Scalpel and Symbol

There is a moment, early in every operation, when the surgeon makes the first incision and the abstraction of a diagnosis becomes a body. Everything before it — the imaging, the charts, the conversations — collapses into a single, exacting gesture. The hand has to know what the mind has only described.

For years I trusted that gesture completely. The scalpel is honest. It goes only where you guide it, and the body answers without metaphor. Disease has an address, and surgery is the art of arriving there cleanly.

The wound that does not close

But I began to notice the patients who healed and did not recover. The sutures held. The scans came back clear. And still something remained unwell — a grief that had no organ, a fear that no instrument could locate. The body had been repaired, and the person had not.

This is the territory Jung mapped a century ago. He understood that the psyche speaks in symbols, not symptoms, and that what we refuse to face does not vanish. It descends. It waits. It returns, eventually, wearing the mask of fate.

The wounds that most profoundly shape a human life are almost never the ones a scalpel can reach.

Symbol as instrument

If the body answers to the scalpel, the soul answers to the symbol. A dream, an image, a recurring story we tell about ourselves — these are not noise to be cleared away. They are the language in which the deepest part of us tries to be heard.

To work in that register is not less precise than surgery. It is precise in a different grammar. You learn to follow the thread instead of the blade, to ask where a feeling lives rather than where a tumor sits, to trust that integration — not excision — is what makes a person whole.

That is the work I have given the rest of my life to. Not the abandonment of precision, but its translation: from tissue to meaning, from scalpel to symbol.

This is the first of these essays. More will follow.