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.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is careful here in a way the passage's admirers often aren't. She lets the students reach for the obvious answers — he knows suffering, he has overcome suffering — and then she cuts both short. The shaman is not distinguished by having suffered more, or by having won against suffering. He finds a way out that is *his own*, a cure that is unique. That word is the hinge. Not the cure that was given, not the framework that was handed down, not the technique absorbed in training — something that emerged from inside the specific wound in that specific soul.
The pneumatic temptation is to read this as a heroic arc: wounded, descended, returned, now able to heal others. But von Franz is pointing somewhere harder. Most people who suffer do not become healers. Most people who overcome suffering do not become healers. What separates the shaman is that the way out was not borrowed. He could not reach for a tradition, a teacher, an outer authority — and so the soul had to find its own passage. The wound, in other words, is not the credential. The aloneness inside the wound is. That distinction does not soften suffering into meaning; it simply names what the suffering disclosed — a resource that could not have been reached any other way, because every other route had been removed.
Marie-Louise von Franz·The Problem of the Puer Aeternus·1970