Karin Spaink - Disputes With New Age Proponents Over Physical Ailments

Disputes With New Age Proponents Over Physical Ailments

Spaink first came into the national limelight by accusing New Age writers such as Louise Hay, Thorwald Dethlefsen and Bernie Siegel of over-simplifying physical ailments by reducing them to a purely psychological phenomenon. Spaink, herself suffering from multiple sclerosis, was insulted by the suggestion that her disease was nothing more than the result of her own lack of willingness to heal. (Compare Idealism and responsibility assumption with Materialism; see also New Thought Movement.)

Her essay Het strafbare lichaam ("The Penal Body") coined neologisms such as kwakdenken ("quack thinking") and orenmaffia ("mind-Mafia") that even made it into the Dutch language dictionary. The latter term derived from the expression that something is "all between the ears," in other words, "all in the mind."

Read more about this topic:  Karin Spaink

Famous quotes containing the words age, physical and/or ailments:

    Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    Not too many years ago, a child’s experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries that parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child’s life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.
    Richard Louv (20th century)

    For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
    Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the world’s ailments and troubles.
    There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
    Tomorrow you’ll weep what of it?
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)