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Psychotic language offers us an extreme example of a kind of rationality that
has left logic behind and taken on other, associative mechanisms. But it is not the
only case offered by clinical medicine of oscillation between classical and poetic
rationality.
10.3
The Rationality of Magical Thinking
Medicine, as an experimental science, tries to work with classical rationality, whose
rules allow ideas to be communicated clearly, coherently and unequivocally. But it
is constantly being interfered with by the other kind of rationality, which uses the
association of ideas by analogy (metaphor) and contiguity (metonym) in a very lax
way: associative or poetic rationality.
Both in clinical practice and in other areas of daily life there are many examples
(not as extreme as delirium) of association by analogy or contiguity bursting in
on reasoning, sabotaging its logic with wild associations. This is the case with
many beliefs in folk medicine, rooted in what has traditionally been called “magical
thinking”.
In his classic work
The Golden Bough
, first published in 1890, James George
Frazer described this magical thinking, which he considered an erroneous mech-
anism of arbitrary association of ideas, typical of primitive mentalities. [3] His
openly scornful tone towards these mentalities has earned him deserved reproach.
But the description he offers is still of interest. According to Frazer, there are two
sorts of what he called “sympathetic magic”, each based on a type of association.
Firstly there is what he calls “homeopathic or imitative magic”, based on the law
of similarity by which “like produces like”; it can be deduced (arbitrarily), from the
fact that two things are analogous, that one is cause and the other effect and that it is
therefore possible to act on something simply by imitating it. This gave rise to the
widespread belief that it is possible to harm an enemy by working on a wax doll in
his or her likeness, pinching the doll's eyes to blind the enemy, piercing its heart to
provoke a heart attack, afterwards shrouding it as though it were a corpse and giving
it a ritual burial to be rid of it once and for all.
Then there is another kind of link, that of contiguity, that gives rise to another
kind of magic: “contaminating or contagious magic”. This is based on the principle
that things that have once been in contact can continue to act on each other after-
wards, so that an object can be manipulated to cause an effect on a person or animal
that has previously been in contact with it. The groom who, when he sees that a
horse has hurt its hoof on a nail, picks up the nail, cleans it and greases it for several
days to prevent the foot from festering, is working on this principle. ([3], p. 68)
Amongst the enormous amount of casuistry collected by Frazer there are plenty
of therapeutic applications of magical thinking. One of his examples even shows the
combined use of the two basic types of association of ideas: analogy and contiguity:
“A cure for a tumor, based on the principle of homoeopathic magic, is prescribed
by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious
work on medicine. It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang
