…Antiphon would first encourage the patient to talk about his suffering and would then help him by means of a rhetoric which utilized both style and content of the patient’s utterances – a procedure which in a very modern sense amounted to a reframing of that which the sufferer considered ‘real’ or ‘true’, and thereby changed his pain-producing world image. …Antiphon of Athens …appears to have come the closest to the modern concept of therapeutic communication. The fact that communication is a condition sine qua non of human existence has been know for a very long time. This, however, means that the use of a specific interpersonal communication leads not merely to a change of the mood, the views, or the feelings of its recipient, as it can be observed on an everyday basis, but to a physical change that cannot ‘normally’ be effected deliberately.
What happens is really quite extraordinary: A totally absurd, symbolic interaction leads to a concrete result that is, the blood vessels leading into this virally produced tissue begin to constrict, and the wart eventually atrophies as a result of anoxia. As a rule the child then asks – amused or bewildered – how he is supposed to let go of the wart, whereupon one answers nonchalantly that he should not worry about that – the wart will come off all by itself.Īlthough the effectiveness of all kinds of magical and superstitious treatments of warts has been know since time immemorial, there does not exist a scientifically satisfactory explanation of these treatments especially not for the procedure just mentioned.
In practice this is achieved by giving the child a coin for, and thus laying claim to, his wart. One can free children from warts by ‘purchasing’ them.
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