ABSTRACT
Children all too easily scratch, cut or scrape their skin. Abrasions and surface wounds overpopulate the accidental territory of childhood. As a young boy, I had more than my share of cuts and bruises. Climbing trees or exploring
thick thorny bushes caused minor wounds. Playing stick ball or touch tag on the Brooklyn city street where my family lived produced numerous temporary scars. Minor and surface wounds disappeared quickly, of course. But they left an indelible impression
on me of the body’s ability to reconstitute its borders. So, I was delighted, when, in the summer of my eighth year, while vacationing in the mountains of Pennsylvania with my parents and siblings, I discovered something marvelous about the tiny, lowly salamander. (In the evening I collected salamanders, some injured, in shoeboxes and jars.) This is that the adult salamander is blessed with a miraculous power. It can regenerate an entire lost limb over and over again, no matter how often the limb is shorn or amputated from its body. Just how this is done was utterly mysterious to me at the time. One key, I since have learned, is that when a salamander’s limb is amputated blood vessels in the remaining stump contract quickly so that bleeding is limited. A loose arrangement of stem-like cells in the area of the stump then begins to serve as progenitor of the replacement limb (Muneoka, Han, and Gardiner 2008: 56-63). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our mental health or emotional well-being, when scarred or
damaged, similarly healed autonomously, immediately and fully? Suppose a wounded mind would ‘know’ of the right repair for its damaged capacity or faculty, access the extent of injury, initiate a regenerative response, clean the emotional scar, restore the contour of cognitive or psychological function, and heal itself. Just as we may watch a lowly salamander grow back a missing leg, we may observe the subject of a severe depression or crippling paranoia quickly and efficiently reconstitute their person.
