Yangqi Zheng

Csordas

ANSC 129

9 January 2020

The Symbolic Supernatural

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

proximate mechanisms of action not so.

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.

Assumedly, symbolic healing processes act primarily on this in-between.

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

mechanisms of social process and influence.

 We see from the seemingly necessary division between the symbolic and the physical, and from

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.”