Today a great deal is written about holistic medicine as an approach to healing that integrates body, mind, and spirit. In Broken Vessels, a lecture course given to a mixed audience of doctors and priests, Rudolf Steiner renews the ancient tradition of “pastoral medicine,” which involves the working together of trained physicians with those having the care of the patient’s soul and spirit. He shows that healing is not possible unless it takes into account the invisible as well as the visible dimensions that make up a human being. Until we begin to understand these dimensions of ourselves as clear and concrete knowledge, real health cannot truly be attained.

To understand psychological abnormalities with appropriate spiritual concepts, Steiner describes in this book the inner make-up of both healthy and unhealthy psychological states that escape ordinary perception. Addressing topics ranging from sleepwalking to psychosis to the visions of St. Teresa of Avila, he suggests how to approach the extraordinary relationships of our inner vehicles or ‘bodies’ which express themselves as psychological disturbances with what he calls “pastoral medicine”—a truly holistic approach to healing that can bring body, soul and spirit into a more harmonious and wholesome relationship.

“Rudolf Steiner reveals something about the invisible structure of health and illness as they are seen with the second sight of spiritual research…. His comments about the opening to spiritual worlds that can accompany severe mental retardation or illness foreshadow some of the most important alternative psychiatry of our own times. He anticipates elements in the work of R. D. Laing, the Windhorse movement of Podvall, and also the new practice of ‘facilitated communication’ whereby some autistic patients have been aided in expressing a full and conscious inner life to which their bizarre outward behavior gives no clue.”

—from the foreword by Michael Lipson, Ph.D.