Abstract

Healing is a complex issue. Inevitably linked to the concepts of health and disease, and sometimes mistakenly superimposed on that of cure, the word is commonly uses in spoken language but little investigated in the scientific literature, so that its understanding remains confused and imprecise. In fact, if in alternative medicine texts the term finds frequent placement as a passe-partout word that goes wherever you put it, in contemporary medical textbooks and medical journal articles it rarely appears or is given a much narrower meaning. The aim of this paper is to make an exploration of the issue, taking a look at both the clinician’s and the patient’s perspective within a psychopathological-clinical framework and proposing some, final reflections