The Trickster: Medicine's forgotten character

The Trickster: Medicine's forgotten character continued...

decisive stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended — as they are in a dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the stream of ideation is free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were in an apparently 'lawless' fashion."[20]

The paradoxes involved in the creative process are vividly exemplified in the life of England's Michael Faraday (1791-1867), one of the greatest physicists in history. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Faraday is that he lacked any mathematical education or gift, and was "ignorant of all but the merest elements of arithmetic."[20] Faraday was a visionary in the literal sense. He was able to see stress lines around magnets and electric currents as curves in space, for which he coined the term lines of 'forces'. For him, these patterns were as real as if they were made of solid matter. These images "rose up before him like things" and proved incredibly fertile, leading to the birth of the dynamo and electric motor, and the postulate that light was electromagnetic radiation – and this with only "the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula."(21)

Writing in the 1950s in Scientific American, Frank Barron, an expert on the psychology of imagination, captured the essentially un-harnessable nature of the creative process:

"Creative individuals are more at home with complexity and apparent disorder than other people are … The creative individual in his generalised preference for apparent disorder, turns to the dimly realised life of the unconscious, and is likely to have more than the usual amount of respect for the forces of the irrational in himself and in others … The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts it as the most promising source of novelty in his own thought. He rejects the demand of society that he should shun in himself the primitive, the uncultured, the naive, the magical, the nonsensical … When an individual thinks in ways which are customarily tabooed, his fellows may regard him as mentally unbalanced … This kind of imbalance is more likely to be healthy than unhealthy. The truly creative individual stands ready to abandon old classifications and to acknowledge that life, particularly his own unique life, is rich with new possibilities. To him, disorder offers the potentiality of order."(22)

Barron's statement might well serve as a kind of Trickster manifesto, emphasising as it does the central role of the irrational, chaotic elements of the psyche in the creative process.

Discovery as trickery and deception

In Greek mythology the classic Trickster figure is Hermes, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods and the deity of speech, communication, and writing, whose first act as a baby was to steal cattle from Apollo. Thus we see in Hermes the qualities of thievery, trickery, and deceit combined with the skill of communication.

This may appear to be an odd combination of traits, but if we look closely we can see that the pairing of deception and communication makes sense. Because Trickster happenings are paradoxical, confusing, and chaotic, they take us off guard mentally and jolt us into seeing unexpected patterns and new meanings. The writer G K Chesterton emphasised this 'breakthrough' potential by defining paradox as Truth standing upside down to attract attention. In the wake of paradox we see connections and patterns to which we were previously blind. It is as if our normal modes of perception have been tricked. The logical mind, accustomed to following old paths of reason previously laid down, is momentarily side-tracked into a different mode of perception. A new communication channel with the universe suddenly opens and grand patterns are revealed — creativity and discovery as a prank played on the habits of reason.

Trickster effects in healing

Similar processes happen in healing. Myrin Borysenko was a prominent researcher in immunology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He was intrigued by the work of Harvard's David McClelland on the impact of belief in healing. On one occasion Borysenko asked McClelland how a particular healer in the Boston area healed people. "Oh, he messes up your mind," McClelland replied.

One morning while at his laboratory Borysenko began to come down with symptoms of flu — fever, aches, cough, and congestion. By noon he felt miserable. Unable to function, he decided to leave work and go home to bed. On his way home he suddenly thought of the psychic healer he had discussed with McClelland. Why not give the healer a try? There's no adequate alternative treatment, he thought, and no one will ever know.

He found the healer in a dilapidated part of the city. As he climbed the rickety stairs he began to have second thoughts. What if my colleagues could see me now? he worried. The door to the healer's apartment was open, as if Borysenko were expected. He entered to find an enormously fat, unkempt man sprawled on a sofa watching a soap opera on TV and drinking wine from a gallon jug. Summoning his courage, Borysenko said, "I hear you can cure people. Can you cure my flu?" Without taking his eyes off the TV, the healer reached for a small bottle of purple liquid on the floor. "Go into the bathroom, fill the tub half full of water, pour this stuff in, and sit in it for 30 minutes. Then you will be cured."

Borysenko did as he was told. As he sat in the tub, up to his waist in the densely purple water, he was struck by the sheer absurdity of what he was doing. He felt so silly he began to laugh uncontrollably. He was still laughing when he realised his half-hour was over. He dressed and walked to the living room to find the healer still engrossed in the soap opera. He simply said, "Now you are healed." Then he pointed to the door, indicating he was free to go.

Driving home, Borysenko gradually realised he felt different. He sensed no symptoms whatever. He felt well — so well that he decided to return to work. He worked late. As he recited his adventure that night to his wife while undressing for bed, she suddenly burst into laughter. Looking into the mirror, he knew why. He was purple from the waist down.

Borysenko's healer was a first-rate Trickster — one who upsets expectations, creates confusion, and jumbles the normal categories of thought. Borysenko was enticed to abandon everything he believed about how healing worked, put his intellect on hold, and simply "let it happen."

It is perfectly natural to try to find approaches to healing that are completely objective and that can be successfully applied to all individuals who have the same illness. One might try, for example, to reduce Borysenko's experience to an algorithm whereby every patient with a diagnosis of flu is advised to add a specific amount of purple liquid to his bath water. But when used in a repetitive, formulaic way, these approaches rarely work as dramatically as for Borysenko, perhaps because they do not 'mess up the mind', as McClelland put it. This is perhaps one reason behind the adage, "One should use a new medication as often as possible, while it still has the power to work."

Arrogance and the Trickster

As long as we lie to ourselves, the Trickster will be with us. He'll show up just when we least want him, to embarrass us on a first date, to prove us fools in front of the learned company we're trying to impress, to make us miss a power breakfast with that all-important business contact. Yes, he'll leave at our bidding, but he always comes back with a vengeance. The only way to get rid of him is to listen to his message — and to admit the truth about ourselves in all its beauty and ugliness.

The Trickster not only deceives others, he is always being duped, often by pranks that backfire. Trickster tales show that humiliation is never far away; thus the Trickster warns of the dangers of arrogance and hubris. When we make rash assurances to patients that "everything will be fine," that our favoured therapy is sure to work, or that we can find the problem when a string of other diagnosticians has failed, we are setting ourselves up to be tricked. "You can think as much as you like," the Russian proverb warns, "but you will invent nothing better than bread and salt."

(This article first appeared in Alternative Therapies (1996), 2, 2. It is reproduced here with kind permission.)

<< BACK TO PREVIOUS PAGE Return to top

References

This article first appeared in Volume 3, No, 4 (1996) of the Human Givens journal.

LARRY DOSSEY, MD., is the author of a number of books and an international lecturer on mind-body medicine. He is co-chairman of the Panel of Mind/Body Interventions within the Office of Alternative Medicine at the American Institute of Health, and executive editor of Alternative Therapies. His books include Healing Breakthroughs, Piatkus, London; Healing Words, Harpers, San Francisco; Space, Time and Medicine, Shambala, New York and Beyond Illness, New Science Library, New York.

> More information can be found in the following books, both by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell