This Chapter from Spring Publication's book  (ISBN 0-88214-304-2) is reprinted  by permission of Spring Publications. If you would like to order the book directly from the Publisher you can click on Chiron Publications, the Company is currently working on their Web Site and it may not be quite finished yet . This material was copyrighted in 1971 by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig and is in its 9th printing by Spring Publications. All rights are reserved.

Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, Ph.D., is a well known  jungian analyst, and the author of many articles and books on psychology. He recently published a new book entitled The Emptied Soul (ISBN: 0-88214-371-9), also through Spring Publications.

This reading does not require a familiarity with the terminology of Jungian Psychology. It is intended for psychotherapists, doctors, clinical social workers, and considers the pitfalls those who work in these professions have the unconscious tendency to fall into.. 

Deliver us from evil?

Most professions serve the health and well-being of mankind in one way or another. But the activities of the doctor, priest, teacher, psychotherapist and social worker involve very specialized and deliberate attempts to help the unfortunate, the ill, those who have somehow lost their way. In the following chapters I should like to describe how and why the members of these "ministering professions" can also do the greatest damage - harm caused directly by their very desire to help.

I work as a medical psychotherapist. In preparing psychiatric reports I come into regular contact with social workers and often feel myself to be one of them. Many of my own patients are teachers and clergymen. While writing this book I was very intent on seeing the beam in my own eye and not only the mote in the other fellow's. That is why I have concentrated chiefly on the Power problems of the doctor and Psychotherapist. To introduce, however, the subject of destructiveness in the ministering professions, I have also explored some of the Psychological background of social work and have touched very briefly on the activities of clergymen and teachers.

Only in writing of doctors and Psychotherapists, however, have I tried to explore in detail the possibility of overcoming the fundamental problems of their professions. It is my own house that I would like to set in order, leaving my neighbors to tend to theirs, but power problems and their mastery are similar in all the ministering professions, although each has its specific characteristics. This small book is therefore addressed not only to doctors and Psychotherapists, but also to social workers) teachers and the clergy. For this reason I have tried to use a minimum of Psychological terms which are not generally familiar. Wherever I have had to deviate from this practice, I have added a brief explanation of the specialized term.

It is my hope that a member of a non medical ministering profession will try in his own way to deal more deeply with the basic, personal problems of his own field and to indicate Possible solutions.

Literary references are practically absent from this book. My chief aim is to rouse the reader not to read still more, but rather to turn inward and examine himself. I have also refrained from trying to prove my assertions by citing experiments, statistics and quotations from other authors. I hope to stimulate by presenting my own experiences with myself, my colleagues and co-workers. I am not necessarily interested in proving myself right.

The following pages contain frequent use of the words -- analysis, psychotherapy, analyst and psychotherapist. To prevent misunderstanding: By psychotherapy I mean, quite generally, treatment dealing with the psyche; this ranges from psychological counseling lasting a few hours, up to an extended analysis of perhaps several hundred hours during which the most profound depths of the unconscious are explored and such phenomena as transference, countertransference and the relation between analyst and analysand are discussed in detail. The analyst thus engages in a specialized form of psychotherapy. The power problems confronting the analyst and the general psychotherapist are basically the same. It is therefore unimportant for the reader whether, in any particular passage, we refer to psychotherapy or analysis.

A final prefatory thought: We of the ministering professions shall not be delivered from evil. But we can learn to deal with it.
 
 

Psychotherapist: Charlatan and false prophet

Psychotherapy in its present form is relatively young. The model upon which the therapist bases his activities are derived from various other professions and cannot be understood except in relation to more ancient arts. Like it or not, psychotherapy is related to medicine. The professional and ethical models which guide the physician are in part those of the psychotherapist as well, and the dark sides of the analyst are to a certain extent linked to the doctorly character of his work.

The physician undertakes to help the sick and the suffering. The Hippocratic Oath reads in part: "The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patients according to my ability and judgment, and not for their hurt or for any wrong... Whatsoever house I enter, there will I go for the benefit of the sick, refraining from all wrongdoing or corruption... I shall regard my life and my Art as sacred." In its general outlines, this lofty conception of the doctor is familiar to most people of the Western world.

The dark sides of a physician's activities are not to be found in the Hippocratic Oath. They were ably caricatured in Dr. Knock, a play by Jules Romain. Dr. Knock has no wish to heal others selflessly; he uses his medical knowledge for his personal advantage, not even hesitating to turn healthy people into sick ones. His philosophy is, "There are no healthy people, only sick people who don't know they are ill." Dr. Knock is a charlatan. By this term I do not mean someone who uses unorthodox or officially unaccepted methods to help the ailing, but rather doctors who at best fool their patients and themselves or, at worst, their patients alone. They help themselves, financially and in terms of prestige, more than they do the sick people seeking their aid. Understood in this sense, the activities of a charlatan may in any particular case be beneficial or harmful or entirely neutral.

Charlatanism is a form of shadow which accompanies the physician everywhere. It is one of his dark brothers. As such it may live in him or outside of him. Some doctors see this shadow in the person of the obscure quack or "nature healer." But most physicians themselves frequently fall victim to the charlatan shadow in the course of their professional activities. Patients exert considerable pressure on the doctor to betray the Hippocratic model and act instead as a Dr. Knock. All the countless complaints of indeterminate origin with which the general practitioner must deal every day, and for which no genuine therapy has yet been found - chronic fatigue, certain pains of the back and joints, vague heart and stomach disorders, chronic headache, etc. - are commonly treated by pseudo-scientific means. By not pointing out the emotional components to those patients whose bodily complaints are largely psychic in origin, the average physician encourages his patients to emphasize even more the somatic aspects of their emotional problems. If the symptoms improve, he is the great healer; if they deteriorate, it is obvious that the patient has failed to carry out his instructions.

A lovely historical example of the operation of this charlatan shadow, dating from the 11th century, may be found in the seriously intended hints offered by Archimatheus of Salerno, who wrote: "To the patient promise a cure, and to the members of his family give warning of grave illness. If the patient fails to recover, it will be said that you foresaw his death; if he is cured, your renown will grow."

But the psychotherapist draws his models only partly from the field of medicine. The other vocation which influences his ideals is that of the priest.

The image of the man of God has undergone many changes in the course of history and is not the same among all religions. The important image for our purposes is that of the religious leader of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He is supposed to be a man who, at least now and again, is in contact with God. Not all clergymen are expected, like the Old Testament prophets, to receive their vocation directly from the Deity, but they are expected to sincerely try to act on God's behalf and in accordance with His will.

The dark side of this noble image of the man of God is the lying hypocrite, the man who preaches not because he believes but in order to gain influence and power. As in the case of the doctor and his patients, so with the clergyman it is frequently the members of his congregation who involuntarily activate his dark brother. They exert considerable pressure on him to play the hypocrite. Doubt is the companion of faith. But no one wants to hear doubt expressed by a clergyman; we all have doubts enough of our own. Thus the priest often has no alternative but to be the hypocrite now and again, to hide his own doubts and to mask a momentary inner emptiness with high-flown words. If his character is weak, this can become a habitual stance.

A man of God in the ideal sense must bear witness to his faith by his actions. He cannot prove what he preaches. He is expected to provide by his own behavior a foundation for the faith which he represents. And this opens the door to another of the clergyman's dark brothers - the one who wishes to present himself to the world (and to himself) as better than he really is.

The shadow of the false prophet accompanies the clergyman all his life. Sometimes it appears externally, as the preacher of some obscure sect or as a colleague grown popular through demagoguery; at other times it rises up inside himself. Many modern clergymen, however, have a strong fear of this hypocritical, false prophet shadow. They refuse to be characterized as "men of God" through inner or outer traits; they deliver their sermons dressed in everyday clothes, in an attitude of casual social converse.

We analysts deal very often with disturbances of health for which, in terms of both treatment and possible cure, accepted controls of an experimental nature are hardly possible - neurosis and psychosis. For these are virtually impossible to accumulate statistics on successful treatment. What constitutes improvement? What deterioration? Should social adjustment serve as a criterion? The ability to work? The increase and intensification, or decrease and amelioration of neurotic symptoms? The patient's subjective feelings? Progress in psychological development, in the individuation process, in contact with the unconscious? Even the criteria are uncertain, as opposed to a straight forward somatic complaint where a restoration of functioning provides an unequivocal yardstick for the success of treatment. In the case of emotional problems, including psychosomatic ailments, generally whatever criteria are used provide unsatisfactory results. Even with large statistical samplings, it is very difficult to make qualitative judgments about the course of the disturbances involved, whether one treats them with intensive psychotherapy, with tranquilizers, or with nothing at all.

The nearness or remoteness from the 'self,' from the 'meaning of life,' a better or worse contact with the unconscious may be criteria which can best indicate the success of psychotherapy. But how are such factors to be measured and statistically investigated?

Anyone can register a success in treatment if he happens to be on hand at the right moment, sticks with a patient long enough, and is fortunate enough to stumble on someone looking for help whose condition would have improved anyway, in terms of one or more of the criteria we have enumerated. The charlatan shadow of the analyst's medically oriented aspect can thus operate more or less freely. Moreover, such terms as sick and healthy, in need of treatment or not, are in general far more difficult to apply to a person's emotional state than to his physical condition. The psychic development of every individual is highly complex, and each of us is somewhat neurotic. A psychotherapist operating like Dr. Knock could prove quite easily to nearly anyone that a yearlong analysis is unavoidable. The matter can be pushed so far that everyone who has never been in analysis feels himself somehow sick or at least not completely developed psychologically.

The analyst's shadow is further enlarged by the traits which the psychotherapist share with the clergyman. We analysts, regardless to which school of psychology we subscribe, advocate no specific faith or organized religion, but like the clergyman we often do stand for a certain basic attitude of life. We represent no philosophy, but indeed a Psychology to which we adhere out of conviction, since in our lives and in our own analyses we have had experiences which persuaded and formed us in terms of that psychology. The Jungian analyst, for instance, has been deeply shaken by the encounter with the irrational and the unconscious.

There are few psychological insights, however, which can be statistically proven in the empirical sense; they can only be confirmed by the sincere, honest testimony of other seekers. Our only proof is the experience of ourselves and others, since psychic reality cannot be grasped statistically or causally in the sense of the natural sciences. Here we find ourselves in a position very similar to that of the clergyman. But such utter reliance on the personal experience of oneself and others inevitably raises grave doubts. What if we and others like us have deceived ourselves? There are, after all, many other men of integrity, psychotherapists who advocate completely different schools of thought. Are they all deceiving themselves? Are they all blind? Or could the situation be as it is described, in Mary McCarthy's novel The Group, by a psychiatrist who has decided to give up his profession to pursue research on the biochemistry of the brain: "That is why I am getting out of it (psychiatry); if you stay, you have your choice of becoming a cynic or a naive fraud." Are we capable of admitting these doubts to ourselves and the world around us? Or do we psychotherapists do with our doubts and fears what the clergyman often does with his - suppress them and keep the lid on tight?

Again, like the clergyman, we work with our souls, with our selves; methods, techniques and apparatus are secondary. We, our honesty and genuineness, our personal contact with the unconscious and the irrational -these are our tools. There is great pressure to represent these tools as better than they really are, and thus to become the victim of our psychotherapeutic shadow.

There is still another parallel to the priest: We analysts are often forced into a role of omniscience. We work with the unconscious, with dreams and the psyche, realms in which the transcendental manifests itself - at least in the view of many laymen and even many therapists. And so it is expected that we know more about ultimate matters than does the common mortal. If we are weak, we eventually come to believe ourselves that we are more deeply initiated into life and death than are our fellow men.

It is not only the more noble images of medicine and the priesthood which converge in the analyst, but their shadow aspects as well, the charlatan and the false prophet.

The problem of the analyst's shadow is further intensified by something which is specific to him and not necessarily linked to the basic models of other professions. It is the fact that one of the psychotherapist's tasks is to help his patients in becoming more conscious. Just as a knowledge of God plays a central role in the ideal model of the priest, and the selfless healer in the image of the physician, a crucial position in the model of the psychotherapist is taken by a figure which we might term the maker of consciousness or the bringer of the light. But professional images always have a dark aspect which represents the opposite of the bright ideal. The analyst's professional shadow contains not only the charlatan and the false prophet, but also the counter pole to the bringer of the light, a figure who lives completely in the unconscious and strives for the opposite of the analyst's conscious goals. We have a paradoxical situation in which the analyst is more threatened by the unconscious than is the non analyst. The honest psychotherapist is shocked from time to time by the realization that he has been operating completely from the unconscious in his work.

The analyst often receives no warning from his patient when he is being unconsciously destructive. For the patient is himself oriented toward the charlatan and false prophet in the analyst and encourages these aspects. A therapist often has the impression that his work is going splendidly, the deeper he falls into his own shadow. just as the physician is forced into the role of charlatan by his patients, and the clergyman into that of false prophet by his congregation, the analyst is repeatedly pushed into these unconscious roles by his analysands.

An important objection might be voiced here. If he is professionally sincere, an analyst remains in constant contact with his own unconscious, carefully studying his dreams and any other statements the unconscious may make. One would think this would certainly prevent him from falling into the role of charlatan, false prophet and unconsciously destructive analyst. But that is not the case. Like other people, we analysts often have something like a blind spot with regard to our own shadow. We see it neither in our dreams nor in our actions. Frequently even our friends cannot see our shadow for a time, becoming as blind as we are ourselves, resulting in something resembling a "folie a deux." In such cases enemies can be very useful; we should study their statements with care. There are a few rules which we use in interpreting the statements of the unconscious. But in the final analysis such interpretation is an art rather than a craft, and our own personal equation may repeatedly mislead us into overlooking something crucial.

There is also the difficulty that statements from the unconscious, like those of the Delphic Oracle, are almost invariably ambivalent. And whether one chooses to understand the unconscious in one way or in another, depends on the Self. What happened to Croesus with the Oracle can happen to us as well; that is, we may interpret the unconscious in keeping with our ego-wishes and thus misunderstand it. Anticipating some later remarks, I would like at this point to just touch on the question of what consequences may be drawn from the fact that we sometimes fall prey to our professional shadow.

We demand truthfulness from our patients. We help the patient in his sincere confrontation with the unconscious through our explanations, our dream interpretations, but above all by our own attitude and manner. By looking our own professional shadow in the eye, we show our analysands that the unpleasant sides of life must also be faced. As I have tried to indicate, a very important role in our analytical work, and thus in our relations to our patients, is played by the shadow figures of the completely unconscious charlatan and false prophet. If a patient gets wind of this shadow, it is crucial for the further progress of therapy that we be capable of admitting to him our own backsliding into the unconscious and the professional shadow, no matter how painful such an admission may be. The patient, after all, must also face up to painful insights. By constantly trying to spot the workings of our psychotherapeutic shadow, to catch it red-handed, we help our patients in their own confrontations with the dark brother. If we fail to do this, all the patient learns from us is how to fool himself and the world, and the value of the analysis becomes highly questionable

The problem of the professional shadow touches other fundamentals of psychotherapeutic activity. As analysts we constantly deal with severe suffering, with uncommon and tragic destinies. Often what is required of us is to help a troubled person to understand himself as far as possible, not only to take up contact with the unconscious but also simply to bear the tragic aspects of life in all their incomprehensibility. In order to help an ailing person in a tragic life situation - in a situation which remains tragic even if contact with the unconscious improves - we must also be able to face our own tragic situation, the tragedy that, the more we try to be good psychotherapists and to help our patients to broader- consciousness, the more we repeatedly slip into the opposite of our bright professional ideal.

In a certain sense the fate of every person who is striving for something - and our patients are generally such people - has a distinctly tragic side to it. The very opposite of what one wants to attain or avoid is repeatedly being constellated. This is true in the collective and in the individual. The French Revolution sought to free men and brought the Napoleonic tyranny. In the I 9th century many Swiss men interested in singing tried to promote it as an activity by founding male choirs; but in fact the existence of these male choruses completely destroyed singing as a popular pastime among the general populace, making it instead something which was done only within the organized framework of a choir under the direction of a conductor. Christianity, preaching peace and love, caused bloody crusades, and the crusaders, fired by a desire to conquer the Holy Land, first tried to exterminate the Jews of Europe. C. G. Jung repeatedly pointed out that, whenever a bright psychic content becomes lodged in consciousness, its opposite is constellated in the unconscious and tries to do harm from that vantage point. The physician becomes a charlatan precisely because he wants to heal as many people as possible; the clergyman becomes a hypocrite and false prophet precisely because he wants to bring people to the true faith, and the psychotherapist becomes an unconscious charlatan and false prophet although he works day and night on becoming more conscious.

My statements thus far may seem rather gloomy, like those of a Calvinist preacher or a theologian of ancient Iceland -- if there had been theologians in those days. Odin does what he can, although he knows full well that the roots of the world are being slowly but surely destroyed by the serpent.

But the existence of the psychotherapist's shadow also has aspects which are somewhat less tragic. The actions of a therapist operating from the shadow are not always negative. Charlatans often do more to ameliorate suffering than respectable, earnest physicians. And a therapist temporarily falling into the unconscious and operating completely from the shadow side, can by his external sureness and definiteness help many patients, at least temporarily, by taking the edge off their more acute suffering.

One of my analysands once had the following dream: In a newspaper he saw a caricature of me, done in the Daumier style, and under it were the words, "Unfortunately our colleague Dr. A.G.C. has misused the noble art of medicine, as a charlatan, to his own advantage."

At the time I did not think the dream actually referred to me, but interpreted it as the expression of a resistance based on collective prejudices against psychology, psychotherapy and the unconscious. I rejected the criticism leveled at me, the portrait of my professional shadow as a caricature a la Daumier, and took it as a subjective problem of the patient. In the course of the analysis we subsequently returned to this dream and saw quite clearly that it referred to my own professional shadow problem. But my patient also said he was glad that we had failed to understand the dream completely when it first came up. The assuredness with which I had referred the dream back to him, though it was based on my own unconsciousness, had had a calming effect upon him. At that time, he said, he could not have borne the strain of having to deal with my shadow problems as well as his own.

I could well imagine a very critical reaction to the remarks I have made so far in this chapter. Are they not perhaps very destructive? Why should we try at all to become more conscious, if we are doomed to fall back again and again into the most unpleasant kinds of unconsciousness? Why not "live and let live," cheerfully unconscious, and simply try to help our patients with medication? For those who are concerned with it professionally, the effort to become more conscious appears condemned to tragic failure. It is perhaps with very good reason that certain East Asian religions try to cut loose completely from the demands and strivings of the ego, to free the individual from earthly concerns so that he can approach Nirvana. All the ego's efforts, no matter how earnestly intended, only do harm in the long run.

But Europeans cannot and will not renounce the ego. They must take its strivings and its goals very seriously. The self - the meaningful and purposive center of the psyche, according to Jung - can in general only appear if the ego is not brushed aside and killed off as insignificant, but runs aground in tragic involvement.

King Oedipus tried desperately to live and act according to the will of the gods - that is, the unconscious. Apollo informed him, by means of the oracle, that he would shed his father's blood and marry his mother. To avoid this, young Oedipus left his father Polybos and his mother Merope, unaware that they were his adoptive rather than his real parents, since they had never told him about his true lineage. But his deliberate attempt to avoid the horrible and cursed deeds predicted for him led to the opposite. At the end of the tragedy, self-condemned, he describes himself as "the most cursed of men, hated by all the gods." Having blinded himself, he cries: "Nothing is left for sight. Nor anything to love. Nor shall the sound of greetings any more fall pleasant on my ear. Away! Out of the land, away! Banishment, banishment!"

But it is precisely in this tragic breakdown of Oedipus' ego that the self, the divine spark in man, begins to shine through. As in every tragedy, one senses here a meaning which is no longer ego-oriented. Something similar is felt by every analyst - and with him, by his patients - who tries to be related to the unconscious, to live as consciously as possible and to practice his profession in these terms. And in doing so he must increasingly fall into his own shadow, and time and again play the charlatan and false prophet to his patient

Up to now my remarks about the psychotherapist's dark brother have been perhaps too general. In the next chapter we shall deal more closely with the charlatan, the false prophet and other dark figures, and see in practical terms what happens when the psychotherapist falls into the unconscious.
 
 

The "Healer Patient" archetype and power

The "healer-patient" relationship is as fundamental as is that of man-woman, father-son, mother-child. It is archetypal, in the sense expounded by C. G. Jung; i.e., it is an inherent, potential form of human behavior. In archetypal situations the individual perceives and acts in accordance with a basic schema inherent in himself, but which in principle is the same for all men.

Does power lie hidden somewhere in the archetype of healer patient? Before we try to answer this question, we must first briefly sketch the many meanings which the word "power" can have.

In a human relationship one subject confronts another. Each relates to the other as a subject. In a relationship in which power is a dominant factor, one subject tries to make an object out of the other, while the latter subjects himself to the former. That is, the object can now be manipulated by the subject for his own purposes. Such a situation enhances the subject's sense of his own importance and relieves the object of responsibility. This is one kind of power. Another variety is "self-deification." Only God, or the Gods, have the right to dominate men. A human possessed by a "god complex" tries, like a God, to dominate other humans. This kind of power has a numinous quality and is exceedingly dangerous for both the ruler and the ruled. The ceasars, Napoleon and Hitler were examples of such self-deification. This is the kind of power which Jakob Burckhardt described as evil per se.

The modern cult surrounding the physician is at least partly an expression of this power. In using the term cult I mean the public veneration and social prestige enjoyed by the doctor as he who "has life and death, sickness and health in his hands." It finds expression in novels about doctors, in biographies such as that of San Michele, in popular films and TV series.

This cult and the power which physicians can exercise in hospitals are linked and mutually reinforcing. The dictatorial head doctor, whose moods terrorize patients and before whose every grumble nurses and interns quake, is a familiar figure. Patients do not dare to pose their questions for fear of being brusquely treated. Nevertheless many nurses, students and patients admire such a show of power and respect the great, mighty healer as he strides like a demi-god through the hospital corridors followed by a swarm of assistants.

But something is wrong here. A cheap note seems to be creeping into my prose. The medical novels and memoirs, the TV plays about hospital life, are generally sentimental, in poor taste and devoid of any artistic value. There is something impressive about a politician who exercises his power, a union leader who can paralyze an entire industry with a word, an industrial manager whose decisions affect the lives of thousands, a general on whom the life and death of countless soldiers may depend. But a physician who abuses his position to exercise power seems like a ridiculous little tyrant, overblown and morally deplorable. He keeps his patients waiting for hours while he chats leisurely with the nurses, gives the ill a minimum of information about their condition and issues directives without explanation. He strides through the wards like some oriental potentate overseeing his helpless slaves. All of this seems petty, with nothing splendid about it.

At this point we face the question of the nature of the physician's power. Health and sickness, the healer and the ill doctor and patient, are all archetypal motifs. Does power belong to the archetype of healer-patient as it does to the archetype of king-subject? If this were really the case, the exercise of such power would have nothing cheap or mean about it. An archetype is a primal factor, a fundamental reality, and as such it cannot be petty in nature. Or is the kind of power which I have described above in the relation between patient and doctor exclusively negative and destructive, an attempt to make an object of a subject and to degrade the humanity of the partner in the relationship? It does not seem tenable to maintain that we doctors are so strongly guided by destructive forces. We chose our profession in order to be able to heal; it can hardly be assumed that we are primarily driven by such destructive motives. Or are we perhaps dealing with a form of self-deification, with a god complex which is commonly activated in the physician? This would be a possibility, but here again the pettiness and tastelessness of the phenomenon seems to argue against such an assumption. To try to become like God is a great transgression, but it has nothing petty about it. Nevertheless the paltriness associated with the power of the doctor cannot be a mere matter of chance. The various kinds of power which I have described seem inapplicable to the problem we are considering.
 

The splitting of the archetype

Many diverse characteristics of the archetype have been dealt with in psychological literature. But one aspect seems to have been relatively ignored. In order to avoid any misunderstandings I shall, in somewhat different words than before, again go into the nature of the archetype.

An archetype may be defined as an inborn potentiality of behavior. Human beings react archetypally to someone or something when faced with a typical, constantly recurring situation. A mother or father reacts archetypally to a son or daughter, a man reacts archetypally to a woman, etc. In this sense certain archetypes have two poles, so to speak. The basic situation of the archetype contains a polarity.

We do not know, of course, precisely how archetypal behavior came about. Perhaps one pole of the archetype was originally in the individual and the other pole outside him in his fellow man. But in human psychology as we know it, both poles are contained within the same individual. Each of us is born with both poles of the archetype within us. If one pole of an archetype is constellated in the outside world, the inner and opposite pole is constellated as well.

A child awakens maternal behavior in its mother. In the psyche of every woman there is the inborn potentiality of motherly behavior within the mother-child situation, which in some mysterious way must mean that the child is already contained within the mother, somewhat in Goethe's sense when he wrote: "Did our eye not contain sun's power, how could it perceive the sun at all? " Perhaps we should not speak of a mother archetype, a child archetype or a father archetype. It might be better to talk of a mother-child or father-child archetype.

 Carrying this line of thought further I would suggest that there is no special healer archetype or patient archetype. The healer and the patient are two aspects of the same. When a person becomes sick, the healer-patient archetype is constellated. The sick man seeks an external healer, but at the same time the intra-psychic healer is activated. We often refer to this intra-psychic healer in the ill as the "healing factor." It is the physician within the patient himself and its healing action is as great as that of the doctor who appears on the scene externally. Neither wounds nor diseases can heal without the curative action of the inner heart. It is commonly said of a patient that "He doesn't want to get well." This not-wanting-to-get-well does not refer to the ego's will, of course, We should not say "He doesn't want to get well." A more apt description of the phenomenon would be, "His inner healer seems to be weak."

Many ailments require the ministrations of an external physician. But no physician can be effective without the inner doctor. A physician can stitch up a wound, but something in the patient's body and psyche must help if an ailment is be overcome.

It is not very difficult to imagine the healing factor in the patient. But what about the physician? Here we encounter the archetype of the "wounded healer." Chiron, the Centaur who taught Aescalpius the healing arts, himself suffered from incurable wounds. In Babylon there was a dog-goddess with two names: as Gula she was death and as Labartu, healing. In India Kali is the goddess of the pox and at the same time its cure. The mythological image of the wounded healer is very widespread. Psychologically this means not only that the patient has a physician within himself but also that there is a patient in the doctor.

We began this chapter with the problem of power. Let us see if the concept of the split archetype can cast a sharper light on this question. It is not easy for the human psyche to bear the tension of polarities. The ego loves clarity and tries to eradicate inner ambivalence. This need for the unequivocal can bring about a certain splitting of polar archetypes. One pole may be repressed and continue operating in the unconscious, possibly causing psychic disturbances. The repressed part of the archetype can be projected onto the outer world. The patient, for instance, can project his inner healer on the doctor treating him and the physician can project his own wounds onto the patient. This projection of one pole of the archetype onto the outer world may bring momentary satisfaction. But in the long run it means that the psychic process is blocked. In such a situation a patient, for example, may no longer be concerned with his own cure. The doctor, the nurses, the hospital will heal him. The patient no longer has any responsibility. Consciously and unconsciously he begins to rely completely on the doctor to bring about improvement. He hands his own healing factor over to the doctor and, so to speak, sits back and takes it easy. Such a patient may follow the doctor's orders or not, he may take his medicine or flush it down the drain. The large out-patient clinics swarm with patients like this; they always suffer from something, and there are no signs in them of a will to health or what we might term a conscience of health. They follow the doctor's suggestions or rebel against them, like school children who believe that only the teacher need be active in the process of learning.

In the doctor the repression of one pole of the archetype leads to the reverse situation. He begins to have the impression that weakness, illness and wounds have nothing to do with him. He feels himself to be the strong healer; the only wounds are those of the patients, while he himself is secure against them; the poor creatures known as patients live in a world completely different from his own. He develops into a physician without wounds and can no longer constellate the healing factor in his patients. He becomes only-a-doctor and his patients are only-patients. It is no longer the wounded healer who confronts the ill and constellates their inner healing factor. The situation becomes crystal clear: On the one hand there is the doctor, healthy and strong, and on the other hand the patient, sick and weak.
 

The closing of the split through power

Many doctors choose their profession out of a deep inner need. Even if a physician tries to repress one pole of the archetype, to project illness completely onto the patient and identify himself exclusively with the healer pole, he cannot get off so lightly. Patients, sickness and wounds leave him no peace; whether he like it or not, they belong to him. A split archetype tries persistently to return to its original polarity.

Reunification with the "missing" aspect of the polarity may take place through power. The doctor may turn his patient into an object of his power drive. Now it becomes clear why the power exercised by the physician makes such a cheap and shabby impression. It is the result of a partial psychological and moral failure by both doctor and patient. The doctor is no longer able to see his own wounds, his own potential for illness; he sees sickness only in the other. He objectifies illness, distances himself from his own weakness, elevates himself and degrades the patient. He becomes powerful through psychological failure rather than through strength. One pole of the archetype is repressed, then projected, then reunited through power. The patient can do precisely the same thing, in the reverse.

At this point we might ask whether there are other cases in which the split polarity of the archetype is rejoined through power. I do not know whether this happens with all archetypes, but it seems to be a frequent phenomenon. For example, when the mother-daughter archetype is split the power problem begins to play a dominant role in the relationship between mother and daughter. In practical terms this means that the mother becomes only-a-mother, forgetting that she has an inner daughter as well, something "daughterly" in herself. Instead she tries to be the perfect mother, without weaknesses. In such a case the daughter becomes a total daughter, helpless and completely reliant on the strong mother. The mother rules her daughter with power. No "motherliness" is constellated in the daughter herself; nothing maternal inside her begins to care for herself. And no daughter is constellated in the mother. The relationship is that between a strong, dominating mother and a weak, dependent daughter. The desire for power and the state of subjugation are here the expression of an attempt to reunify the split archetype.

So the physician tries to reunite the split archetype through power and the patient through acknowledgment of this power, through his subjection or childish dependence. This manifestation of power has its psychologically positive side as well, for the doctor is at least trying to reunite the two poles of the archetype. The petty, tyrannical doctor is in his way wrestling with the fundamental medical problem. In this respect he is better than the jovial healer who no longer even takes the trouble to at least try to dominate his patients. This cheerful, relaxed fellow has either repressed one pole of the archetype so severely that it can no longer be projected, or else he has never really been concerned with the basic problem of the physician and his choice of profession was merely superficial.

Despite this positive aspect, however, the consequences of the split archetype of the wounded healer are in many respects very damaging for both patient and doctor. The sick man becomes the perennial patient; his inner healing factor is no longer activated. The physician becomes a self-important, narrow-minded man blind to his own psychological development. His ability to constellate the healing factor in his patients is greatly reduced; he believes that his primary function is to make it possible for the patient's own inner healing factor to come into play. In a certain respect he becomes a priest who believes that he is-far removed from the Greek physician, who maintained that only the divine healer can help while the human doctor merely can facilitate its appearance.

Here we should clarify a possible point of misunderstanding. When I speak of the wounded healer I do not mean a doctor who identifies himself with the individual patient.

That would be pure sentimentality and would constitute only an external reunification of the poles of the archetype. Such an identification is a sign of ego weakness, an hysterical method of uniting the opposites.

The image of the wounded healer symbolizes an acute and painful awareness of sickness as the counter pole to the physician's health, a lasting and hurtful certainty of the degeneration of his own body and mind. This sort of experience makes of the doctor the patient's brother rather than his master. Everyone has within him the health sickness archetype. But it has a very special fascination for the physician with a true vocation. This is why he chooses the medical profession. The average doctor does not enter upon his career for the sake of an easy way to gain power and, perhaps, at the same time to help mankind. Doctors are often accused of being more interested in disease than in cure. This is a half-truth. Physicians are interested in the health-sickness archetype and wish to experience it. For a great variety of psychological reasons, those men and women who choose a career in medicine are attracted by the healer-patient archetype. Unfortunately not all of those who choose are strong enough to continually experience both ends of the polarity.

To concretize what we have said thus far let us take a look at medical students. In the course of their studies they often go through a phase in which they believe themselves to be suffering from all those diseases about which they must learn. They hear about tuberculosis and discover in themselves all its symptoms; they encounter cancer patients and begin to fear that they too are suffering from it. This psychological phenomenon is often understood as a neurosis. Older doctors smile at their fear-ridden students, recall that they went through a similar phase themselves and ascribe no importance to it. But this so-called neurotic phase can be a turning point for the medical student. It is the moment when he begins to understand that all these ailments are in himself. Thus he becomes the "wounded healer." Very often, however, the burden is too great and the pole of sickness is repressed. But if he is capable of experiencing sickness as an existential possibility in himself, and of integrating it, then the student becomes a true "wounded healer."

Once again I wish to caution against the conclusion that power exercised in the medical profession is completely negative. It is true that the more power exerted, the less the genuine healer appears. But I cannot emphasize often enough that it is better for a doctor to try to reunite the split archetype through power than simply to ignore the split-off pole entirely.

Now let us briefly concern ourselves with today's physician. Modern medicine is highly technical and specialized. Our fantasy of the old country doctor, intimately familiar with his patient's entire family, may serve as the prototype carrier of an unsplit healer-patient archetype. He had no power, but when he arrived feverish children were calmed. Perhaps he wore shabby, rumpled clothes; his appearance may have been modest; often he had a leaning toward alcoholism trying to avoid through alcohol the tremendous tension inevitably suffered by a man constantly experiencing both poles of the archetype. But he had no delusions of grandeur; he is for us an image of the good "wounded healer."

Those of conservative temperament may be inclined to believe that the modern physician is in particular danger of being unable to experience the whole archetype. At first glance he may seem like a specialized technician doing assembly-line work in a hospital. It may seem that the old doctor was the wounded healer par excellence, but the modern, technically-oriented specialist tends to fend off one pole of the archetype. The archetype operates, however, in the greatest variety of ways. It is inner reality as well as outer. The medicine man in the bush had his own methods, which were not comparable to those of the educated doctor in ancient Greece. The medieval physician, doling out Arab potions, in turn worked in a manner entirely different from that of the 19th-century family doctor making his rounds in horse and buggy. The surgeon in the first and second world wars had his own way of living the archetype, and the highly trained specialist at the Mayo Clinic equally has his own particular way of operating. But all of these, regardless of how divergent their techniques and methods may be, can nevertheless either live the entire archetype or repress one of its poles. They can all be wounded healers or petty tyrants. Which one comes to the fore depends not on whether they are a 19th-century family doctor or a narrowly specialized staff member in a modern hospital. The splitting of the archetype is an inner event, depending less on the external situation than on the doctor's own psychological development and capacities.

To further clarify what I am trying to say I should like to refer to one last image, though fully aware that it may be impertinent: that of Christ. Jesus Christ is a historical and religious reality and therefore only with the greatest reservations is he to be understood as a psychological symbol. But where better than in him can we see the "wounded healer"? He was not only a healer of sickness on the physical level but a healer of man's existential sickness in sin and death.

Jesus Christ was wounded and bore the sins of man. He came to heal the world of sin and death, yet he bore all sins and had to die. He refused ever to make use of power, acknowledging only God his father as powerful. Thus he is the wounded healer in the highest sense. By comparison the physician is a mere dwarf who throws himself into the struggle between life and death, sickness and health. But the doctor can only work creatively if he bears in mind that, despite all his knowledge and technique, in the final analysis he must always strive to constellate the healing factor in the patient. Without this he can accomplish nothing. And he can only truly activate this healing factor if he bears sickness as an existential possibility within himself. He is less effective when he tries to unite the two poles of the archetype through petty power - but even then he will be more effective than if he completely ignores, or cannot grasp the significance of, this split in the archetype.
 

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