Reviewed by Bruce I. Kodish, P.T., Ph.D. © 1998*

A version of this was first published in General Semantics Bulletin, Number 54, 1988/9.
 

As its title suggests, this book provides a sociologist's perspective on "healers...practising...outside the boundaries of conventional medicine". (p. 1) Easthope's narrative reports from the field enliven his analysis, which provides a social context for understanding the appeal and varying 'effectiveness' of both unorthodox and orthodox healers. The resulting book, concise and readable, contains much of interest from a general-semantics perspective.

Easthope, associated at the time of publication with the University of Tasmania, attempts to go beyond many previous sociologists who, he claims, have generally limited their view to the "cultural label[s]", the social roles and the institutional functions of sickness and healing. He looks, as well, at the relation of these and other sociological factors to the actual 'organic' changes in the 'sick' person. He writes:
...there is ample evidence that healing is concerned not only with sickness (the social recognition of affliction) but also with disease (organic change), and there is some evidence - especially well-documented at Lourdes - that healing produces organic change. Given this evidence, it is no longer adequate sociology to treat man as an organic machine (to be studied by doctors) with feelings (to be studied by psychologists), who applies labels to his behavior (to be studied by sociologists). A new model of man is required that does not treat man as a 'disembodied' self. That model must, if it is to be useful for looking at healing, include not only culture but also body and mind as social constructs, in part at least. (p. 116)

Easthope's model focuses on the nature of personal identity and its development. He sees humans as embodied selves. Looking to neurobiology, he rejects mind-body dualism and suggests that:
...we abandon the notion of an immanent mind with which the individual is born and see him as a neurological complex... (p. 118)

Easthope views social identity as symbolic, involving the development of 'meanings' created within ongoing social interactions. While acknowledging the interaction of so-called 'bodily' and 'social' factors, his theory emphasizes the influence of the symbolic social factors in transforming and transcending the personal identity of the 'sick' person. He argues that:
...identity is composed of body and culturally created identity intimately interlinked...Identity is created and sustained by social interaction...A change in social interaction produces a change in identity, and the body is included in the term identity. There is, in fact, already extensive evidence that changes in the social environment produce changes in bodily states. (p. 122)

Easthope formulates that the alternative healers that he studied seemed to work effectively at transforming the identities of their patients (most of whom had chronic illnesses and had already been seen and screened by medical doctors) towards a sense of greater self-esteem and coping. Techniques used included creating an air of authority that the patient respects, focusing on the patient through the art of sympathetic listening, spending time with the patient and showing deference to the patient through what sociologist Erving Goffman called "presentational rituals" such as "the use of first names, the proffering of small services and aid, invitations to come on outings, salutations and touch." (P.127)

Encouraging their patients to "take an active part in the healing process" (p. 128) constituted a significant aspect of the art of the healers that he observed. Easthope writes:
Marginal healers in modern society...focus upon the individual and his feelings...and their therapy requires the co-operation of the individual. What is involved in their therapy is a complex process of coaching...whereby the individual abandons his old identity as an afflicted individual subject to his affliction and takes on a new identity as an individual who controls his affliction. (P. 124)

Easthope distinguishes the above factors (which focus on transforming the 'sick' person's identity) from what he calls "transcendence". In a state of transcendence, one 'leaves' one's 'normal' state of consciousness, which includes one's identity as a 'sick' person. Easthope speculates that this seems likely to account for reported 'instantaneous' cures:
...the afflicted individual, subjected to the full gamut of techniques, as at Lourdes, is disorientated through physiological means, through sensory overload and through the breakdown of his perceptual framework. The framework of his body, the framework of his senses and the cultural framework with respect to such basic concepts as time and space are all subject to attack. His old identity, his old way of looking at the world, is completely [!] destroyed and he experiences transcendence in which he loses all [!] his old identities, both social and animal. In this state he is extremely suggestible, a blank sheet on which a new identity can be built. (p. 139)
Recent psychological research on hypnosis, state-dependent learning and multiple personality disorders provides some corroboration for this notion of 'transcendence'.
 

Unfortunately, Easthope partially undoes his intention to explain how sociological factors can produce 'organic changes' because he fails to live up to his own statement, as previously quoted, that "...not only culture but also body and mind [can be considered as] social constructs". (p. 116) Rejecting the notion of an 'immaterial mind', he wisely views the dichotomies of 'mind' and 'body' as terms that must not be confused with what we try to represent with them; yet he continues to use the old terminology throughout the text. He thereby continues to confront and confront again the persistent problem, as he frames it, of "How...immaterial social forces produce changes in a material being". (p. 131) "Social forces", he writes in another part of the book, "are not material (although they have material effects)..." (p. 41)
 

As social constructs or terms 'body', 'mind', 'social forces', 'material', 'immaterial', etc., carry baggage left by their historical use. This history of assumptions and implications will continue to affect the users of these terms as long as they continue to use them uncritically. In the preface to the first edition of Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski wrote, "Few of us realize the unbelievable traps, some of them of a psychopathological character, which the structure of our language sets before us. These also make any scientific approach or agreement on vital points impossible..." (p. Lxxxii, Fourth Edition)

In regard to this crucial problem of terminology, Healers and Alternative Medicine provides a well written example of much recent work in behavioral and psychosomatic medicine and of what can go wrong with it. Many 'establishment' researchers and research institutions seem to have begun accepting the subject of Easthope's book as an area for legitimate research. The magazine Advances: The Journal of the Institute for the Advancement of Health publishes a good sample of such research. The heading of its title page reads, "Advancing ideas, based on the latest scientific knowledge, to further the study of mind-body interactions and the use of mind-body interventions in health care and health promotion." Studies in this area would advance much further if its students stopped revivifying the notion that there exists some thing called the 'mind' that interacts with some thing called the 'body'. The methodology of general-semantics, including the various extensional devices and the use of non-elementalistic terms, provides much needed antidote to the dangers of such formulating.

Korzybski continuously and ruthlessly refused to separate language, including his own language, from its neurological matrix. He coined the terms "neuro-linguistic" and "neuro-semantic" and kept a constant focus on "semantic [evaluational] reaction", defined as the organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment's psycho-logical reaction to words, symbols, and other events in terms of their 'meanings', significance, value, etc., to the organism. Human psycho-logical reactions as semantic [evaluational] reactions of an organism necessarily involve 'emotional', 'intellectual', 'physiological', and 'colloidal' [electro-chemical] levels of analysis among others. The environment of the organism includes its neuro-linguistic, neuro-semantic [evaluational] environment.

To point out, as Easthope rightly does, that the social symbolic environment can create 'organic' change in individuals thus seems from a general-semantics viewpoint not only obvious but redundant. Because for a symbol to function as a symbol for an individual it necessarily must 'exist' on a physiological, organic level. This point, made over and over again by Korzybski more than 60 years ago seems as difficult to accept for some 'hard- (nosed) -science' physicians and researchers, married to an antiquated notion of 'matter' and 'body', as it seems for some of the 'new-age', 'cosmic foo-foo' mongers married to antiquated notions of 'mind' and 'spirit' whom Easthope writes about.

Semantic [evaluational] reactions constitute, as Korzybski wrote in his later writings, "the most complex electro-colloidal processes known." To me it seems highly regrettable that people like Easthope continually have to re-invent this particular wheel (he does a particularly good job of it) and then proceed to dismantle it, sometimes in the same paragraph. It seems way beyond time for socio-psycho-somatic research to go beyond having to prove that it exists as a legitimate field of research and to go on to study in a much more detailed way the neuro-semantic [evaluational] variables that can be used to improve an individual's functioning.