Taking a deep dive into the ancient roots of psychotherapy
Redfield Jamison is the author of many books, including The Unquiet Mind, and is a professor of mood disorders and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her new book isur medical ancestors sought to heal the mind long before they could treat diseases of the brain. Magicians and priests tended the sick through suggestion, therapeutic bond, and tincture of time, not by science. This has changed.
More than four thousand years ago, Egyptians built sleep temples that served as sanctuaries for worship and for the relief of suffering. Temple priests and doctors induced trancelike states in their supplicants, interpreted their dreams, and advised the most auspicious paths through life. Music, painting, and walking in nature were prescribed to calm the anxious and console the grieving. Egyptian doctors, and after them the Greeks, studied their patients as well as healing them.
The priests in the Asclepian temples were tutored in suffering and were learned in the prescription of calming or enlivening herbs that had been used for tens of thousands of years. They knew and taught the rituals of remedy: Before starting treatment, supplicants purified themselves. They bathed in healing waters—mineral springs, the river, the sea—meditated in the sanctuary’s sacred grove, fed on a cleansing diet, and prayed.
War, as Henry Adams said about the Civil War, sets the circumstances for advances in medicine and science. In the twentieth century, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, wounded in body and devastated in mind, commanded not only urgency but improvisation. Science from the battlefield brought rapid change to psychiatry, as well as to general medicine and surgery. British psychiatrist and anthropologist W.H.R.
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