SOUL MEDICINE

The author describes himself is a transformational psychotherapist, international pilgrimage guide, educator, author and poet, who has been steeped in Greek culture since the Iliad fell into his hands at the age of 10 (p. 35). He reminds readers that the practice of medicine and psychology grew out of the ancient Greek healing tradition, said to have been founded by Asklepios, god of healing and dreams. At a session with medical students, the author describes how no one had heard of Asklepios, and only a few of Hippocrates as the inventor of medicine. A student added that there was no medicine before Hippocrates – medicine and healing did not yet exist (!). Correspondingly, despite the enthusiasm of the students for a course on the medical use of dreams, this request was dismissed by the Dean on the grounds that there was no time for non-scientific studies. Such narrow views can lead to misinterpretation, mismanagement and mistreatment where social wounds traceable to our shared cultural conditions are diagnosed as individual pathology to be medicated and controlled. (p. 138)

The dean’s remark reveals and typifies the outlook of modern scientific medicine, characterised by Robert Wickiewicz when he explained that he was ‘only educated as an advanced technician manipulating mechanical parts without any vision of healing or wholeness or the mysteries we come from.’ (p. 2) The focus is exclusively on the outer, the material, on fixing the symptom, unconnected with any inner or symbolic realm. This book, by contrast, ‘affirms the primacy of soul in human life and explicates the principles and practices by which it is restored, made whole and healed – especially revelatory dreams connecting us with mysteries and the transpersonal. The approach combines philosophy, literature, arts, ritual, myth, and culture with modern depth psychology, often in the context of visits to ancient Greek sacred sites. The chapters combine history, pilgrimage and profound transformative experience, and in the process we re-member the roots of psychotherapy – to attend to the soul, and of psychiatry – doctor of the soul. It is notable that medicine was initially a branch of philosophy, entailing love of wisdom.

I loved this quote from John Burnet of the University of St Andrews, whose Early Greek Philosophy – signed by him in Latin as a classics prize – is one of my most precious books: ‘Greek philosophy is based on the faith that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it.’ (p. 29) In a revealing conversation with his friend Konstantinos in a taverna on Crete, the author explains his return from America: ‘America gives you everything but steals your soul. Greece gives you nothing but your soul’ – a quest for truth that brings depth, meaning and connection to the Cosmos, a life enacting goodness, truth and beauty rather than the temporal, mundane, and transient pursuit of glittering material success. We all have to navigate Moira as fate and destiny, Ananke as necessity, healing ourselves through encounters with the numinous that ‘turn on the inner light.’ I also loved the term filoxenia as the ritual kindness accorded the stranger.

Last autumn, we gathered in Epidaurus, the scene of Greek theatre as a divine and cathartic ritual. The author describes the place as once ‘the deepest, most complex, holistic, wise, and sacred theory and practice for healing intractable wounds of body, mind, heart, and spirit to be found in the Western world’ (p. 44) – one of 320 other healing sanctuaries around the Mediterranean. He describes a performance by Greek actresses of Euripides’ Trojan Women, a play of extraordinary power about the trauma of war and violence – much of his work has been helping Vietnam war veterans to heal through the Warrior archetype (pp. 173 ff.); and many extraordinary journeys, dream dialogues and transformations are vividly evoked. Here, interpretation is said to be the greatest art. We are invited to consider our own health challenges and afflictions symbolically, and in his own case his back injury (pp. 140, 232) represented being overburdened. Symptoms are oracles, divinations, and ambiguous messages asking to be read. We also need to find a dynamic balance between Apollo and Dionysus, Narziss and Goldmund in Hermann Hesse’s novel – the author comments that many modern people are trapped in the mind, the rational, physical and Apollonian, and that body loss and soul loss go hand-in-hand – the dance must dance us. And Aristotle describes the aim of art as to represent ‘not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.’

Living mythically involves rebirth into a new self with new integration and an enlarged identity achieved through healing and in this case incubation and pilgrimage. The profound message of this book is that we need to engage the core underlying conditions of our souls and their troubled relationships to society, culture, and nature as the causes of our suffering, requiring reinvigorating our lives and the world with spirit. (p. 221) The final chapter offers a powerful affirmation of the characteristics of the healing deities and the principles of soul medicine, including ‘that we are part of the all, have limited control over what unfolds, but are responsible for our responses.’ Soul medicine values the irrational, mysterious, fantastic, imagistic, synchronistic, intuitive, circular, and the dreamlike as much as the empirical, logical, rational, and linear. (p. 229) We need to affirm our own moira, to give thanks to cosmic powers and principles, and to serve the whole on our hero’s or heroine’s journey. The experiences and guidance of this hugely significant book can act as a light and sign on this path.