Reflections on Curing and Healing

Once upon a time the idea of what is healing of the mind had a fairly simple dimension. People would seek the help of a ‘mind doctor’ if they felt troubled to the point that they felt a burden to themselves and/or a burden to others. And the mind doctor considered that his task had been accomplished when the patient was able once more to work, to make love, and, above all, to fulfil his social role.

It is evident that criteria such as these depend on an implicit belief that the values and norms of a society are inevitably valid and that they can be accepted as a standard against which to judge an individual's actions and reactions. However, the social and political events of the last half-century have shattered such a belief, for they have demonstrated that, far from offering a reliable standard by which to judge the health or sickness of an individual, societies themselves can fall sick, regress, and act out primitive and/or perverted impulses and phantasies. Any individual who is ‘adapted’ to such a sick society must in fact either be as sick as his society, or else he must be insulated from the world around him to a pathological extent.

Furthermore, these earlier criteria of health and sickness presuppose a greater continuity and cohesion than actually exists between behaviour on the one hand, and inner experience on the other. We now know, for instance, thanks to the ‘permissive society’, that an individual may to all appearances be potent and capable of coitus, yet his inner experience may belie the appearance and be marked by the predominance of pre-genital and pre-Oedipal sensations and phantasies.

Thus present-day study and understanding of the history and functioning of societies, as well as the present-day depth of our clinical understanding of the history and functioning of the individual, have rendered our ideas of what is ‘health’ infinitely more complex and sophisticated.

Already in 1916, in his paper on ‘The transcendent function’, Jung wrote,