One, a woman named Debby Ogg struggled to explain, "There's a science from the inside as well as the outside." Debby, whose spontaneous remission from lymphoma ("It wasn't spontaneous," she emends, "I worked my ass off for it.") was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, says that she experienced episodes of a "floating, timeless" state of mind that had reminded her of childhood, like when "the sign for the town of Worcester was only ten minutes from our house, but getting there seemed like a whole day's trip."
Many people described revisiting forgotten moments of childhood wholeness with unprecedented intensity. Peter Hettel, a Florida software engineer, was diagnosed with a deadly sarcoma in his sinus cavity. He had been offered a treatment so gruesome sounding that he refused. Instead, he drove to North Carolina to see an unorthodox therapist whose practice included "neurolinguistic programming." During his first session, Peter was suddenly plunged into a long-submerged memory.
"I was around six years old, living in the countryside. I'd woken up really early one morning, and there spread before me was a magical-looking field with dewdrops like diamonds, and a grazing deer with its breath smoking from the cold. What I remembered was this sense of newness, of infinite possibility. Suddenly I was in it again, just exactly. I felt like I was a different person, or a person I'd once been but had completely forgotten. I just burst out laughing."
Many ancient healing rituals seem to imply that the first turning point in the process of renewal is "becoming as a child again." Writes mythologist Joseph Campbell: The first step of regeneration is a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the magic of childhood. All the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; such golden seeds do not
die."
In the Greek Asklepian temple, the patient would be clothed in white linen and wrapped like a child in swaddling clothes. Interestingly, the late Australian psychiatrist Ainslee Meares apparently obtained several documented and dramatic spontaneous remissions teaching patients with advanced cancers a meditation technique aimed at producing psychological "regression... a return to that state of affairs prior to the onset of the cancer... before things went wrong' " He postulated this return allowed the "self-righting" mechanisms of the body to again "come into play."
Vivid recall of childhood memories is a characteristic of people rated highly hypnotizable. Psychologists S. C. Wilson and T. X. Barber found that such people were as children more likely to indulge in make-believe and retain into adulthood an ability to immerse themselves in fantasy, to "live in" the images they create. One woman in Wilson and Barber's study described having to wrap herself in blankets in her well-heated living room while watching the Siberian winter scene in Dr. Zhivago.
Such so-called mind-body plasticity is also a hallmark of the placebo response, and may be a key component in self-healing. Good placebo responders, says researcher Ian Wickramesekera, resemble good hypnotic subjects in their ability to shift out of "the critical, analytic mode of information processing. They will tend to be individuals who are prone to see conceptual or other relationships between events that seem randomly distributed to others. They will inhibit the interfering signals of doubt and skepticism."
It is intriguing to note how closely these descriptions tally with observations of the healers of the Africa's Kung Bushman tribe, who, Harvard anthropologist Richard Katz notes, have "easier access to a rich fantasy life and a primarily intuitive and emotional response, rather than a logical or rational one."
A Rising Heart
But Katz noticed another trait. The healers in the tribe, he says, seem to be more "emotionally labile. They are said to be more sga ku tsiu; that is, their 'heart rises' more, they are more 'expressive' or 'passionate.'" During the healing dance ceremonies in which participants attempt to raise within their bodies the "boiling energy" called num, the healers' emotions seemed to be "readily available and capable of quickly changing their intensity and content."
I and other researchers have been struck by a similar emotional lability among self-healers. In contrast to some notions that the healing path winds through verdant swards of peace and love, many patients described the unexpected welling-up of hidden reservoirs of anger—"like a volcano," said a former rheumatoid arthritis patient—which they associated with their unexpected recoveries. Several studies of exceptional cancer patients have confirmed such people are not infrequently "hostile, compulsive, and demanding."
Dr. Hans Schilder, a researcher at the Helen Dowling Institute of Psychosocial Medicine in Rotterdam, Holland, has noted similar characteristics in the seven spontaneous remission cases he has studied. Schilder, who sports a mop of blond hair, looks scarcely older than 17, and is lanky almost to the point of elongation, is attempting to identify specific psychological changes that might precede healing—searching, in effect, for a Tumor Necrosis Factor of the Mind.
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