ABSTRACT
Asclepius’s father, Apollo, gave medicine the quality of a rational, solar art. Asclepius’s maternal descent, however, and the manner of his birth – snatched from fire and from the womb of his dying mother, Coronis – indicate that medicine cannot be considered an exact science, and that it is fraught with the frailty of the human condition. Those who treat wounds need to know the experience, to have themselves been wounded. Vulnerability and compassion are essential elements in the tragic consciousness inherent in the god of medicine’s vision. Asclepius’s genealogy goes back to the paternal principle as culture and self-awareness, which transforms a dark, destructive element into a fire consciously usable by technology and science, which Prometheus will give to humankind. The story illustrates the need to confront and overcome the shadowy side of Apollonian culture, the recondite secrets of matter and the feral violence of death. The author stresses the importance to science of accepting uncertainty, to make the integration of the experience of illness, as a subjective process, possible through symbolization. The symbolic, initiatory structure of the Greek temples of medicine thus seems closer to the paradigm of individuation of analytical psychology than to the medical paradigm of healing.
