The Rite as Therapy
Why exorcism works when it works: persuasion, community, and the ending.
In the Texts
The rite the manuals build toward is long, public, and formal: the sacred names, the commands, the questioning of the demon, the sprinkling and the signing, the relics laid on, the whole house praying, and at the end the demon’s departure, often announced by the patient, and a Mass of thanksgiving. Canale records the cures; he also records that the rite had to be repeated, sometimes for years.
What Medicine Makes of It
Jerome Frank, in Persuasion and Healing (1961), set out what every effective healing has in common, from the shaman’s séance to psychoanalysis: a sufferer in distress, a healer with authority, a setting marked off as healing, and a rationale and ritual that both believe. Arthur Kleinman’s fieldwork in Taiwan found the shaman’s patients as satisfied as the doctor’s for the complaints the clinic calls functional. Exorcism has every element Frank named, and in addition a diagnosis that takes the blame off the sufferer, a community that attends, and a clear ending, which the clinic rarely supplies. For dissociative and functional afflictions it is, in these terms, a strong treatment; for an infection or a tumour it is none, and the manuals’ failures were of that kind. The present Rituale (1999) requires a medical examination first.
The Evidence
- Frank (1961, 1991) compared religious healing, shamanism, placebo, and psychotherapy and found four shared elements: an emotionally charged relationship with a helper, a healing setting, a rationale accepted by both, and a ritual requiring active participation.
- Kleinman’s Taiwan study (1980) followed patients of a shaman (tang-ki) and found 90 per cent reported improvement, the complaints being mostly anxiety, somatic, and family troubles.
- A controlled study of Pentecostal deliverance in Ghana and Brazil (Pfeifer, 1994, and Csordas, 1994) found that the ritual relieved anxiety and depression in the short term and that relapse brought the patient back for more.
- The Vatican’s 1999 rite requires that the exorcist consult physicians and psychiatrists and that symptoms explicable by illness not be taken for possession; some dioceses now have psychiatrists on the exorcism commission.
- Goodman (1988) and Bourguignon argue that the rite’s power is in its ending: the expulsion gives a date on which the suffering is declared over, which no course of psychotherapy supplies.
Where They Part
The manuals say the demon leaves; the clinic says the sufferer is persuaded, held, and released. The two accounts predict the same outcomes and the same failures. Where they part is in the cost: the rite names an enemy, and the manuals’ afflicted were cured at the price of someone accused.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Frank, J. D., and Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and Healing, 3rd ed. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Kleinman, A. (1980). Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. University of California Press.
- Goodman, F. D. (1988). How about Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World. Indiana University Press.
- De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (1999), praenotanda 16–17.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.