ABSTRACT
Ziegler proposes a therapy of the word applied to medicine. Archetypal medicine is based on the principle of polarity which starts from the conscious experience of the inherent symbolic tension between sickness and health: value is attached to life’s intrinsic thanatotropic tendency, which emerges in our culture through various symbolisms linked to personified death. If the shadow and the lower functions of the personality are denied, they will eventually materialize as symptoms. The patient feels inhabited by an extraneous will, which desires his or her destruction (the nosoi). Archetypal medicine shows solidarity with the demon; it carries on a dialogue with him, trying to ennoble his presence and understand his language, always remaining close to the body. If the method of dialogue based on introverted intuition is adopted, images of sickness and the symptom arise, in a language rooted in the senses, of which the patient’s bodily experience is evidence. Health is largely unconscious, for its realization corresponds, in an alchemical sense, to the ‘gold in the dung’ that sickness brings with it. Ziegler describes the symbol of the mystical marriage with death, Todeshochzeit. The text ends with the description of a personal case experienced by the author.
