We think we know what healers do: they build on patients irrational beliefs and treat them in a symbolic way. If they get results, its thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all.

In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interestingprecisely because they dont listen to patients, using techniques of divination rather than diagnosis. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment.

Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.

Tobie Nathan is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Université Paris-VIII.

Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Editor's Note

1. Towards a Scientific Psychopathology
Tobie Nathan

I. The Benefits of Folk Therapy

Scientific Therapy and Folk Therapy

Solitude

Diagnostics or Divination

Statistical Categories vs. Real Cultural Groups

The Construction of Truth

Risky Psychopathology

A Clinical Illustration

Continuation of the Consultation

II. Medicines in Non-Western Cultures

Prolegomena on Thought and Belief

The Idea of the Symbol

The White Mans Medicines

Thought is in Objects

Concepts of the Savage Mind

Active Objects

In Conclusion

2. The Doctor and the Charlatan
Isabelle Stengers

Recovering for the Wrong Reasons

The Power of Experimentation

Who defines the causes?

A Practical Challenge

3. Users: Lobbies or Political Creativity?
Isabelle Stengers

Is another kind of medicine possible?

Disease mongering

A machine

Condemnation?

Hands Off!

4. Doctors, Healers, Therapists, the Sick, Patients, Subjects, Users
Tobie Nathan

Therapist

The Sick

Patients

Subjects

Users

Pharmaka

Notes