‘Fires in the Dark’ examines how great healers help to ease human anguish.
Mentally and spiritually devastated after surviving World War I’s combat horrors, British poet Siegfried Sassoon was treated for emotional wounds at a military hospital. He wrote a poem for his psychotherapist that included these lines:Kay Redfield Jamison takes the title of her new book,, from Sassoon’s vivid image of how medical psychologist, physician and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers tended to his psychological war wounds.
That theme reverberates in Jamison’s account of how Rivers treated Sassoon, whose war reactions might today be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. As an anthropologist, Rivers had learned about and witnessed healing rituals and supernatural beliefs of different cultures. He had written that “psycho-therapeutics would seem to be the oldest branch of medicine.”
Psychotherapy as practiced by Rivers had roots in the powers of suggestion wielded millennia earlier by priests and sorcerers, Jamison writes. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for example, called on priest-physicians who performed early types of surgery, chanted against disease-causing spirits and used magic spells to amplify patients’ responses to medicinal potions.
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