505 - Creative Suffering

Creative Suffering
By Paul Tournier
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983. 146 pp. $10.95.

As so many people already know, Paul Tournier is a Swiss physician who early in his career decided not to become a psychoanalyst and then proceeded to apply significant insight from religion, philosophy, and psychology to his relationships with his patients. Widely and wisely read in all three fields, he made his initial personal religious commitment in the Oxford Movement. This is his twentieth book and it is written primarily to his medical colleagues with the hope that others will find it helpful.

Tournier starts by writing about the will to power and the amazing number of orphans who have extraordinary achievements. He notes that so many, whether orphans or not, have been highly successful after experiencing tragedy, suffering, and deprivation while others produce only negative results from like situations. His purpose is to understand suffering and make it creative. He says that deprivations without the aid of love spell catastrophe, that the acceptance of deprivation is necessary, that anger toward deprivation goes hand in hand with acceptance, that religious faith is the most powerful source of real acceptance, that courage is essential, and that loving and giving create more ability to love and give. He rejects the premise that suffering is sent by God for our own good but he has concluded that while suffering may not be creative in itself, we are scarcely ever creative without it.

Tournier admits that he skips about a lot in his writing but each new page is like opening a present. He shares much of himself, his thinking, and his work in his illustrations and after 83 years he has much to share. It does not appear that this book was intended to be a major treatise but it is warm, helpful, insightful, and at times inspirational. Most everyone would benefit from and enjoy reading it.

E. Dean Bergen
Allentown State Hospital
Bethlehem, Pa.