Necessary Fictions: Healing Encounters with a North American Saint

^Necessary Fictions: Healing Encounters with a North American Saint* James J. Preston We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. —Shakespeare, The Tempest (4.1.156-58) Throughout the world for thousands of years the practice of medicine has been lodged in the context of mythopoetic world views. Medical practitioners could hardly be separated from magico-religious technicians of the "sacred." Nor was it possible to define the elaborate pharmacopeias or dietary remedies (some still used today) as a kind of primitive science, since religion, magic, and science were inseparably entwined in more or less homogeneous symbolic systems. Not until the emergence of state level societies, along with an expanding specialization of labor, and finally the Industrial Revolution, would medicine appear, at first glance, to have become detached from its magico-religious roots. This evolution in medical technology, with its consequent alienation of magico-religious sources of healing, has peaked today in overdeveloped Western technological societies . On the one hand, the historical rupture in the evolution of medicine wrenched it free from the shackles of "superstition"; on the other, it deepened the already nascent mind/body split embedded in Western civilization . Despite this legacy of the technological revolution, with its mech- * I wish to thank the two Vice-Postulators for the cause of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha for their many hours of assistance in this research project. Both Rev. Henri Bechard (Canada) and Rev. Joseph McBride (United States) are devoted advocates of Blessed Kateri's cause for canonization. I am also grateful to Professor William Starna of the State University of New York, Oneonta, who first drew my attention to the devotion of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. He has assisted with a critical reading of this manuscript. I absolve all of the above from any responsibility for the conclusions I have reached. Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 42-62 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press James J. Preston 43 anistic impact on medicine, human response to illness, even in complex societies, remains undetached from its deeper, more ancient origins. The current counterrevolution, best articulated as holistic medicine, addresses the curious fact that, despite explosive technological medical advances, somehow individuals remain connected to an older conception of healing, one that defies mechanistic reductionism and interprets illness within a metaphorical frame of reference. Susan Sontag perceives the retention of symbolic and metaphorical interpretations of illness as an unwelcome intrusion in the coping mechanisms modern people employ against serious or terminal conditions, such as tuberculosis and cancer.1 If Sontag's assault on culturally engendered metaphors of illness is to be accepted for resolving emotional problems generated by terminal disorders, then the whole mythopoetic dimension of human history is an elaborate illusion. This further opens the mind/body split by denying the role of metaphor and symbolic systems in the healing process. The purpose of this paper is to move in an opposite direction, toward a review of the fictive dimension of healing. I shall demonstrate, through data collected on the healing powers of a contemporary Native American candidate for sainthood, that mythopoetic fictions continue to thrive among contemporary Americans and that healing fictions are necessary components of any medical system that incorporates the whole person. Further, this fictive dimension of healing is not necessarily removed by elaboration of complex medical technologies. Fictive Reality The human world is infused with the substance of dream. All the "realities" we perceive to be concrete and incontestable are heavily imbued with the stuff of fiction. As symbol-making animals, we cannot stop the imaginary flow within us that intersects continuously with physical impulses from the environment. While we may, at times, consider our surface perceptions of the physical world to be ultimately real, something reminds us that even these are approximations of a deeper, invisible reality, understandable only through metaphors and the mythopoetic dimension of the human imagination. Elsewhere I have developed the concept of fictive reality to refer to imaginai metaphors employed universally to penetrate the surface, sensory level of reality. Fictive reality consists of 44 NECESSARY FICTIONS the myriad images we construct [to] impose . . . order in an otherwise chaotic world. [It] does not refer to...