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In this paper I wish to discuss the process of becoming a healer in different cultures and societies around the world. I will try to show how the training process transforms the individual healer. This transformation is achieved through the transmission of powerful cultural symbols regarding illness, suffering, death, and rebirth, from master healer into the disciple. These cultural symbols are socially structured through certain rites and practices which, in turn, are internalized by the disciple as part of his or her evolving professional healing self. This process is based upon identification with the master who embodies the empowered self-object and thus mediates between the cultural demands and the individual who must assimilate them into his or her self by means of projective and introjective identification. The cultural symbols thus also assume a private meaning and cause psychic change, accompanied by both pain and elation. All this is made possible by the inherent capacity of cultural symbols to serve as containers for deeply seated primary anxieties. In this way, a special kind of complementarity is established between the individual healer and the larger socio-cultural context.
As reference material for this discussion, I shall use the vast body of knowledge accumulated in anthropology about these processes and their associated rites and belief systems. I shall try to allow for the broadest perspective possible, in order to avoid excessive focusing on specific illustrations or juicy anecdotes. To do so, I have relied on ethnographic material from the Far East (India, Tibet, Nepal, and Bali), from the West (North America, South America, Alaska, and Siberia),