Reflexions on Psychosis

The wounded healer myth refers psychologically to the capacity to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asklepios, the sun-like healer. The deepest psychic wound with its mythological dimension can only be experienced during psychosis, so the wounded healer is the psychotherapist who discovers this wound in himself through living his own psychosis. Nothing in the per-sonal unconscious needs to be repressed unless the ego feels threatened by its archetypal power. The wound of the wounded healer has one of the most threatening archetypal powers. In the meantime, the encounter with the unconscious is a wounding defeat for the ego, and the integration of con-tents that were always unconscious and projected involves a serious lesion of the ego. This lesion of the ego is what is symbolized by the figure of the sun-hero who is lame or who has an amputated extremity.