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Response 1
Response 1
Csordas
ANSC 129
9 January 2020
The contruct of “symbolic” healing processes is proposed. An analogy is drawn between today’s
psychotherapy in the Anglo-European world and various other systems of healing across cultures, as
instances of symbolic healing. The efficacy of symbolic healing systems is well-documented, but their
In fact, the very search for proximate and often implicitly physicalist mechanisms of action for
processes which in their own terms are explictly non-physical may be misfounded. We see behaviors
and experience a conscious mind, and propose some system in between connecting the one to the other.
In comparative studies as by Frank, Frank, Csordas, and Kleinman, the search seems directed
pragmatically, towards an understanding of healing processes applicable for the development of better
new ones. The extraction of commonalities between modes of symbolic healing, even aware of dense
sociocultural contexts, is the extraction of the active compound from the long-trusted herb. The work
continues to be the alchemical distillation of the medicinal essence, but a spiritual essence now rather
than biophysical.
As the development of the biophysical pharmacology was grounded not only in studies of the
body itself, but in chemistry, physics, and various other physical sciences, one may expect that a good
spiritual or psychical pharmacology must likewise be grounded in not only the cognitive sciences, but
in studies of diverse external spiritual and psychical processes. Perhaps what we most lack then is not
insight into self, as is the principle concern of many present Anglo-American psychotherapies, but into
clear differences between the mythical and spiritual literature, including of psychotherapeutic systems,
versus the literature on mundane and immediate physical phenomena, that the study of what are often
now called “symbolic” phenomena may require a radically different epistemology from the study of the
mundane. We may even be severely and cripplingly limited by a language devised foremost to navigate
the banalities of everyday life, then appropriated and adapted by a largely physicalist academia.
From comparative studies of spiritual literatures and practices, we find symbolism, figurativism,
and nonliteral representation to be common features, but find great differences in what means what, in
the specific schema of representation. In investigating the supernatural from the naturalist institution,
we find ourselves lost in words, trapped in culture, and not knowing what to do.
The project then, towards an academic understanding of various symbolic, especially “super-
natural” healing systems, may be a project of translation from the supernatural to the natural. From
alchemists devising the magnum opus, we have turned to thaumaturgists attempting to solve the secret
incantations. The mythological tracts, from Trismegistus to Freud, are filled with wisdom but also
contradiction, and are in languages foreign to our own. When today we declare about the far-off and the
supernatural “we don’t know,” we often mean very literally “we can’t say.”