One must be wounded to become a^ healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade's book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded: either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing. Generally, the experiences are ecstatic-stars, or ghostlike demons, hit them or cut them open. But always, they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others. How would you interpret that psychologically? Answer: He would know the whole process of suffering and of being wounded and healed. Yes. But many people have the experience of suffering and do not become healers; practically everyone could become a healer if it depended only on the experience of suffering, for we have all suffered. At that rate, everybody would be a shaman. Answer: By overcoming suffering and having been wounded. Yes. The natives in the circumpolar regions, for instance, say that the difference between an ordinary person who suffers and the healer is that the healer finds a way to overcome and get out of his trouble without outer help. He can overcome his own suffering; he finds the creative way out, and that means that he finds his own cure, which is unique. Eliade tells a story about a very successful reindeer hunter, a provider of food, and therefore a big man in his tribe, who has no thought of becoming a shaman. However, he gets a nervous disease which keeps him from going hunting, and then he discovers that as soon as he learns to drum like a shaman, his disease disappears; as soon as he begins to "shamanize" by drumming, calling ghosts, and making cures, he cures himself. But once he is cured, he has had enough of being a shaman and goes back to hunting. Then the illness gets him again. In the end, he sullenly 112 puts up with it and becomes a healer, since it is the only way by which he can keep himself fit. Against his wish and his will, reindeer hunting is finished forever. This is a striking illustration of a man's having to find his own cure after having been wounded by a neurotic disease and forced into a healing activity. Naturally, when he was initially confined by his illness, he got a shaman to try to cure him. But no shaman could cure him. He had to cure himself; he had to shamanize, and then he was cured. The healing hero, therefore, is the one who finds some creative way out, a way which is not already known and does not follow a pattern. Ordinary sick people follow ordinary patterns, but the shaman cannot be cured by the usual methods of healing; he has to find the unique way-the only way that applies to him.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is pressing on something the wound-and-healer image usually glosses over: the healer is not distinguished by the depth of suffering, nor by the nobility of surviving it, but by finding a cure that no one else could administer. The reindeer hunter's story is deliberately unglamorous for this reason. He doesn't want the calling. He returns to hunting the moment he can. He is dragged back by the illness itself — and the dragging is the point. The shamanic vocation arrives not as inspiration but as compulsion, which means the "creative way out" is not chosen in any heroic sense. It is stumbled into, resisted, and finally accepted because the alternative is to remain sick.
This matters because the wound-healer motif gets read most often through a pneumatic lens — suffering as initiation, as passage to a higher capacity, as the necessary price of spiritual authority. That reading turns illness into curriculum and lets the sufferer console themselves with the idea that their pain is secretly productive. Von Franz won't allow it. The Siberian hunter's sullenness is the corrective: he finds his cure not because he embraced transformation but because the illness was more persistent than his resistance. There is no triumphant arc here. There is only the discovery that a specific suffering requires a specific response, and that no general method — not even the tribe's best shaman — can supply it. The uniqueness of the cure is not a reward. It is the constraint.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood·1970