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All systems of healing involve a relationship between a healer and a person who offers himself to be healed. The exact nature of such a relationship is unclear. Even the motivational drive for the participants to come together is open to variegated sociological interpretation. However, for the healing to be successful, both patient and therapist must subscribe to a common belief system about disease and its cure; this further helps make the cure effective regardless of its objective or scientific merit. Indeed, the patient and the therapist are so basically identified that by a simple psychological transformation, the roles of patient and healer can be momentarily reversed. The therapies that pride themselves on their objective and scientific nature, such as behavioral modification approaches, have not been found to be immune from this patient-therapist attraction, and it remains an open question what it is that produces behavior change under their auspices. The “faith dynamics” that operate in classical psychotherapeutic situations are therefore very much present in conditioning and social learning approaches. In internal medicine, where there is no direct intention of influencing the patient's psyche and where the healing approach is organic and instrumental, the physician's personality, placebos, suggestions, and similar procedures are believed to account for as much as 50 percent of his helping armamentarium.
The influence of a person called “therapist” on another person called “patient” is still a great mystery. Frank2 insists that religiomagical methods of behavior change have great commonality with what we have come to accept as scientific psychotherapy. The power structure of the healer, quasi-magical belief systems, faith in rationality