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Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.
-Robert MacNeil
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Essay by Raphael Campo, p. 35 in Healing, Edited by Lee Gutkind:
My earliest conscious recollections of disturbances within my own body are those of the minor bumps and bruises whose pain was alleviated by parents' kisses. Kissing was the most potent and intoxicating of all elixirs. Pure physical contact had the power to cure. My body, before I was capable of truly hurting myself, could be reconstituted with my mother's moist breath in my ear as she sang me a comforting song. The pleasures I felt, more intelligible to the child's mind than my parents likely suspected, are in great part what led me later in life to the healing arts. I desired to be made well in their eyes, to be acceptable, to be beautiful, to be kissed. My desiring of my parents had a good deal of its expression in the ritual of the tearfully extended, oftentimes exaggerated "boo-boo," presented for their fastidious attention. To be well meant to be well loved.
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