Gifts we give through evils we take: empathic exchange of embodied experiences as therapy

Journal article

Therapeutic empathy entails understanding a patient's illness and relation to that illness, communicating that understanding and acting on it in a helpful manner. Explanations of its efficacies in improving patient outcomes in the biomedical literature are limited and centre on latent consequences such as facilitating more accurate diagnoses, thus neglecting the role of social processes in healing. In an attempt to provide this insight, this study performs an ethnographic sensory analysis of xemátiasma, a Greek healing ritual for the evil eye in which a healer temporarily takes on the evil affecting the patient (thereby partially embodying the patient's symptoms of mátiasma), expels it through intense yawning and tearing, and relieves the patient's pain. Much of existing literature on the evil eye in Greece privileges an ocular-centric perspective that focuses on the symbolism of the ritual steps and materials in xemátiasma to explain its effectiveness, rather than on the dynamic, lived interaction between patient and healer. By showing how ethnographic accounts of evil-eye infliction invoke visual, acoustic and tactile synaesthetic features, I explore if and how an exchange of embodied experiences occurs in xemátiasma and delve into the ritual's social and bodily-felt efficacies. I argue that xemátiasma provides evidence for a multisensory form of therapeutic empathy that allows healers to perform acts of care and create new orientations through which patients can experience their illnesses. This relationship between therapeutic empathy and xemátiasma provides a platform to contemplate differing claims to efficacy and highlights the importance of social and sensory experiences in healing, including in the biomedical consultation room.

Authors: Vrosgou, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 172-199
• Publication date: 2020-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-zv8avzgon
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: JASO