Mythology, Health and Healing

Following in Campbell’s footsteps, we will discuss the overlap and influence of one’s spiritual beliefs, mythology and the healing response.

Join us for this special plenary in which Robert Walter will help us explore the relationship between mythology and health: how the visceral beliefs – the myths – of both patient and physician interact to either positively impact or impede their interpersonal relationship and, more importantly, the healing process itself.

We will also investigate some of the biological bases for such mythic understandings and scrutinize the ways in which technological development, globalisation, and mass media are continually redefining and reshaping our understanding of what it means to be “healthy”.

Robert further ‘diagnoses’ the well-being of the body politic by examining how our contemporary mythos – whether consciously articulated or unacknowledged – fails to inform our lives with the art of living due to an insistent denial of death and the inevitability of our dying.