Navajo Psychotherapy

"Witch doctors and psychiatrists are really one behind their exterior mask and pipe," says Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey of the National Institute of Mental Health. Most of his colleagues would not go that far, but some believe that witch doctors can help their emotionally troubled patients. That is why the institute is now providing scholarships for Navajo Indians studying "curing ceremonials" under the tutelage of tribal medicine men on the federal reservation at Rough Rock, Ariz.

The aid program was conceived by the Indians and encouraged by Psychiatrist Robert Bergman of the Indian Health Service. Without it the Navajo medicine man might die out, because potential students need to work at paying jobs and have no time for training. Describing the program at a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Bergman explained that the ceremonials are based on a belief that disease is "caused by disharmony with the universe, including the universe of other men." To restore harmony, a medicine man or "singer" conducts a traditional "chantway," leading the ailing victim, his relatives and friends in a ritual of speeches and dancing.

The singer intones a long text and creates several beautiful "sand paintings" by arranging patterns of pollen, meal, crushed flowers and charcoal on a canvas of sand or buckskin. He directs the patient to sit on each painting while he conducts a ceremonial treatment, and then the paintings--and presumably the sick man's problems--are destroyed section by section.

Most traditional scientists look on such ceremonials as merely quaint performances that have no significant effect. But Bergman has long disagreed. He was particularly impressed six years ago when he met a Navajo medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers, who had apparently cured a psychotic Indian woman after a modern psychiatric hospital had failed to help her.

Though Bergman admits that he does not fully understand why Largewhiskers' methods work, he offers several possible reasons. For one thing, chantways are "almost always symbolically appropriate." Pathologically prolonged grief, for instance, is "treated with a ceremony that removes the influence of the dead and turns the patient's attention back toward life."

Besides, says Bergman, Navajo medicine has much in common with psychoanalysis. Both have an "ordered method of establishing intense, helpful relationships" between doctor and patient. And both are based on a belief that much behavior is shaped by unconscious processes. "There is a part of the mind that we don't really know about," Largewhiskers told Bergman. "That part is the most important in whether we become sick or remain well."

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