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The Chinese pictograph for crisis is comprised of the ideograms for “danger” and “opportunity.” Every serious diagnosis, especially when life-threatening, is a major crisis for everyone concerned that shakes the foundations of previous assumptions. Such a crisis is not restricted to the person with the illness, nor is it just about the fate of a body. All aspects of life are thrown into a time of turmoil and transition. When death and disability come close, it is indeed a time of danger and opportunity, which raises questions about the meaning of life and tests the bonds of relationships. Life-threatening illness is a crisis for the soul.

This book grew out of a series of lectures and workshops about illness as a descent of the soul into the underworld and the healing that can result. The central message that illness is a soul experience was one of the inspirations for a series of conferences for women surviving cancer called, Healing Journeys: Cancer as a Turning Point, along with Lawrence LeShan's ground-breaking book, whose title inspired the second part of the conference name. Cancer as a turning point was a personal perspective for the organizers: three of the original four had been diagnosed and treated for cancer of the breast.

I have accompanied family members, friends, and patients through illnesses and hospitalizations that were descents into the underworld. The terrain is very familiar, though the gateway of physical illness is not as familiar as the psychological entry points that bring people on a soul path into a Jungian analysis with me.

Whether the life-threatening illness is psychological or physical, when depression colors or influences thought and action, people often give up on themselves and on the future. It is then not enough to treat a depression only with medications or to only pay attention to the physical signs and symptoms of disease, when giving up on life having any meaning, now or in the future, is the underlying life-or-death issue.

The parallels between psychiatric and physical life-threatening illness are easy for me to see because I have straddled both worlds. Before I was a psychiatrist and even now as an analyst, I am, in some essential way, still a physician. Medical school and a rotating internship in a large county hospital were an initiation, not just an education. To be a doctor of the body or of the psyche is to be at those border crossings between ordinary life and life thereafter. The onset of a life-threatening or life-changing illness brings an end to a phase of life, as it may to life itself. The doctor of the body or of the psyche is a witness to and a participant in the outcome.

A serious illness has the impact of a stone hitting the still surface of a lake, sending concentric rings of disturbance out, as feelings, thoughts, and reactions radiate out from this center. It impacts relationships, it stirs the depths of others, it potentially brings the patient and those who are affected “close to the bone,” into the proximity of the soul. Soul questions arise about the meaning of life when the mind is ill or the body is ailing. Healing and recovery may depend as much or more upon a deepening of relationships and connection to one's own soul and spiritual life, as on medical or psychiatric expertise.

I have learned over and over again that a life-threatening or progressive, disabling illness is soul shaking for everyone involved, that it provides us an opportunity to get intimations and intuitions about why we are here and what and who really matter. It is this experience, along with the archetypal underpinning provided by mythology, that is the soul of the book

I hope this book will be an inner companion during a time of descent or difficulty. Maybe it will come to you through synchronicity to affirm what you intuitively know and to support you to do whatever it is that will heal you. I can imagine it being read aloud, a portion or a chapter. I hope that it opens the way for significant conversations with others and to rich internal dialogues with yourself.