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8. The Call to Health
- Vanderbilt University Press
- Chapter
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I am afraid of this patient.” This thought often echoes in the minds of doctors and therapists, paralyzing the self-healing forces in traumatized persons. I have observed this fear in my own colleagues who, after listening to a patient’s trauma story, flee from the examination room or withdraw into themselves in shock and bewilderment. I have experienced it myself. The fear is based on the irrational belief that the patient will never recover from his or her ordeal. Faced with such trauma, the health professional unwittingly taps into the annihilating energy of the perpetrator. And this energy can be terrifying. The doctor is unprotected and unprepared for this disturbing result. A Renaissance painting by Raphael, The Transfiguration, on display in the Vatican Pinacoteca in Rome, captures on canvas the fear healers face in confronting serious illness. Commissioned in 1517 by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici for the French cathedral of Narbonne, this painting perhaps offers insight into the healing experience because Raphael himself fell ill and died while he was completing it.1 Chapter 8 Raphael portrayed on the canvas two scenes from the New Testament . In the top scene Christ is transfigured into a heavenly spirit, surrounded by Moses, Elijah, and the disciples. In the lower half of the painting the disciples are attempting to heal a boy who is possessed by a demon. The boy is apparently having a seizure while being held by his father. The disciples’ faces are filled with anxiety and dread because their healing has not stopped the boy’s convulsions . The onlookers plead with the apostles for help and even show signs of anger at their ineffectiveness. This rendition of the apostles’ failed healing experience reveals a social context of anarchy, confusion , and hopelessness. The illness—the demon within the boy—is completely in control. The resolution to this crisis of healing comes not in the painting but in the Scriptures. After the disciples have failed to heal the child, Jesus himself drives the demon out of the child, instantly curing the boy: Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.” (Matthew 17:19–21) Here Jesus is saying to his disciples that he is not the only source of healing. Human beings also have this great power if, like the mustard seed, they have faith in their own potential. The mustard seed, though tiny, can grow into a large plant if planted in the proper soil. Jesus is telling his disciples that, in planting the seed—or healing— they must not prejudge the growing environment—the patient. Some growing environments and patients can seem so debilitated Healing Invisible Wounds 189 [3.238.142.134] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:41 GMT) and void of potential for change that the immediate tendency is to give up on them, without even trying. But it is also true that the least likely ground can produce a healthy plant—and that the sickest, most destitute patients can recover. Raphael’s Transfiguration is considered a splendid example among Italian Renaissance paintings of incitamento devozionale, “call to devotion ,” because of its spirituality and reverence. With its emphasis on humanitas, “love for humanity,” the painting shows that mankind too is capable of replicating the divine transformation (upper panel) through the healing act (lower panel). To achieve this call to health, however, we must first overcome our very human fears. a good prognosis For doctors and health professionals to move beyond their fears to a more positive and optimistic place, they must first become aware of the conditions that prevent them from seeing their patients in a different light. Rarely do healing professionals, who spend little time with their patients and are detached from their social realities , need to acknowledge their negative emotions toward their patients. Few therapists interact with patients within the patient’s own social world. Therapists thus protect themselves from observing firsthand what is occurring to the patients in their homes and communities. The concrete realities of the traumatized life remain unseen. Furthermore, for medical practitioners, the trauma story has become largely irrelevant to the healing process. Medical and psychiatric science isolate body parts and pieces of the mind, breaking...