ABSTRACT
At the heart of House, a television series that dramatizes the unmasking of medical mysteries1, is a recurrent image of the crippledness of its master sleuth, Dr Gregory House. This diagnostician in a teaching hospital suffers from damaged muscles in his thigh2 that will not stop hurting. His own wound is instructive. Seeking an injection of morphine to ease his pain in Skin Deep (2: 13), he exposes his scarred, atrophied thigh muscles to the Dean of Medicine. The shocked viewer can see that he bears what Jungian analysts who have studied the Grail Legend3 have learned to call an `Amfortas' wound,' (Haule 19924) ± after one of the names of the suffering Grail King, who is sometimes shown as crippled and staff-bearing, not unlike House with his cane. In the Grail story, the King had been wounded while ®shing or boarding a ship, and his wound was around the hips or through the thighs, that is, in the sexual region (E. Jung and von Franz 1970).
