern for Peck is the use of euthanasia as a way of avoiding existential sufferin
