Matthew 4:24 · World English Bible
The report about him went out into all Syria. They brought to him all who were sick, afflicted with various diseases and torments, possessed with demons, epileptics, and paralytics; and he healed them.
Wholeness spreading out into Syria calls its own scattered pieces home: every illness listed here is a way the inner life has split apart, and the healing is the joining of opposites, restoring what exile had broken. Older ages read madness and seizures as demon possession, a reading that, under its literal surface, caught something true: a foreign force had taken over the person.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Wholeness spreading out into Syria calls its own scattered pieces home: every illness listed here is a way the inner life has split apart, and the healing is the joining of opposites, restoring what exile had broken.
Older ages read madness and seizures as demon possession, a reading that, under its literal surface, caught something true: a foreign force had taken over the person. The paralyzed man unable to lift a limb makes plain a frozen inner bridge, energy that cannot cross from will into action.
Each figure carried toward the center is a rejected, cut-off part, brought at last into contact with the whole self that alone holds the pattern of wholeness.
Psychoanalysis lens
What part of me have I been treating as an intruder instead of as mine?
The Tao Te Ching says all things return to where they came from. Scattered pieces are not lost pieces, and coming home is the natural motion.
What you have been calling foreign and other turns out to be yourself. The exile ends in recognition, not in conquest.
The old ox-herding pictures show a man chasing a runaway animal through the hills and discovering it was never anything but him. Nothing was captured. Something was joined.
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Psychoanalysis