Healer as Lover

 Advertisement

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) wrote: 'Christ the healer is one of the eternal images or archetypes.' The healer is a tremendously potent figure in our imaginations. We have said that the witch doctor is both physician, psychiatrist, chaplain and private detective.

The faith healer, his western cousin, can also boast a variety of functions. He or she is the lover, employing touch in a therapeutic way that it is difficult to imagine any doctor or counsellor ever contemplating. One cannot underestimate the potency and the primacy of touch. Embryos react to touch at just six weeks.

The first contact with the external world the baby will experience will be through the medium of touch. By extension, spending 50 minutes a week with someone who is touching you and making eye contact with you, and is fully involved with you and your illness is a tremendously positive and invigorating experience.

It would be a lucky patient indeed who received 50 minutes (or even 5 minutes!) of a doctor's time today. Moreover, a patient in the care of a doctor will no doubt meet different doctors from the one he or she originally saw on follow-up visits. Yet with healers there is a sense of continuity built up, which strengthens the confidence of the patient.

This demonstrates that sometimes the success of a healer can lie in quite prosaic answers. If you were an old lady living alone in a high-rise block, the very act of being physically touched and spoken to sensitively and softly with a healer's undivided attention would be therapeutic.

It has been found that one of the most compelling figures to the female psyche is that of the mysterious stranger, a figure that Emily Bronte used as a key motif in drawing the character of Heathcliff, perhaps the greatest romantic hero in all English literature. Like Heathcliff and the Byronic hero, the healer is handsome, magnetic and melancholy. We are also slightly ambivalent about him. Consciously or unconsciously, the healer taps into the resonance of this figure.

To put it less discreetly, we should not ignore the factor of sex. as an element in the appeal of the healer. Mutual attraction was undoubtedly there between Baker Eddy and Phineas Quimby. No doubt it explains the appeal of a figure like Rasputin, who obviously possessed strong sexual magnetism, and clearly it was an element in the attraction of the female genteel society that surrendered their dignity to Mesmer. Striking good looks and personal magnetism also play a part in the appeal of Djuna Davitashvili.

Modern healers tend to have a disproportionately high number of female patients. A wander around any complementary health fair shows a preponderance of women over men. Two-thirds of pilgrims to Lourdes are women. A possible explanation for this is that women tend to have far less control over their lives than men and are therefore more inclined to believe in an external force over which they have no control, be it healing, horoscopes or magic crystals.