Emotional Aspects of Heart Disease: A Personal Narrative

Abstract

It is not particularly profound to note that one's choice of a professional career is related to unconscious motivational forces, and that a desire to become a physician may stem from a wish to conquer one's own illness and the inevitability of death. Once one becomes a physician his personal experience with illness may, but not by means necessarily, place him in the position of being empathetic with the sick patient. My purpose in this particular narrative is to review my experience with a life-long illness and to relate it to my longstanding psychiatric interest and work with patients with chronic disease. I trust the confessional quality will be instructive and not taken as maudlin or pseudo-Proustian.