Patrick Clervoy is a psychiatrist, and associate professor at Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris. He has been involved in several large military operations. He is the author of works on phenomena of psychic trauma and unconscious mechanisms of collective violence.

Do we really know today what it means to heal? The healing of an illness is polymorphous, sometimes mysterious, it can be subjective. Though the medical world can describe illnesses well, it cannot always explain what keeps us alive. However, these mechanisms, the forces at play when an illness is cured, can be revealed by science. This is what the psychiatrist Patrick Clervoy invites us to discover. Against all expectations, the history of mass healing, miraculous phenomena, magnetism, notions of vital energy, of empathy, are interesting in many respects. It is possible, without making judgements, to learn something from them. Because all those phenomena enable us to observe the role of the mind and its power over the body.

And so, isn’t it time to grant more importance to the emotional and subjective elements that intervene in healing, elements that the medical world today consistently ignores, whereas these factors – as History has shown – are part of the healing process, or in any event influences it.

An argument for a more open-minded medicine that acknowledges the unexplored dimension of healing, the metaphysical dimension of the human being.