Med Trop (Mars). 1981 May-Jun; 41(3): 327-38.

[Curing power, or the restoring myth (author's transl)]

Jarret R.

Nowadays, occidental or traditional healers are gaining more attention. The author aimed at demonstrate that the healer can be classified between the physician and the soothsayer. Six manners of healing are described through examples: -- operating allurement (Quesalid); -- trip in the unconscious to subdue its forces (the Chaman); -- domination of Powers under hallucinogen substance(s) (Peytol); -- symbolic efficacity of words (MÃ»u); -- cathartic confession and trance through reintegration into a mythic structure. In every historical technique, a personage is found whose "doing" and "saying" express an exceptional experience, constituting a magical and therapeutic area, facilitating the inscription in a mythical structure, which provides a sense. Several kinds of healers are shortly described, as well as their personality and their patients. The border lines of their power are contiguous to the Sacred and the Religious (which mythical fragments are many "power-allurements") as well as articulated with credulity and belief, and finally built on the pattern of magical thoughts and acts. Healer and/or quack? Healer and/or physician? What are the analogies or differences according to the pattern of the relation "physician-patient"? It is not a "restoring-myth", universal, whose actuality is spotted every time for each act of healing (by a healer)? -- even if this myth is not clearly definite or legible. The power of the healer articulates itself on the pregnancy of this myth which guides the sufferer towards this personage whose power is nothing else but the power the sufferer hopes the healer possesses. It is this hope which the "restoring-myth" contains.