「ルルドの泉」と治療

Harris, Ruth, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Penguin Books, 1999).
必要があって、ルース・ハリスによるフランスの巡礼地「ルルド」の研究を読む。ハリスによる19世紀フランスの司法精神医学の歴史を殺人事件から調べた著作は、『殺人と狂気』として翻訳されている。それからしばらくして、フランス史のメインストリームの主題で、医学といやしの問題がより広く深い問題になっている現象を取り上げたのが本書である。ルルドの泉のいやしの奇跡について、医学と宗教という捉え方をせずに、非常にニュアンスに富んだ陰影を与えた書き方をしているとても優れた書物だと思っているが、意外に日本では取り上げられていないらしい。確かに、イギリスの歴史学者が書いたフランス史の本というのは、日本で知られるメカニズムがあまりないのかもしれない。

二つメモをした。特に、19-20世紀の患者の治療の記録から、患者の「自己」の問題を析出するという問題意識はとても参考になった。


The cures from mid century contrast sharply in style with those of the 1880s and 1890s. The former show a greater cultural diversity, a world in which the “self” is elusive, if not almost silent, and subsumed under collective beliefs and rituals. The latter cures were also enmeshed in a collective repertoire, this time of more strictly orthodox Catholicism and patterned-story telling, but the women of the 1897 pilgrimage are clearly preoccupied with the “self” and their imaginative encounter with the compassionate presence of both Mary and Jesus. The “self” in the women’s view of themselves and in my analysis did not privilege spirit over body; on the contrary, both bathing and taking the Eucharist were rituals that broke down the boundaries between the two. Additionally, their narratives expressed a range of painful physical experience that is absent from the earlier tales. 318-9

Lourdes survived the onslaught of positivism even though it had to face the genius of Emile Zola and the “enlightened” public who avidly accepted his account of the shrine. The magnitude of his assault and the defensive stance that it generated among such men as Boissarie suggest that the sanctuary was fighting a rearguard action against the “new” ideas of the impending twentieth century. In fact, it was Zola who was losing ground, as his naturalistic approach declined in the face of new forms of literature preoccupied with the self, spirituality and identity. 354-5.