ARCHETYPAL MEDICINE ARCHETYPAL MEDICINE was written by Alfred J. Ziegler (you may purchase it HERE from Amazon). The Introduction to the work was written by Robert Sardello, and is published below as this month's edition of the eLetter: This work by Alfred Ziegler, M.D. constitutes a rare and valuable contribution to a radically different way of approaching physical illness and suffering. In our age, a false flight from the pain of every sort of illness, nurtured by the strictly modern fantasy that a technical approach to medicine can restore health, has effectively all but eliminated the imagination of illness as bearing value. Even alternative medicine, which has come to prominence in the past five years, is caught in the imagination of health as the norm and illness a deviation from this norm. When the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of a 1991 telephone survey of 1539 American adults concerning the use of unconventional medical therapy, doctors of conventional medicine were alarmed to learn that 34% of those surveyed had used at least one form of unconventional treatment in the last year. The Journal reluctantly concluded that unconventional medicine has an enormous presence in the U.S. health care system. Some 87 million men and women were willing to pay $10.3 billion out of their own pockets for a kinder medicine. Nonetheless, holistic, complementary, empiric and natural medicines, without exception, value health, not illness. Archetypal medicine does not put itself forward as another alternative; it might be better seen as a treatment for the disease of medicine itself. Only archetypal medicine it seems, recognizes that health belongs to an intractable polarity, that of health-illness. From this point of view, there can be health only when there is also illness. When we pursue health with the imagination that illness opposes rather than complements it, the significance of illness has no place. Simply stated, following Ziegler, illness represents one of the primary ways in which the forgotten, sleeping soul awakens itself by falling into body. The aim of archetypal medicine does not consist of merely ridding the body of pain, suffering, and disease, but rather to take advantage of this bestirring of soul, alleviating physical suffering where possible by loosening the bonds of soul from a too strong immersion in body, without however obliterating individual presence to soul life. How does archetypal medicine practice its craft? First, we need to be alert to the fact that this modality of medicine differs from a psychology of illness, or psychosomatic medicine as typically practiced, and differs even from an analytic psychology of illness and disease. The craft can be characterized as proceeding by way of archetypal reflection, which, however, does not limit itself to the psyche. Instead, it applies archetypal reflection to the whole person, not just to the psychic realm. Consequently, in the chapters of this book concerned with specific illnesses such as asthma, fever, rheumatism and so on, very little will be found tracing these illnesses to specific archetypes or even an archetypal imagination of the gods, goddesses, spirits, or diamones that might be linked up with particular illnesses. Instead, concentration on two factors reveals the essence of the craft: the mode of reflection and language as the medium through which change in disease syndromes can be effected. Ziegler characterizes the mode of reflection of archetypal medicine as belonging to Sophia, or 'wisdom' rather than to logos, or intelligence. Wisdom as a mode of knowing works with polarities without splitting them apart; it knows from within, by communion, is filled with contradictions that do not seek after resolution, contemplates rather than analyzes, functions through the entire body, not just the head, replaces insight with empathy, seriousness with drama, causal logic with poetic imagery. In this mode of knowing under the aegis of Sophia, the human being suffers, not because of a deviation from health, but because suffering belongs to the nature of the unavoidable conflicts entailed in intimate participation with the ever- changing and contradictory nature of the spiritual, cosmic, archetypal, and natural worlds. Changeableness and mutability are here seen to be the essence of the human reality as well as the feminine divine reality which is its prototype. Archetypal realities tend to be swallowed into the timeless and static only by the abstract intellect incapable of the living thinking required to enter into the action of archetypal reflection. A physical illness, understood on this ground, constitutes a shift from one form of imaginal activity to another. As Ziegler brilliantly says: "What was recently an aspect of demeanor can be transformed and appear as a physical symptom. Hence our readiness to be shaken or moved can be transformed into a physical trembling disease, our reluctance can appear more or less abruptly in different forms of rheumatic stiffness, or our ability to keep life moist may reappear in addiction to water and edema" (pg. 159). Archetypal realities are sufficiently broad and flexible to encompass functional as well as organic activities, allowing for a metamorphosis from one to the other, without a sharp separation between the psychic and the organic. It might be fruitful to contemplate some of the differences between archetypal medicine and not only conventional medicine but also some of the alternative medicines to amplify how working with wisdom contrasts with logic. Conventional medicine views disease through the logic of entities. The nature of these disease entities varies considerably, from the invasion of the body by a bacteria or a virus to an alteration of genes to some factor or other which inhibits the normal functioning of one or more organs. The approach is completely materialistic, relying on the scientific model of cause and effect and treatment that is oriented toward eliminating the cause; and it operates heroically. Traditional Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, acupressure and Chinese herbalism shares some aspects with archetypal medicine, but also differs in significant respects. Chinese medicine shares the view of archetypal medicine that the human organism participates in the life of the cosmos. This participation, however, concentrates on the bodily network of subtle energy channels and energy circulatory patterns which link the human body to energy patterns of the solar system and the stars. Chinese medicine constitutes the empiric aspect of Taoism, a vast philosophical view interrelating energy, consciousness, the body, landscape and cosmos. These interrelationships are held in balance through "Three Treasures" - jing, chi, and shen, or physical substance, life energy, and spirit. The dynamic relation of these three forces are "read" by the practitioner by the feeling of pulses and the signature of an illness determined by the strength or weakness of a pulse. Acupuncture points stimulate or suppress the flow of energy to bring about balance in the system. Illness in this system means blockage of energy and illness has no significance in itself. Homeopathy founds its understanding of the disease process on what Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of this form of medicine, called the dynamis. The dynamis is a life-giving vital energy that rules and animates the organism. Homeopathic remedies stimulate the dynamis to restore bodily harmony. The remedies, highly diluted plant, animal, and mineral substances, work as healing agents based upon an imagination of similarity: the practitioner discerns the key correspondences between a patient's complex symptom picture and the subtle energies of remedies, utilizing the remedies based on similarity between the symptom picture and the remedy. "Like cures like," says homeopathy. Homeopathy does rely on a certain valuing of illness, insofar as the "illness" of the remedies effects the cure. However, the patient undergoing this treatment does not enter into illness as a source of value. Chiropractic therapy, probably the most widely accepted of alternative medicines, is based upon an imagination of the correct alignment of the 24 spinal vertebrae, which is seen as crucial to nervous system function and thus to overall health because the nervous system is said to control and coordinate all internal organs and bodily functions. Daniel David Palmer, the founder of chiropractic therapy, held that structure governs function. If the structure is displaced, illness follows. Treatment consists of physical manipulation to bring the vertebrae into alignment. What misalignment may be saying does not come under consideration. Herbalsim as practiced today is based upon an allopathic model of illness, much the same as conventional medicine. Herbal preparations are selected to oppose and act against existing physical symptoms. The more ancient view of herbalism related the action of herbs on the human organism to the influences of the stars and planets. Some herbs are ruled by the Sun and are good for warming and drying. An herb ruled by Saturn would be good for structure. The correspondences between herbs and the starry worlds, however, is generally not today incorporated into the practice. In the West, the seventeenth century compiler of herbology, Nicholas Culpeper, held that correspondences are the key to herbology. He stated: "physic without astrology is like a lamp without oil." Practitioners today may know about the correspondences but do not work out of a deep imagination of the cosmos. A wide range of alternative medicines focus on working in non-physical domains of the human being. Flower Essence therapy, first developed by Edward Bach, M.D. in the 1930s employs subtle tinctures made from specific blossoming flowers which are said to work on the "soul body" and bring emotional and psychological life into balance. Various forms of Therapeutic Touch work by massaging not the physical body, but the human energy field at a distance of several inches from the body. These forms of treatment also often include having the patient engage in creative visualization, the reporting of images that come while subtle body manipulation is being carried out, and sometimes actively working with these images in active imagination. Similarly, some practitioners work with chakra visualizations. The chakras are subtle energy matrices arranged along the spine which are said to be something like transducers from cosmic energies to human energies. In illness, some of these chakras are said to be blocked or out of balance in relation to each other. New age alternative medicine colludes with conventional medicine without knowing it; the sweetly smiling cosmic hero stands in the camp of the raging warrior. Conventional medicine and all of the forms of alternative medicine follow a path of medical pragmatism. Whatever works is right. And, all of these practices do work, some of them better for one person, others for another. They all take health as the norm, viewing illness as something gone wrong, and they all work from logic rather than wisdom. Some of the alternative therapies, for example, Chinese medicine, have wisdom as a basis, but wisdom is converted into logic. Individual practitioners may rely more on wisdom and base their practice more on intuition than following the logical rules of the system, but none of the alternative medicines see value in illness and in this respect hold hands with conventional medicine. In the sketches given above, one also notices a propensity to rely upon a very abstract word - energy. I suggest that the archetypal element of these forms of healing hides within that word which has great explanatory power but actually says nothing concerning what is actually happening. When Nature is evoked as the guiding principle of medicine, as often happens in alternative medicine, the underlying imagination of Nature appears highly romanticized. Nature's ways are best, whole, healthy, life-giving, life-restoring. And so are the 'energies' of the cosmos. Dark Nature is never considered. One does not have to observe nature very carefully, however, to see that She always operates in polarities of life-death. Some examples. Spotted hyenas typically bear twins which are well developed at birth, completely furred, teeth fully developed. Within minutes of birth one of the cubs attacks its twin, killing the other. This deadly conflict is the norm, having nothing to do with food shortages. The female cub usually wins this murderous battle, maintaining female dominance among hyenas. The Amazon's vast armies of ants produces 200,000 tons of formic acid a year, spraying this into the air as part of their communication and defense system. This acid, released into the air makes the rain mildly acid and promotes decay, that is the death process. Every few years in Norwway, there are population explosions of lemmings. Masses of lemmings descend from the mountains and invade forests and pastures in a suicidal march to the sea. In their march, when progress is blocked by a lake, river, cliffs, the accumulation of lemmings drastically increases and they turn mean. They fight, bite, and kill each other. Assault, battery, child abuse, murder, infanticide and suicide then characterize their behavior. Antarctic penguins, when they are very young, gather in large numbers on the edge of the ice, readying to take their first plunge into the sea. They have only one enemy, leopard seals, who hang around beneath the ice floe, waiting for penguin lunch. The large gathering of penguins watch as one jumps into the water. If the courageous swimmer is eaten, the rest backtrack, noses in the air, as if nothing happened. They then wait for another to take the plunge, until finally one does not disappear forever but bobs up, inviting the rest in. Everywhere in nature, from plants to insects to birds and animals we find this polarity of life-death. This is more the imagination of Nature that guides archetypal medicine, one in which illness and death are integral to each other. Ziegler states: "It is no mistake of Nature, but Nature's plan, that we fall, disintegrate, or dissolve - not only a foundering on the reefs of outer circumstances but also a well- programmed assortment of illnesses and death. The selection of diseases and deaths belongs to the chimera-like quality of human existence, while health as such is only a secondary concern (pg.12)." Such an understanding of Nature helps us to see that both conventional and alternative medicine are not merely guided by a deep-seated fantasy of health as good and illness as bad, but underlying such a false division can be found the fantasy of immortality. Medicine works under the pretence that we really should not have to die, death an unfortunate glitch in an otherwise bountiful, good universe. For Ziegler, the preoccupation with health constitutes a modern neurosis, and, in fact health attained can be considered a neurosis of the body, with illness being the movement toward the cure. He here follows Jung's brilliant definition of neurosis as one-sidedness, and by one-sidedness he means directed, having singularity of orientation and meaning. Seen in this way, health comprises a literalism of the body. Defining neurosis in this way enabled Jung to bypass causal explanations of neurosis and places the difficulty right in the present. I am neurotic, not because of what happened in the past, or because of some psychodynamic mechanism, but because of my present outlook which constructs reality in a one-sided way. Health is just such a one-sidedness, medicine being the cultural affirmation of this neurotic state. Health seems to be something literal, substantive, to be brought about by equally substantive things such as counting calories, keeping cholesterol at a certain level, running a certain number of miles a day. But, in fact, health as a thing and the things that bring it about are conceptual ideas that have become literalized. What seems to be so concrete turns out to be highly abstract, having little to do with the body that smells, aches, gurgles, snores, wheezes, farts, excretes and pees, becomes excited, aroused, sometimes feels like lead, sometimes like fire, sometimes not felt at all. When we actually look at the body in all its concreteness, it becomes apparent that health must be a decidedly puritanical notion. Are we not to be thankful to illness for bringing back smelly breath, festering wounds, belching and bloating, coughing, burning and freezing, saving us from bodily fundamentalism? Here at least imagination begins to have a place. The ill person becomes forced into imagination, forced into the full actuality of the body. A dull ache pounds in the stomach, becomes sharp like a knife during the day, moves from one region to another, disappears for a while after lunch, becomes stronger after drinking wine, produces sleeplessness into the early morning hours, followed by intense dreams of being forced into a cave by a dragon. Suddenly, even the most literal-minded becomes a story-teller, image-maker, poet, sometimes even a genius. Until the diagnosis comes. It turns out to be an ulcer - and then the imagination stops, globbed up with kaopectate. Archetypal medicine has a different answer. Be grateful for the stirring of soul and utilize language as the instrument through which somatization can be relieved while imagination retained. When Ziegler says that language constitutes the magic wand, the instrument of healing in archetypal medicine, he does not prescribe the road to health, but the circuitous path of imagination. The sections of this book on praxis represent the practice of language through which the body can discover its imaginal voice. If these chapters are read with literal- mindedness, nothing but skepticism results. Because soul has fallen into matter, archetypal reflection works to make soul matter in some other way than somatizing, and for Ziegler this way is language. We are not given psychological nor even archetypal explanations of disease but disease picturing itself through the medium of language. In order to entice morbidity into art, a few language tricks can be helpful. One of these tricks involves practicing etymology. Etymologizing teases words out of the cloak of arbitrariness and nominalism into tradition; it also dissolves a literal diagnosis into fluid image. Further, entering into the history of a word such as rheumatism begins to change conceptual speech into alchemical concretness. Instead of the diagnosis of rheumatism we begin to hear: chained bending and flexing, being controlled at the joint, a snake that stiffens by its stare, making one stand stately, steadfastly, perhaps stubbornly, with rigor, or rigor mortis, like an unbending tree. Rheumatism, seen by standard medicine, tries to find ways to bring flexibility back into the joints. But, the wisdom, the knowing, of the body may be doing exactly what is needed, bringing steadfastness and stature to the body refusing to leave the awkwardness of adolescence. Honoring the being of the illness in this way does not mean letting it go on until the joints are fused. But, it also does not mean getting rid of the visitor either, which in any case only suppresses it. To begin to take it into imagination means to live with it in a different way. The point of archetypal medicine is not to live with the physical illness but to live in relation with the personified figure in the disease who know better than we do what we need. Think of our diagnoses as oracles. Etymologizing counts though only as the beginning step, the step into the topic, the topos, the place or region of images. The imagination of stepping into a region carries the all-important notion that there can be many entryways. If this variability of gateways goes unnoticed Ziegler's exploration of the landscapes of illness will be taken as peculiar forms of explanation which do not hold up in every instance. Entering into etymology does not give us the true meaning of a word but entry into a place from which it is possible to be receptive to the voices of the illness. And any illness has many voices. Ziegler enters the topos of asthma by contemplating the qualities of constriction. One could also enter into the region through a contemplation of the word breath, taking one into images of shortness of breath, spirit suffocated or held in, perhaps the need, expressed by the body of holding spirit closer. The direction to go may be initiated by etymology, but this direction needs to be backed up with a careful phenomenology of the illness in each particular instance. We thus come to another feature of archetypal medicine: each condition needs to be entered into with the understanding that a single condition does not exist, only multiple illness with the same name on the doorway. Asthmas, not asthma, rheumatisms, not rheumatism. It would be a mistake indeed if we said that all asthmatics are characterized by the need to dominate others, that they are all idealists, and that they are dominated by ideals of simplicity, purity, and clarity. For some, the attacks of asthma, the shortness of breath and bodily tension are felt as similar to the sensations of sexual intercourse. One might also find another, such as Proust, for whom asthma relates more closely to aisthesis, to aesthetics and a way of perceiving the world in which one becomes overwhelmed by beauty. Ziegler's praxis needs to be taken as an approach, not a system. If one tries to begin to work with one's own illnesses in an archetypal way, which may be necessary, given that the practitioners of this art are almost unheard of, it may at first be like entering a dark forest, where shadows constantly pop up as seeming realities. The main shadow to be alert to consists of the tricky inversion of this way of working back into the model of health. Recently, I was speaking with someone who for months had been nauseous, felt pain in the stomach, was weak, and continually losing weight. Conventional medicine could find nothing. The doctors suspected a blockage in the stomach. Another physician suspected a ruptured appendix which however closed itself in some peculiar way. A medical intuitive told her that her inner organs were all enlarged, like obesity introverted. A Jungian told her that hearing the symptoms brought to mind a twisted telephone cord and that what was needed was silence, relaxation, and unwinding. Everyone imposing their subjective imaginings. Notice, however, that in each instance the fantasy of health was operating. Even the Jungian, also an astrologer, who gave the additional diagnosis that this person was suffering from a Virgo attack, was being led by the fantasy of health. The twisted telephone cord can also be seen as the body's necessity for knotting, for complexity, twistedness, entanglement, confusion in communication. Two suggestions arise from this little story. First, beware of the imposition of images, and second, beware of the ever-lurking one-sidedness of health. Rather than concocting images of our condition, it is far better to await for them to come in their own way. What Ziegler terms "pathognomic" dreams are of particular significance, those dreams which upon awakening are accompanied by symptoms characteristic of the illness. These dreams can be the signature of the specificity of the illness, the one asthma among the many. And, if one has the opportunity to work with a practitioner who works in an imaginal way, such pathognomic images come to live within the practitioner; that is, only the practitioner who has the capacity of carrying the illness without also becoming ill can speak with any authority. The imposition of images signifies the attempt to keep the illness at a sufficient distance so as not to become ill oneself. The practitioner is not to be blamed for this tactic, certainly not as a human being. As a practitioner, however, it betrays playing loosely with images. Ziegler's work might be approached most fruitfully as a kind of alchemical text that one would do well to spend years working with. Anything but a quick read. It takes years to learn a language, and even longer to shift attitudes toward health and illness; longer yet to move from logos to Sophianic speech. We are impatient with our illnesses, caught in the general speeding up of time characterizing this culture. Archetypal time differs considerably from the clock time by which we order our days. I do not think archetypal imagination takes us into the timeless but rather into the quality of time that can be called duration. The day offers itself as different ratios between duration and tempo. In the present world, duration is fast being lost and tempo accelerates into repetition, pace, and now instantaneousness. Duration has to do with the soul qualities of time, and as long as duration endures there is not the abstraction of time, but multiple times - work time, play time, love time, prayer time, illness time and many more. Duration dominates the place of the Grand Canyon. Tempo dominates the corporate office. If I walk down the street in New York City, tempo rules. If I go into Central Park, I enter another time where duration enters more strongly. And even within Central Park, the duration of one place differs from that of another - the time of the gardens is different from that of the jogging path. And when I step back onto the street, time again changes. The idea of health chains us evermore to tempo, for the economy of heath care systems, managed care, is to shorten the time of illness in order, not only to cut costs, but to assure that we do not get out of step with the fast paced tempo of daily life. Illness, however, has its own time and timing, which belongs much more to duration than tempo. Recovery time, sick time, grieving time, mourning time, can also be seen as the body's work to heal the disease of time. This book is written in the time of duration, and thus needs to be mused upon, contemplated, dwelt with, returned to over and over again. And, because we have here the marvelous language of duration, this book will endure.

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