Complete Interview with Harry van der Zee:
Part 1: Homeopathic Miasms and the Birth Process
Part 2: Treating Epidemics with PC Resonances
Part 3: Homeopathy and Collective Trauma”
Playlist link to the whole interview on Yutube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irKDM6eqdOU&list=PLO__cjI5LZxfUahINCQLuRKex3Tjz3q7y
TRANSCRIPT of INTERVIEW
In this final part of the interview Harry van der Zee describes the use of PC Resonances beyond traditional epidemics, starting with the treatment of collective trauma among survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He explains how any collective phenomenon, including inter-generational (epigenetic) trauma, can in principle be addressed by this ‘genus traumaticus’ approach. PC Resonances can thereby complement the classical approach whenever the non-individualized features of the pathology or history predominate over those of the individual symptoms, as may be the case in advanced pathology or in trauma survivors and their descendants. This approach is arguably more suitable than individualized treatment using classical homeopathy for resolving epidemics or trauma on the collective scale. Ultimately, treating collective trauma supports the individuation process (described in the first part of the interview), and could be used to heal entire populations and potentially make certain diseases obsolete by addressing the underlying issues that have brought them about.
Whether or not PC Resonances will turn out to be the right tools for attaining these aims, Dr. van der Zee presents a compelling argument for cultivating a homeopathic approach to collective diseases and trauma as complementary to the classical, individualized approach. For more information see Peter Chappell and Harry van der Zee’s book “Homeopathy for Diseases: Vital Remedies for Epidemics, Trauma, and Chronic Diseases”.
Transcript:
H: What I also came to understand is that trauma and collective trauma is strongly connected to epidemic diseases. And, like we’ve discussed before regarding Miasms in Labour, as far as I understand, miasms and epidemic diseases are also connected to the individuation process, but then not so much on the individual level but on a collective level. So these epidemic diseases play a role in the development of mankind. So, to me, treating trauma even comes first to treating epidemics – and certainly [treating] collective trauma. Now, like genocide, like the Holocaust: this is, of course, clearly collective trauma. But if you look at rape: in Africa, there are areas of Africa where the chance for a girl to get raped is higher than that she will learn to read and write. This means that this is an individual trauma taking place on a collective scale. Also, if you look at the homeopathic treatment of (for instance) rape, and you would ask homeopaths remedies they prescribe, they will usually have a small set of remedies with which they treat most of their cases. This means that in homeopathy we already tend to treat trauma in a genus epidemicus kind of way, which I have now been calling ‘genus traumaticus’. So you can analyze a certain type of trauma, and take the cases of those people that experience it ‘as if one person’, and come to a remedy. If you can find in the materia medica – wonderful. If Peter Chappell can make it – wonderful… whatever works. But as such, as an approach, this is something we can do and should do, I think.
This came about the first time when Peter went to Rwanda in 2005 to treat AIDS patients. He went to Rwanda to treat AIDS. And so this was 11 years after the genocide in Rwanda, when in ten days’ time 800,000 people were butchered. So this was a huge trauma to the whole population. Either you were one of the killers, or you had lost people, or you had been injured yourself: there’s nobody in the country that is not traumatized by it. So when he started treating their AIDS, he saw that trauma was perhaps even more dominantly in their state than AIDS, and he realized he had to treat…
D: … an epidemic of trauma.
H: He had to treat trauma. And so, using the same technology he decided to make… he just analyzed the situation, took many cases ‘as if one person’, and prepared a remedy for that, and tried it out. And he noticed that it worked with the people that he was treating there.
There was this one case that came to me in my practice in Holland – a woman, a therapist – that was talking about a deep, deep, deep pain and grief inside of her, that was so big, so huge, that she even didn’t dare to get close to it. And her personal life story was: her mother, psychiatric patient, being hospitalized. So she was missing the love and care of the mother and all of that. But somehow this didn’t measure up to the depth of her pain and grief. And, discussing this, she told about how her mother had lost all of the family during the Holocaust. She was a Jewish woman, and all of her family had been killed in the concentration camps. And that I could connect to the depth of the pain that she was describing. And this was a woman that had followed all kinds of therapies. Being a therapist herself she knew the channels, she knew where to go, and nothing had ever helped. And so I asked her: “Are you willing to test a remedy I’ve never prescribed before? All I know that in Rwanda it seems to work for people that experienced the genocide. My understanding is that your pain is connected to the collective pain of the Holocaust.” And so she took that remedy and I saw her back a couple of weeks later, and she told me, she said: “I could never imagine that this would be possible for me.” Just in a matter of weeks this pain and this grief had left her. This woman had been weeping for years: no more weeping. She continued taking the remedy for several months, there was no more change, and the kind of symptoms she had then were all symptoms that you could relate to her everyday life and to her personal history. So that’s when I complemented this collective remedy with an individual remedy for her, Lac humanum – it happened to be Lac humanum. She responded wonderfully to it, and never needed another dose for years. So it meant to me: first of all, a patient with deep pathology, you give one remedy once and never have to repeat – those are rare cases. Here, treating the collective [layer] first, to which she responds wonderfully, and then just one dose of the individual remedy and also responding wonderfully, made clear to me that in many cases treating the collective [layer] first, or the root of the problem (which might not be individual at all) first, might be the way to go, depending on what you are perceiving in the person. So if the individual picture is very strongly there, that’s what you prescribe for. If you very strongly see a collective issue there, or an issue which comes from the family, you might have to prescribe for that first, and then come to an individual remedy.
D: OK. Now what about, though, the question of why do people get traumatized in the first place? In other words, the homeopathic perspective is that there is a propensity behind even collective trauma. So could you address that question, perhaps: Why is it that we enter this trauma state in the first place, that’s so fundamental?
H: You could say that the fundamental delusion of mankind is that we are separate, so that the connection between us and the rest of the world is broken: we’re out of Paradise. And that is being experienced as a trauma, and so through this your interests might not be my interests – that’s my belief – so I need to reach a deal with you, or keep something secret from you, or go into competition with you… whatever. And so this trauma, I think, is a kind of basic trauma – a basic delusion, based on a delusion – in all of mankind.
D: OK. So from this basic delusion, what happens to bring about collective trauma?
H: Well, if, from this basic delusion, you grow up in a family, and so your interests might not be my interests. So there is already competition and trauma on a small level, scale, going on. And like we discussed with malaria, when you have the interests of the individual and the interests of the group, the tribe, then again there is an area of friction. And depending on the individual, and depending on society, a person will be more or less traumatized by that. So there’s a lot of trauma going on a small level, and that just adds up, adds up, adds up. And by also suppressing the expressions of trauma, for instance by suppressing diseases that flourish on trauma, by suppressing these expressions, you deepen the way the trauma will come out.
D: And then, possibly then the initial traumas which could be treated with those collective remedies… later on, after suppression and so forth, that’s where you get into the conventional classical homeopathy? Meaning that once a lot of time has passed and you have something built up on top of the trauma, and that’s the individual picture that we are familiar with as homeopaths?
H: Yeah, that’s what we mainly treat. It’s a wonderful way of working as a homeopath, because it’s extremely interesting. It’s beautiful, all those individual pictures. But it’s actually, if you look at it, not very effective on the larger scale.
D: So it’s in a sense treating end results as opposed to the root…which is what we’re trying to do?
H: Yeah, we’re standing at the very end of the river, where it enters the ocean, and we try to pick out those that are still alive. But if we could move up the river and prevent people from jumping into the river, that cannot swim, we might do much more effective work. So if you look at it like this: there’s trauma, collective trauma, there’s disease, collective diseases, and ultimately you find the chronic diseases and then the individual issues a person can have in his own process. We tend to be focused a lot on the last, whereas if we were focused more on the collective issues, we would prevent a lot of the individual issues that come out later in this whole process. And instead of trying to fight our way back, I think we would be much more effective if we treated epidemics, collective trauma, for large amounts of people. And then use classical homeopathy for those problems that still remain and are not addressed by that general approach.
D: Now, what about the situation in the West, so-called West, as opposed to the Third World: Do you see the genus traumaticus, genus epidemicus approach, equally applicable, or is it just the case that in the West the individual approach happens to be more useful, and vice versa?
H: I think individualization in the West as such is more than in developing countries, for instance, so an individualized approach might be more necessary here.
D: Because we’re more sick, more removed from our initial traumas, or because, say, Western people are more individualized than in more collective societies?
H: More individualized and more mentalized. In the West we’re very much mentalized, and we fight our reality with our mind. We have got all kinds of concepts and ideas about how it should be. If I look in Africa and I talk to people, people much more easily accept life as it is, and it includes being born or dying, and it includes that if… I mean, you can see people that are about to die, and if you treat them well and you see them back one week later and they’re just alive and kicking, they might just accept this as a usual thing, there’s nothing about it. They don’t have all these stories connected to their situation as we have. Also, if you take a case in Africa, usually you will not find deep stories that you have to dive up somewhere deeply in the subconscious or whatever. No, things are as they are, and when you treat that it’s gone.
Many homeopaths who work in developing countries have the same experience, that taking a case is a lot more simple, because you don’t have the over-mentalized layer that you have to go through first, of all the concepts and understandings and theories people have about their state. It was a very interesting observation that people did in Rwanda, also: people that were treated for the genocide were responding wonderfully; there were a few that were responding not as well as the others, and these few had been living in London and had been studying there for many years. So these were more mentalized people, whereas those people that we may tend to call simple from our perspective, and they are more simple in a way that they are more able to just take life as it is, they also heal more easily from whatever occurs to them. So you can see dramatic results.
So going back to your question, how it is in the West: I haven’t treated enough people in the West with a general genus traumaticus approach to be able to judge. What we can see in homeopathy is that some people with an advanced stage of a chronic disease like multiple sclerosis are very difficult to individualize at some point: all you see is the disease. This means that you might have to start with a remedy fitting the symptoms of the disease as it presents. So this is another area where I’ve seen very interesting cases since I started working with Peter, and one of the first cases I’ve seen was very dramatic in that sense. So I had met Peter, talked to him, decided to go to Africa, and before I could go there were a couple of months in which I treated some patients with a PC remedy for a chronic disease – completely not classical thinking.
So one of the first patients was a person with Parkinson’s that I had been treating for quite some time, and I was happy with the results. So we had seen an improvement and then he was stable. Great: that’s what you can reach with homeopathy with Parkinson’s, as far as I was aware of. I gave him this PC remedy for Parkinson’s and just told him: “Well, what I understand from Peter is that you just take it daily, five drops every day.” And I saw him back the day before I went to Malawi, and I must admit that before I went to Malawi I was very enthusiastic after having seen this case at the congress, but then three months later I thought: Oh, you’ll see that when I go to Malawi all these people are dead, and it’s just a hoax, you know… he thought he saw these results but in the mean time they might have died or whatever. So the day before I went to Malawi this Parkinson’s patient was coming back, and he entered my office, and I didn’t perceive the Parkinson’s anymore: he just walked normally, he moved normally. And he said: “Well, you told me to take this remedy every day, and I took the remedy, and already after 2-3 days I had an aggravation of my Parkinson’s, so I thought, no, I’m not going to take this anymore.” But he said: “But then again a few days later the aggravation went away and I started to improve. And I thought: Okay, let me take another dose.” And he said: “I took another dose, and again I had an aggravation, but not as strong as the first one, and then after several weeks I could take the remedy daily, and I just kept improving, and right now I’m just fine.” I’ve never seen a result like that before with Parkinson’s. The same happened to a case with multiple sclerosis, a woman that I had been treating for 14 years, and after this PC remedy for multiple sclerosis she was better than 10 years back. A woman that could walk bare-feet on the beach again, instead of just for 5 minutes around the block and that was it, on high shoes to keep her ankles stable. So I’ve seen quite amazing results with that as well.
And so it’s a very practical approach: I just start with what I perceive. If I can see the simillimum – wonderful, I’ll start with that, that’s my first option. If I’m not sure about it, if it’s difficult to find it and it’s a clear diagnosis – this could be trauma, this could be chronic disease – I start with that. And my experience is that when you start treating the disease – actually what we call clinical homeopathy, and just Peter found a new way of making a one-remedy approach for that – if you start with that you will start to see changes in the pathology, and because the pathology is being lifted off a little, you start to see individual symptoms coming up, and the individual remedy gets clearer and clearer. So it’s a beautiful approach to complement [the classical approach]. And I think, based on this I’ve come to understand that classical homeopathy and clinical homeopathy are not two ways of applying homeopathy that should fight each other, but that they are wonderful ways to complement each other, and you just start with what is the most obvious.
D: Very fascinating… And you see, I guess, that the work with collective… a collective approach to homeopathy as being key to moving homeopathy forward, and the future of homeopathy and so forth?
H: I think if we were treating epidemics much more, and just collected data and the results, that we would come up with very convincing reports. It is a lot easier than trying to treat chronic diseases, so the results will be better. It’s also a lot easier to have lots of patients included in a trial, so also the numbers will be much more convincing. It’s our strongest asset, I’m convinced.
D: Right. So what is your vision for the future beyond showing homeopathy – that homeopathy works – to others, ultimately what do you see as the full manifestation of the potential of homeopathy?
H: Hmm… Well, as I said before, to me life is homeopathy, in that sense that life is all about resonance, and that we are experiencing our simillimum, in a way, all of the time. And homeopathy is just an application of that same law that makes it possible to go through transitions in a much milder, quicker way. And so homeopathy, I think, is a great tool to actually support evolution in a way that will include less suffering. Ultimately, I think, ‘like cures like’, the law of similars, is an expression of love. The basic delusion we talked about, the idea that we are separate, is one that is being bridged by love, and it’s this delusion that in all kinds of facets is actually being treated by homeopathic remedies, because you can resonate back to the individual, and the individual can, as it were, retrieve parts that have been lost and heal himself. And that healing is not only on the individual level but that’s on the collective level as well. It’s in principle impossible to only treat one individual. Everyone is connected to many others. So if you have a family and you treat one person from the family the others will be influenced as well, and that’s something which is very understandable. But every homeopath knows this experience that you treat a person that had a conflict with someone 20 years back: you treat this person, and the shortly after that this person that they haven’t been seeing for decades calls them, writes to them, whatever. So there is a lot more going on that we don’t see. So I think that homeopathy is much more about healing the basic delusion or basic state of humanity, than just treating diseases. Diseases are just expressions of them, and actually tools, helpers, to find our way, because without them we wouldn’t know that we were lost.
D: So do you see the potential of transforming entire societies through the treatment of collective diseases or trauma?
H: I think potentially yes. I mean, we might be far removed from realizing something like that, but I think potentially yes. Initially, like we’re doing now, with treating epidemics in Africa, we’re still treating small numbers, so the effect of this will be mainly to the lives of these individuals. But I would imagine that if you were to treat a large-enough percentage of people suffering from one and the same disease, at some point there will be a kind of collective response. You could say that each disease has a kind of purpose and a role to fulfill in life, and that once you treat enough people that are involved with this collective disease, that this role and purpose can become fulfilled and that humanity can move on. Like we’ve seen in history, I mean, this is what happens: even if we don’t treat it, this is what happens. Diseases have their impacts, and whether it’s intentional impact or it’s just the impact of the disease, that doesn’t make a lot of difference for homeopaths, because we just treat the symptoms, we treat the totality. Whether this effect is intentional, yes or no, is not so important. But what I would expect is that, in principle, to each disease there is a connected role and purpose of its existence, and that once you have either treated enough people…
D: A critical mass of…
H: … a critical mass of people, that the collective can then move through this whole transformation, and the disease becomes obsolete – just like we can see this in individuals, I mean there is not a big difference here, it’s just ‘as if one person’. And individuality, as we discussed already, is actually a kind of delusion: we are connected, we are one, but we are all different expressions of this same oneness.
D: Now where could people find out about this approach?
H: In 2007 we started a foundation, the Amma Resonance Healing Foundation, so there can be information found on its website, which is www.arhf.nl. Then there is a website about the PC remedies that are available for epidemic, infectious, traumatic, and chronic diseases, which is www.vitalremedies.com. The remedies are also available from Helios Pharmacy in London, and the Hahnemann Pharmacy in Holland, and the Florian Pharmacy in Austria. And Peter Chappell has written a great book, The Second Simillimum, in which he describes his whole journey in Africa, and how he came to making the remedy, and his philosophy behind treating diseases, about health and disease. So these are the main sources. And then for Africa we produced a specific, small booklet. I wrote something: the most concise way to explain how to treat epidemics and trauma in Africa – that’s the Amma4Africa Manual. And besides that we developed a kit for Africa which includes some of the remedies for treating epidemic disease, trauma, and just a few chronic diseases.
D: And those are available on your website, right, so www.arhf.nl.
H: Yes, there you can find all the information.
These were important interviews, considering this aspect of homeopathy is poorly understood even in the homeopathic community. Well done.