Elements of Charismatic Persuasion and Healing

Therapeutic efficacy in religious healing is typically analyzed by extrapolating from ritual procedure to expected effect, without specifying conditions for success or failure in terms of the concrete experience of participants. Taking such experiential data as primary in therapeutic process should allow for definition of minimal conditions of therapeutic efficacy, including incremental change and inconclusive results. Two cases of Catholic Pentecostal ritual healing are discussed, with emphasis on participants' reports of therapeutic process. The analytic focus includes the orientation of participants within the healing system, their experience of the sacred, the negotiation of possibilities, and the actualization of change. Alongside the anthropological question of how meaning shapes the illness experience, I pose the clinical question: how may religious encounters influence an illness career? Consideration of these questions suggests that detailed experiential analysis of therapeutic process can lead to a more balanced and pragmatic conceptualization of healing than is available in studies that emphasize either ritual or clinical dimensions of healing.