Wounds as a source of healing in pastoral and medical care

I love the idea of the Wounded Healer, the concept that a person's own suffering can be a source of healing for others. I believe this has enormous social significance for us all, in many different ways. 

This idea was reflected in the consolatory ministry with its accompanying literature from Ancient Greece onwards. I'll write more about this consolatory ministry later. Suffice to say here that by the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Western Europe the idea was well established in pastoral healing, mostly among the clergy of the time, but also in use by some physicians. Men such as George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends (or Quakers), George Trosse and Timothy Rogers, both Nonconformist English clergy of the seventeenth century and the English Physician George Cheyne, these and more used their own personal stories of suffering in their successful healing ministries. They were all reflecting the power of the wounded healer to heal others. 
But it was only with the development of the modern psychological schools of Freud, Adler and Jung, picking up the threads of pre Hippocratic holistic care, that the concept was first articulated, by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), as a recognized healing archetype. Research papers and specialist textbooks on the concept of the Wounded Healer are plentiful, but these are mostly within the realms of analytical psychology. Both Jung and Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) were at certain periods of their lives deeply disturbed psychologically. By submitting themselves to their own styles of self-analysis, they both came to understand their own sufferings more clearly and were able to appreciate and treat their patients more effectively.
Jung introduced extensive self-analysis as an essential part of the training of a psychotherapist, to be followed up by continuing clinical supervision, because, he said,
"The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor…in any ongoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases that the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the whole being of the doctor is challenged…the Doctor is effective only when he himself is affected…‘the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect." (1)

Elsewhere Jung wrote:

"Without too much exaggeration a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician." (2)

Jung’s followers proceeded to give the term special significance in their work and thinking and it was Jungian analysts who apparently started referring to the Wounded Healer Archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process. Jung’s ideas were specifically developed in the context of the doctor and his patient in psychotherapy, but this wisdom is surely just as relevant today within the context of the general medical practitioner’s relationship with his patient.

It was the Dutch priest and successful spiritual writer Henri Nouwen who did so much to popularize the use of the term Wounded Healer in his own works in the context of pastoral healing. In the introduction to his book The Wounded Healer he wrote; ‘nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.’

Like Carl Jung, Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937), a pioneer Austrian Psychiatrist, was a prominent member of Freud’s psychological group, before they both broke away from Freud to develop their own psychological theories. Jung developed a more analytical psychology, introducing the concept of the introvert and extrovert and the Collective Unconscious, with a description of the various archetypes of man’s basic and inherent psychic nature. Adler on the other hand developed his own ‘individual psychology’ theory, and introduced the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’. ‘The method of Individual Psychology begins and ends with the problem of inferiority,’ he wrote. Adler believed that all human motivation was power induced, for example by the drive to be superior or the drive to control others. Somehow that rings very true in much that we see around us today!

But these psychological theories and the treatments arising from them were developing apart from rather than in cooperation with clinical medical practice. 

Indeed in many medical circles the new psychologies were viewed with suspicion and regarded as nothing more than ‘quackery’. 

Science was coming to be regarded as the supreme truth: that nothing could be real unless scientifically proven. 

The scientists thought that there was no room for an intangible global value to exist alongside the material and capitalist values that were reigning supreme. Indeed in many academic circles today the writings of Freud and Jung are still regarded with scorn, on the basis that their theories are too anecdotal and can therefore be of little value to any furtherance of understanding of the human condition and the mind/body problem.

But these ideas should not be dismissed so carelessly. Those of Carl Jung in particular seem to me to be very much in line with some recent developments in the fields of consciousness and intuition, ideas which are slowly gaining some credibility and significance in modern medicine, as I shall explain later on...

to be contd......

(1) Jung, Carl G., Memories, Dreams Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995) pp.154-156.

(2) Jung, Carl G., Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy, in The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1953-1979), vol. 16: 111-25, on p. 116.

Oh God Come to my assistance O Lord make haste to help me

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.   Einstein

Our priest did a very brave thing in our church service last Sunday. He called for 5 minutes silence at the beginning of the sermon!

What a powerful experience it was: just over one hundred people all united together in silent thought and prayer. The church was so quiet, save only for the occasional and delightful accompaniment of a young toddler gently burbling, experimenting with his own sounds and his own first words!

The spiritual connection between us all was palpable. And I’m sure God was listening.

Fresh from Greenbelt, and inspired by Fr Christopher Jamison, former abbot of the English Benedictine Worth Abbey, our priest told us of the prayer used by the Benedictines, and others, based on Psalm 69: “Oh God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me”.

He asked us to prepare for 5 minutes quiet time every morning starting with this prayer, as a life giving rule, not as a puritanical chore. Even attach it to a pleasure, to a nice cup of tea! Then, he said, listen and let God answer.

In the general ‘busyness’ of many church services there is simply no opportunity for such contemplative spiritual experience. And there is a very real need for more communal silent reflection, prayer and meditation in our services. Churches seem so very busy doing all they can to encourage young families into services, with child friendly music and liturgy, and that is a wonderful and essential thing. But they must also make time and space for the spiritual silences, to nurture our souls and enhance our relationship with God.. 

But I think there is much more to this. Carl Jung introduced the idea of the "collective unconscious," and in his Answer to Job, wrote of a God Consciousness, an awakening consciousness in the universe. This echoes the higher levels of consciousness recognized within various mystic and meditation practices.

Isn’t it possible that when we have our spiritual experiences we are all tapping into the same spirit, higher level of collective consciousness, transcendence, whatever we may choose to call it, even the Holy Spirit? This spirituality could be the common thread that binds and unites all religions in a true spiritual oneness of humanity, a global spiritual interdependence. Indeed this is available to everyone, whatever our belief or otherwise in God. Because, after all, this indefinable global consciousness, soul, spirit, empathy is presumably of the same character whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jains, atheists, agnostics, black, white, Scottish or Zulu or whatever our faith, color or culture. Perhaps we may find here the links we need to build a greater respect and understanding between all humanity, essential for the future healthy evolution of this planet and indeed for our own flourishing and survival.

What a dream! How do we achieve this? 

Having five minutes prayerful or meditational silence in our religious service every Sunday and in our homes every day is surely a good place to start!

Our "moral and spiritual lag"

‘As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today,’ wrote Carl Jung in 1957, ‘we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress.’(1)

Martin Luther King called this our moral and spiritual ‘lag’. He observed that ‘the richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’ We live, he said, in two realms:

The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.(2)


 (1)From The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1970 pp304-305

(2)Nobel Peace Prize Lecture December 11 1964

The End of Faith?

In his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris calls in the epilogue for the abolition of religion. This is not a hopeless dream, he believes, and says that an “utter revolution in our thinking” could be achieved in a generation if parents and teachers simply gave honest answers to the questions of children. Really?!
I think Harris may be conveniently forgetting that the rules and customs of ancestral religions still give meaning, purpose and spiritual nourishment to most of the seven billion people on the Earth today. 84% of the world’s population have a faith or religion, often with deeply held convictions, and of the remaining 16% one half claim to be theistic even if not religious. And only a tiny minority are involved in illegal acts in the name of religion. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has reminded us that in spite of what Harris and other angry atheists say, humankind does not need religion to perpetrate ghastly crimes against its own kith and kin. And it is also widely accepted that spiritual nourishment is necessary for human flourishing, within or without a religious faith.
So with these facts and statistics how could religion possibly be abolished?
Today Christian men, women and children throughout the world will be going to church. The UK media love to say that churchgoers are declining in numbers but overall this is simply not true. Since the turn of the millennium across 42 Church of England cathedrals in the UK, numbers attending services have steadily grown by a total of 37%, around 4% on average each year, and 7% just in the last year. Perhaps it is just unfortunate that the secular materialism of the West has the cultural initiative.

Nevertheless it is true that total congregations today, even though on the increase, are still a shadow of the numbers flocking to church even 100 years ago. And this causes a problem with moral values. Religion and ethics were once closely intertwined, but since the influence of religion has declined in so many lives, there is, warns the Dalai Lama, ‘mounting confusion with respect to the problem of how best we are to conduct ourselves in life…morality becomes a matter of individual preference.’(1) Nietzsche called this an impending ‘total eclipse of all values.’

(2) Atheist as he himself was, his observation, he claimed, was entirely objective: we need a God and the moral codes inherent in that belief to curb our otherwise unpleasant behavioral traits.
Is that right?

And there is another issue – that of so-called “progress.” ‘As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today,’ wrote Carl Jung (3) in 1957, ‘we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress.’ Martin Luther King called this our moral and spiritual ‘lag’. He observed that ‘the richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’ We live, he said, in two realms:

“The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.”

He warned that we would put ourselves in peril if the former, the internal, does not grow apace of the external material realm. ‘When the ‘without’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘within’, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.’ The result, he cautioned, is racial injustice, poverty and war, that will only be alleviated if we balance our moral progress with our scientific progress and learn the practical art of living in harmony in a ‘worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.’ (4)
And how do we achieve that?
A question I will continue to explore in the weeks and months ahead. All (constructive and polite) comments welcome.



1. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, 2000, Ancient Wisdom Modern World: Ethics for the New Millennium (London: Abacus, Time Warner Books UK, 2000), p. 11.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, used a few times through his literature, for example spoken by the madman in The Gay Science (Philosophical Classics) Friedrich Nietzsche with Thomas Common (Translator)(New York: Dover Publications, 2006).
3. From The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1970 pp304-305 as quoted in Claire Dunn: Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul An Illustrated Biography, London: Continuum, 2000, pp. 149, 199.
4. Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture December 11 1964

The social significance of healing

I have written rather a lot about healthcare lately, within the context of healing versus curing. Let’s assume that healthcare professionals recognize their fundamental role in the relief of suffering. However I believe there seems to be less understanding of the social significance of this true, holistic healing. Carl Jung and Scott Peck, Carl Rogers and Aldous Huxley, have all written in their times of the social impact of wounded behavior and the significance of individual healing within this context.
I think I have mentioned the work of psychiatric and mental health nurse Conti O’Hare before but make no apology for this. She has a vision for the importance of nursing in the healing of society in the twenty first century. Writing about the nursing profession in the USA she urges nurses to understand the wounded healer concept in their profession, stressing how important it is for them to heal themselves properly before they can generate true healing in their patients and in their profession. Conti-O’Hare reflects on the ills of the world, such as terrorism, addiction and violence on our streets, that she recognizes as symptomatic of our inner woundedness. Nurses, she says, have the potential not only to heal their own profession but to foster healing in the world. ‘We can only wonder,’ she says, ‘if people with serious emotional disorders will seek healing solutions or continue to inflict woundedness on others by their antisocial and unacceptable behavior…What a glorious expectation for nurses to be armed with the knowledge that they are wounded healers who have participated in transforming their own health and that of others.’
O’Hare has developed what she calls the Q.U.E.S.T. Model for Self-Transcendence to help nurses and other health professionals to heal themselves and their professions, as an aid for them to transform and transcend wounds to become true Wounded Healers. This transformation (from walking wounded to wounded healer), she believes, ‘will have a positive impact on the health care system, society and the nursing profession as a whole.’
While O’Hare merely hints in her book at the profound responsibilities of the nursing profession as Wounded Healers to the world, there are others who are more positive in their vision. J. J. Means, a pastoral counselor at the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center, Iowa USA, is more certain of his wider healing role in society. The medical and caring professions are in privileged and indeed socially responsible positions to reach those psychological and spiritual roots of social strategy, within the domain of the nation’s healthcare and soul care. And while the ills of the world at first sight may seem to be far removed from the day-to-day practice of medicine, in fact I agree strongly with these pioneers that here are issues that are inextricably linked. I think these professions have a profound responsibility to recognize their role as healers to the world. As is so often the case, North America seems to be taking the lead in this, for other countries no doubt to follow in due course.

References:
Conti-O’Hare, Marion, The Nurse as Wounded Healer: from Trauma to Transcendence, Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. London: Jones and Bartlett Publishers International, 2002, p. 141, 144.

Means, J. J. ‘Wounded Healer/Mighty Prophet,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Spring 2002, Vol. 56, No. 1.
Means, J. J., ‘Pastoral Counseling: An Alternative Path in Mental Health,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care Fall 1997 vol. 51 No. 3.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

More on the Wounded Healer

It was the Jungian psychoanalysts who probably first started referring to the Wounded Healer archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process. But it was the Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen who really popularized the term within a wider spiritual and pastoral healing context when he wrote his own bestselling book The Wounded Healer in 1979. In it he identifies the loneliness that he himself so keenly felt as the most painful of our human wounds, leaving us craving for love and attention. Loneliness, he tells us, is recognized in words such as alienation, separation and isolation. (1) But Malcolm Langford identifies four other basic types of wound: those resulting from the evil of our own life experiences and of others with whom we are involved, those from our own broken personalities and motivations, from our personal prejudices and fears and those which reflect our emotional and spiritual poverty in such a materially wealthy world. (2) We can all relate to some if not all of these examples of woundedness. And there is plenty of need for healing in the world!

Ian McEwan reflected on the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11:

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity [my italics]. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality…The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanizing hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. (3)

And as the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains, when bad things do happen to us, we can use these experiences to sensitize us to the pain of others. Rather than allowing such wounds to make us victims of circumstance, let them turn us into potentially life changing agents of hope. (4)


1. Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Wounded Healer, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994, p. 83
2. Malcolm Langford, draws much of his inspiration from Henri Nouwen. Langford, Malcolm, Waking the Wounded: Facing our own Poverty. This was on World Vision site at
http://www.worldvision.com.au/getinvolved/faithinaction/files/grid2000_wakingthewounded.pdf sourced 17 February 2009.
3. McEwan, Ian, The Guardian 15 September 2001, ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2 sourced 19 February 2009.
4. Jonathan Sacks, The Times, 5 January 2008, Count your Blessings and Begin to Change your Life.

Chiron the Wounded Healer

Pain and loneliness are forms of energy that can be transformed if we turn them outward, using them to recognize and redeem someone else’s pain or loneliness.
This is quoted from Jonathan Sacks book: To Heal a Fractured World- the Ethics of Responsibility.

Many people outside the healing professions of pastoral care and medicine have not heard of the expression The Wounded Healer. So here is a brief story from Greek mythology, where there was a Centaur called Chiron. Centaurs are normally portrayed as clumsy and brutal beasts. Chiron was different. He was kind, gentle and well educated and tutored many of the Greek gods. Famous pupils included Jason, the leader of the fifty Argonauts, who sailed aboard the Argo to bring back the golden fleece to Pelias. Another was Achilles of the vulnerable heel legend, killed by an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Much of Greek mythology is highly intricate and complex and the myth of Chiron varies in precise details depending on its source. The story goes that he was the love child of an affair between the Greek God Cronus and the Earth Nymph Philyra. Before making love to Philyra, Cronus changed her into a horse to allay the suspicions of his wife Rhea. And so the centaur Chiron was conceived. Abandoned by his parents at birth, Chiron was adopted and brought up by Apollo, The Divine Physician, who trained him to be a great and wise teacher, physician and healer.

Centaurs were known for their over indulgences and Chiron was probably no exception. One day there was a bloody fight between Centaurs over a carafe of wine and Chiron was accidentally shot in his knee by a stray poisoned arrow from the bow of Heracles (or Hercules). The wound would not heal and it gave him much pain. Centaurs also had the gift of immortality. Such was Chiron’s suffering, from both the mental wounds of his abandonment at birth and from this painful physical wounding, that he prayed to the gods to let him surrender his own immortality and die. He then spent the rest of his life trying to find a cure for his physical wound and became an expert in the healing power of plants, particularly the herbal remedies he developed for war wounds. But the healing abilities for which he was renowned came especially from the empathy he developed for the suffering of others, acquired from his struggle to overcome his own physical and mental wounds. Chiron allowed his own wounds to be a source of healing for others. He became a Wounded Healer.

What became of Chiron? His prayer was eventually answered and after his death he was placed in the sky by the king of the Greek gods, Zeus (the Roman Jupiter and the only surviving son of Cronus and Rhea), where he can be seen in the night sky as the constellation Sagittarius (the archer), otherwise known as Centaur (the man/horse).
Greek mythology is of course a collection of fables, of the Greek gods, goddesses and heroes. But many of them encompass a deeper wisdom about human behavior even if few have any basis in fact.

One of the legacies left by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung was the idea that in our psyche we all share deep inherited and unconscious ideas and images together known as our “collective unconscious.” This collective unconscious, Jung said, is made up of different recognizable human models or archetypes. He saw in the Greek myth of Chiron a reflection of the archetypal Wounded Healer of the indigenous medicine man or shaman, first recorded in the earliest known hunting and fishing communities of Siberia and Sub Arctic North America. In fact it was probably from the language of a small group of hunters and reindeer herders from the Arctic Tungus that the name shaman comes, meaning “he who knows.”

The true shaman was both priest and healer and prophet. The essential prerequisite of the shaman was that he would have suffered a serious mental or physical illness or both, which would often be long and drawn out. As healing progressed, the shaman acquired the capacities for inspiration and healing and with recovery he came to understand the spirits and how to master them. He would also train and initiate assistants into the role of healer. Shamans can therefore be seen as people who have come through their own serious illness as a result of which they are stronger in themselves and more able to safeguard the souls of others, either into the next world or to heal them in this world. Michael Lerner has aptly called them “spiritual midwives.”

This then is the concept of the Wounded Healer. The idea is well researched, documented and understood within the traditional fields of medical and pastoral care. But I believe that the Wounded Healer holds a much wider significance for us all within the healing needs of the whole world.

So why the spring flowers photo? Simply to give some cheer on this gloomy foggy frosty winter morning, when the last remnant of our unseasonably early snow is still lying around on the grass and the roads. Oh for spring!




Copyright Eleanor Stoneham 2010

Progress with the manuscript

Progress Bulletin for To Heal the Fractured Earth - Well I submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher, O Books, on 18th January 2010, and on 26th January it was forwarded by the Editorial Manager to a copy editor. As far as I understand the system, the copy editor will check sentence structure, readability, that kind of thing, picking up missing words and grammatical errors, and then return it to me as a copy edited manuscript for checking through. However careful we are to check thoroughly, read carefully, even have peer reviews of our work, a few errors still inevitably creep in - or rather do not get eliminated! Apparently there is only one known book that had absolutely no such mistakes in its final published form - I will find out which it was for a later blog, unless someone can meanwhile tell me!

Does this mean that the Editorial Manager had no substantial editorial changes to suggest? I assume and hope so! After all this is probably my third or fourth rewrite - each time the structure has been reorganised and evolved into a "final" version that I am happy with - at least for now. There comes a point in time in the development of a non-fiction book when a line has to be drawn, and any further ideas, developments etc need to be kept for a reprint or later edition.

For example, I learnt today (from an article by Marguerite Theophil in The Times of India), that whilst Carl Jung popularized the Wounded Healer motif in recent times, the idea is not only traced back to the Centaur chiron, but also to Plato, who recognized that the best physicians had themselves suffered, and were therefore better equipped to understand and heal the ills of their patients. I need to go back to that idea and store it away for future reference.