The Healer Archetype

“The practice of healing lies in the heart.

If your heart is false, the

Physician within you will be false.”

--- Paracelsus

Andrew Weil, MD

When people are sick, injured, and in pain, they often imagine magical, instantaneous cures. In their fantasies external agents or agencies are usually central: the healer god Apollo, for example, or Jesus or the Virgin Mary, a Hindu saint, a sacred grotto, a marvelous fountain, or a rare stone. Interaction with such a being or thing takes away suffering, comforts, brings ease, and restores wholeness. Restoration of wholeness is the literal meaning of healing.

A Freudian might argue that these fantasies derive from one’s earliest experiences of infancy in which mother are the ultimate source of comfort. An infant’s cry usually brings quick relief from whatever is wrong through the agency of an all-powerful being who temporarily re-establishes the security and wholeness of life in the womb. Whatever it’s psychological origin, the belief that healing comes from outside is deep-seated and powerful, often persisting throughout life.

As a physician who practices and teaches integrative medicine with an emphasis on natural healing, I am aware that I am a focus for the projections of the hopes and fears of many patients who would have me play the role of healer. I am also well aware that belief is a powerful influence on the outcome of treatment. As a scientist I am fascinated by the potential for healing that all living organisms share, and my experiences in medicine, both as a doctor and as a patient, convince me that the true source of healing is inside us, not outside. Knowing this, and also knowing that most patients want me to heal them, creates a complex dynamic, that must be managed skillfully and delicately. What is called for is medicine as art, not science.

My contention that healing is innate is hardly an original idea. Hippocrates articulated it in the fifth century B.C. when he admonished physicians to revere the healing power of nature (the vismedicatrix naturae). Since his time, thoughtful medical philosophers in disparate cultures have developed their theories and systems from the same premise: that healing comes from within and must be stimulated, activated, or unblocked by therapeutic action to allow it to express itself. Healing comes from within, treatment from without; at best, treatment facilitates healing. In modern Western culture this idea has been lost in our enthusiasm for medical technology, especially powerful drugs and invasive procedures that reinforce the illusion of external causation. An example I often use in teaching medical students is a case of a patient critically ill with bacterial pneumonia. The patient is hospitalized, given intravenous antibiotics, and within hours is out of danger. What happened? It certainly looks as if the antibiotics caused the cure. But a more precise analysis shows that the antibiotics knocked down populations of invading bacteria to levels where the patient’s immune system was able to take over and finish the job, a task it was unable to do because it was overwhelmed. That is, the treatment facilitated innate mechanisms of defense and regeneration that restored the balance of health. One of the most succinct expressions of this process I ever read was the motto of a medical club I belonged to: “We dress the wound, God heals it.” (Of course, I understand “God” here to mean Nature in its wondrous, mysterious, and beneficent aspect.) What then of human healers? I have met and worked with extraordinary practitioners with impressive track records of clinical success. Some were conventional physicians, some unconventional, and some were laypersons without any professional training or credentials. Some of them were clearly skilled at facilitating healing. For example, Robert Fulford, an old osteopathic physician I have described, was a master of manual medicine---gentle, hands-on manipulation of the physical structure of the body. He routinely cured children of recurrent ear infections with this method, saying that his adjustments in the musculoskeletal system simply allowed “old Mother Nature to do her job.”

Another healer I have worked with, Rosalyn Bruyere, reads patients’ energy fields to diagnose problems, and channels energy through her hands to relieve them. I have felt this energy and have experienced it as anything but subtle, even though I do not know how to explain it in scientific terms. And I have seen cures follow her treatments. Still, my interpretation is that they result from facilitation or activation or unblocking of innate healing, even if by means unfamiliar to medical scientists. Furthermore, I know that belief in treatments and practitioners greatly contributes to the outcomes.

Years ago at Columbia University, I took a memorable course in medical hypnosis that strongly influenced my thinking about mind/body interactions. I learned first that trance is a natural, innate capacity of human beings that varies in degree from person to person. I also learned that a hypnotist does not really do anything to a subject, but simply arranges circumstances to increase the probability of a subject shifting into an altered state of awareness that helps to focus attention and increase suggestibility. A key factor in this interaction is the subject’s expectation of being hypnotized. In hypnosis, this “power” is called the “aura” of the hypnotist--his or her potential to create in the subject the expectation of being hypnotized. In the same way powerful healers create expectation of being healed. That belief enhances their treatments and through the many possible avenues of mind/body communication, helps activate innate mechanisms of healing. Skilled practitioners know how to work creatively with expectation. They can take the projected beliefs of patients and reflect them back in ways that increase the probability of healing responses.

In the 1970s I lived and worked in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, studying medicinal plants and shamanism. I was much interested in supernatural, magical healing. Although I did find magic in the shamanic world I visited, it was not supernatural. It was the same magic that goes on in the offices of doctors and therapists on much more familiar ground: the projection and reflection of belief and its translation into physiological responses that may interact productively with externally-applied treatments to activate and direct Nature’s healing power. The most effective shamans I met were master psychotherapists who intuitively understood the belief systems of clients and knew how to impact them in the service of healing.

This is exactly the paradox of the healer archetype, and the demand it places on all who wish to identify with it, to practice with great sensitivity and skill. Healing is not the physician’s gift to bestow.

All a good doctor or therapist can do is arrange circumstances to increase the probability of healing. But part of that arranging of circumstances might include playing the expected role of the giver of healing. One might ask why it is that we cannot simply will healing in ourselves without projecting belief onto external agents and agencies. If the mind can truly interact with the body, why can’t it do the necessary activating or unblocking of the mechanisms of the body’s healing system? The answer to that question must have to do with the nature of will and its relationship to the physical underpinnings of consciousness. I often say that the part of the mind where will is located is not the part that connects directly to the nervous system and the controls of our physiology. One day we might understand that statement more precisely in neuropsychiatric terms. We will still be left with the practical problem: in order to influence those controls, most of us have to project belief onto something external, and then interact with that person or thing. I say “most of us” because it appears that some people, through psychospiritual practice or inborn talent, can directly influence the functions of the body others only experience as “involuntary.”

What practical advice follows from this view of healing and healers? I would caution patients to choose their healers carefully. There is an element of authoritarianism in the doctor-patient relationship, an inequality of power that may be unavoidable if the magic of the healer is to occur. If you are going to turn over your power to an external authority, be sure it is someone whose ethics are impeccable.

I would also urge practitioners to ponder the complexities of their relationships with patients and try to find a middle way through the opposing pulls they will feel, lest they identify either too strongly with the healer archetype and lose sight of the true source of healing, or reject it in a desire to be an equal partner with the patient and lose the ability to facilitate maximal healing. This requires constant vigilance.

In the essays of the book Healer: Dancing with the Healing Spirit, you will find many of these themes. Ram Dass, in writing about his stroke, describes his healing in terms of adaptation to loss. He cannot walk, his speech is impaired, but he fully accepts these changes and remains an effective teacher.

In Lewis Thomas’s affectionate portrait of his physician father you will feel the discomfort of one doctor with the healer archetype. The elder Thomas has developed an aura of healer that he feels is undeserved. Eventually he quits medicine for the practice of surgery, where he feels he can do “real” treatment.

And Anatole Broyard’s tale of trying to find the right urologist underscores the importance of right chemistry between patient and practitioner.

If the healer only seems to cause healing, a good practitioner of the healing art can nonetheless bring needed knowledge, enthusiasm, and attention to the medical encounter. I often see references to the “wounded healer,” suggesting that suffering is required to play the role well. It is true that a physician who has experienced illness or injury is more likely to empathize with a patient. In any case, if the interaction between healer and patient succeeds, both parties learn from the experience. Both are changed by it and grow from it.

Reference:

Dr. Weil wrote the above essay for the introduction to the powerful anthology, Healer: Dancing with the Healing Spirit, compiled by Mark Robert Waldman. It is one in a series of books published by Tarcher Putnam called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. The series is a collection of art and literature that captures the American Spirit: her shadows and her loves, her faith and her power to heal.

Andrew Weil, MD is a world-renowned pioneer in the field of Integrative Medicine, which combines Western medicine with alternative therapies. He is the founder of the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he currently serves as a professor and specialist in alternative medicine, mind/body interactions, and medical botany.

Dr. Weil has authored numerous scientific articles and eight books, including three consecutive New York Times #1 bestsellers: Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Spontaneous Healing and his newest book, Eating Well for Optimum Health: The Essential Guide to Food, Diet, and Nutrition. You may contact Dr. Weil through his web site at www.drweil.com