Superimmunity by Paul Pearsall

Psychologist Paul Pearsall was an early proponent of current notions of mind-body medicine. For Pearsall, it was important to heal a person’s life even if it wasn’t possible to cure their disease. Often a disease can be the body’s way of getting a person’s attention, and letting him know a change is needed. People who make those changes can experience healing, sometimes in the form of a cure and sometime as health and happiness in the midst of disease. Pearsall described some of his ideas in Superimmunity.

In this book, Pearsall draws from Eastern medicine an organizing theme: hot and cold thinking. Hot thinkers are fast, impatient, black-or-white thinkers. They can be judgmental and prone to exaggeration, overreaction and isolation. Cold thinkers overreact to trivial things and underreact to important things. They are prone to passivity and feeling of inadequacy. They are isolated in their own way, and though often out of touch with their emotions, they often despair.

The body responds to these thinking styles. Hot reactors are always on the attack, and their immune systems attack their bodies. Heart disease is associated with hot people. Cold reactors are inactive, so their bodies may respond with excessive activity, particularly cell growth (i.e. cancer).

Pearsall does not eschew medicine. If you are facing a serious illness, the likes of heart disease or cancer, you need a lot of medical help. However, you also need to enlist the aid of your own immune system, which may be doing something counterproductive if it is very active at all. You’re immune system is closely linked to your brain, more so that was commonly thought when Pearsall was writing in the 1980s, so getting the best immune response calls for leaving hot or cold thinking for something more balanced.

“Until recently, we have behaved as if the immune system were somehow separate from us, doing its job secretly, automatically, beyond our control…. Research now tells us that our immune system functions within a supersystem of mind and body,” Paul Pearsall, Superimmunity

Superimmunity includes many tests to help you identify if you tend to be a hot or cold thinker (you can be both). From there, Pearsall offers strategies for cooling off or warming up your thinking as needed. This can mean observing your body, listening to your disease and getting in touch with your emotions in ways that can be unfamiliar to one in the throes of hot or cold reaction. This self-evaluation that reveals the underlying dysfunction, and your own exploration and imagination may uncover your path to healing.

Pearsall does not suggest that changing your thinking will always lead to a cure, though sometimes it might. Disease and mortality are part of being a human. However, you can truly live while you are alive, and in this since experience healing. Life is more than surviving, eating, drinking and breathing. It is important to live as fully as you can.

Paul Pearsall also wrote

The Beethoven Factor

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need

Toxic Success

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Bnson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

Pearsall, Paul. Superimmunity: Master Your Emotions & Improve Your Health. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987.

Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen

Quindlen, Anna. Good Dog. Stay. New York: Random House, 2007.

It started with the cover. I’m not sure it is a picture of Beau, the Labrador retriever Quindlen memorializes in this essay, but I guess it could be. It resembled Lucky, my Lab mix, with glossy black fur and the hoary muzzle of maturity. My wife bought the book and read it quickly; I got around to it weeks later.

In the six years we’ve had him, Lucky and I have both acquired quite a few white hairs on our chins. My wife jokes that the dog and I a growing to look alike. He is still cute in fashion of dogs. I hope I am cute, too, but in the way the husbands are attractive to their wives.

Quindlen writes about Beau, and dogs, and the relationship between people and dogs. Like many pets, Beau lived happily, simply and briefly. He wasn’t like another child, but he was part of the family, a solid presence in their home. It was hard for the family to put him down when he was to feeble to continue.

That gets more to the heart of the essay: mortality. The duration of a dog’s life is only a fraction of most of ours, but it is long enough for us to share many years and experiences with a dog and become very attached to one. The death of a dog can feel like the ending of a phase of our lives and a foreshadowing of our own passing.


I’ve lost pets to death, too. I remember them with bittersweet longing, particularly childhood pets that I feel I should have treated better. I thought about them as I read about Beau.

The family and friends who have died are a different matter. That is almost too weighty to contemplate. The loss of affection is sad; the loss of love is painful. The could-haves are much more costly. The bitterness of loss is sweetened with some of these people by the hope we share in Christ. It’s not the hope of a vague spiritual reunion in an immaterial heaven, but a hope for resurrection, where those I loved as a spirit and a body, the way we were made, I will know as a spirit and a body again, but ageless and eternal.

Quindlen doesn’t address that issue in this essay. She ends it at death, with hope that she has learned something about living and dying well from her relationship with Beau.