Healer and Patient

...The author suggests that in every case certain basic and powerful psychological mechanisms are brought into play between the healer (or a group of healers) and the sufferer...

...their correction lies in the hands of political, social, and religious healers...

...the unfolding of formal healing rites or rituals whose efficacy or appropriateness must be accepted on faith, or perhaps out of a sense of desperation...

...Such studies—and Jerome D. Frank's Persuasion and Healing is one of them —deserve close attention and a wide audience...

...Investigators have long surmised that even the most diverse systems or methods of psychological healing must have certain common attributes...

...Frank develops the variations in this sequence of psychological forces with a wealth of concrete and fascinating detail...

...The best he can do is improve the patient's ability to deal with them...

...The peculiar capacity of certain men to exercise dramatic and lasting spiritual influence on the lives of other men has perplexed all manner of thinkers since civilization began...

...and the evocation in the sufferer's mind (or perhaps "soul," depending on the therapy in question) of a conviction that pains, obstacles, and frustrations have been removed and the individual has been restored to a better state of physical, spiritual, or social health...

...Psychiatry in America possesses enormous prestige, and willingly or unwillingly its practitioners exert profound influences on political, social, and religious developments...

...At the same time, this reviewer is left with the impression, although the author probably did not intend it, that much in American psychotherapeutic practice is trivial and beside the point, that practitioners are busily and profitably producing adjustments to that which does not deserve being adjusted to...

...Why are practitioners so preoccupied with technique and theory, and so oblivious to values and ends...

...Reviewed by Ivor Kraft From time to time the scholarly and university presses of the nation issue a study which is not only timely and relevant, but also masterful in scientific content and superbly written from the lay viewpoint...

...an evocation of expectant trust in the sufferer on the part of a socially sanctioned healer (physician, priest, shaman, psychotherapist...

...This preoccupation is reflected in the wisdom literature of all cultures, but it is only in recent times that systematic attempts have been made to investigate scientifically the psychology of persuasion...

...Frank's comparative study of psychotherapy is a major contribution to this scientific effort...

...These mechanisms may vary in intensity, duration, formal content, and point of origin, but they seem invariably to include the following: an awareness in the sufferer that he is in a state of crisis, pain, or spiritual danger...

...Frank adopts this hypothesis and proceeds to uncover what most readers will deem striking similarities in such superficially unrelated practices as the rituals of shamans and faith healers, the ceremonies at Lourdes, the interviews between a Chinese Communist thought-reformer and his "patient," the weekly meeting of a branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, the psychoanalyst listening to his client on the couch, and the physician administering an inert pill as a placebo to his suffering cancer victim...

...This sounds like a strange prescription coming from a psychiatrist who has himself taken such bold and courageous public stands on the issue of nuclear policy...

...One suspects that soon the wiser among them will have to face that ancient conundrum which confronts rulers of men and founders of schools: Who shall heal the healers, and who shall persuade the persuaders when they are found to be worshipping at the feet of false or impotent idols...

...Such practitioners may or may not be true healers of sick souls, but surely they often become pseudo-healers and silent apologists for the profound ailments which afflict entire societies...

...We are brought to see what far-reaching possibilities exist for producing genuine attitudi-nal change even in the bleaker cases, especially when group forces are called into play...

...Also, one suspects that there are splendid untapped sources of altruism in the typical human personality, and that we may one day learn how to tap these sources and thus build quite new and better moral relationships among large masses of men...

...Frank writes that "resolution of culturally induced stresses lies beyond the psychiatrist's powers...

...There are certain encouraging as well as troubling implications that flow from this study...

...The psychiatrist who divorces prevention from practice and the need of the individual from the needs of the group has already made a crucial political and social judgment...