Ethno-psychiatric Research has discovered that traditional cure is structured somewhat like modern therapy and shows a lot of affinities with it though the theoretical foundations of both approaches are inimical. Here are some rules of thumb in traditional medicine:

Magical Habitus: socialization to magical beliefs and values plays a vital role in endowing people with the bodily and social skills and attitudes that govern their subsequent behaviour when they are sick. As little children frequenting shrines for instance they may acquire their magical skills and knowledge by experience and observationhow to act in rituals and ceremonies and how to perform traditional cure. So when they grow up they may share a similar magical worldview and will be bodily equipped to let the jinni speak in their voice should they ever fall ill or become haunted.

Shared worldview: possession as a symptom is diagnosed by a shared worldview between patient and healer. In maraboutic culture possession may refer to both organic and non-organic sicknesses. It is part of a set of healing symbols that manipulates social interactions between healer and patient. These social actors both understand healing symbols used for sicknesses and share similar worldviews. Hence patients hold faith (niya) in healers' powers whether 'legitimate' or 'non-legitimate' and respond positively to the cure.

Group support: arriving at the shrine people may be helped and assisted by other visitors. They chat together advise one another and relate encouraging stories and miraculous cases of cure. The patient's family also plays an important role in this solidarity network.

The patient's mastery of his problem in the curative process: the patient participates in his cure. He is assigned a task to drink and wash himself with sacred water use talismans take certain herbs or incense and fumigate himself. All this gives the patient the idea that he can do something for his problem and probably enhances the placebo effect.

Ritual of sri’: a channel of emotional discharge for patients: it is the acting out of interpersonal problems; the jinni being an image of unsocial thought and behaviour gets burnt by prayers (prayers vs. desire; order vs. disorder). Sri’ becomes a ritual of moral organisation of society. Symbolically desires are first acted out and thereafter punished or controlled so that the social order is restored. The child going against his father and the woman against her husband may play out their illicit desire and are afterwards 'beaten' into submission. Exhibitionistic sexual desire is disciplined and naked people are put into the dungeon (khalwa). Forms of transgression are regimented. Differences are exorcised and re-assorted into recognizable identities.

Cult membership: The patient becomes member of a cult or maraboutic order. This endows him with a new social identity makes him strike new relationships see life differently and enrol himself in a maraboutic mode of life.

Placebo effect: People get hope at the shrine in contradiction to the modern doctor who may say: 'I have no cure for your sickness.' The healer always gives hope. He says he knows everything and avows that the power of the saint is great. There are no problems the saint has not solved. Also there is in the last resort always Allah who can and willmake you better if He wills.

The placebo effect is the effect that occurs when doctors administrate a medicine that has no active ingredient (for instance because there exists none); this medicine all the same produces a positive effect on the patient. It seems that the belief the patient holds that indeed creates the positive effect. The effect seems to be even greater when also the doctor believes in it (e.g. when he himself believes that he is giving potent medication). This has been studied in modern medicine in different experiments. They show that the idea alone of a powerful drug in itself produces decrease in pain and symptoms.

Cultural beliefs about a pill (colour of the pill effervescence injection vs. oral administration) seem to make medicines more powerful than they are. The exact mechanism of this effect is not yet really understood and is still the object of research. However all the positive effects of traditional cure may be attributed for a great part to the placebo effect of healing symbols and rituals (see Moerman 2000). However the systematic cure given at the shrine is not always completely effective.

The majority of maraboutic patients who are said to be cured become devotees of the saint and either settle there forever perform periodical visits organize occasional trance dances (jedbas) or call for the healers whenever they do not feel well. After all it is a vicious circle without permanent cure. What patients gain from their treatment is a temporary relief from the indelible scars of their past. Their personality does not change and their maktub ('written fate') is to re-enact their suffering. Some of these patients end up in a web of servitude to the saint and his descendents.

To conclude maraboutism seems to be an historical constant in Morocco. It celebrates the intercession between man and God venerates saints and promotes the belief in baraka and contact of jnun with humans. It responds to Moroccans' cultural specificity and converts the Average Moroccan to a popular form of Islam based on down-to-earth religious symbols that have always existed in his society. Thus any project of modern psychiatry underpinned by western medicine and modern theory denying Moroccans their religious and cultural specificity may be doomed to failure and social alienation. That’s why we keep insisting on the fact that turning our shrines into traditional therapy asylums and bringing academic interest into popular approaches to turn them into established ethno-psychiatric modes of healing is a compulsory requisition.

It is high time for Moroccan psychiatry and psychoanalytic sociology to conduct interdisciplinary research on the local cultural aspect of traditional medicine and avail the disciplines of the great potential resources of maraboutic lore and turn local therapies into modern approaches establishing an alternative therapy to Western therapies that are alien to our cultural background.

Up to now most Moroccan psychiatrists are pharmacologically driven alas denying the importance of the psychodynamic approach of traditional therapies. How can they then communicate with their patients and gain their trust if they keep away from traditional modes of healing and local cultural idioms?

It is a pity because when I published my research on Ben Yeffu in 2007 after a painful self- funded fieldwork and library research abroad in collaboration with Philip Hermans (psychologist/ anthropologist) and the work was highly praised by the scientific community in reviews in medical anthropology and was shelved as a well-cited reference on Moroccan traditional medicine the Ministry of health does not have the least idea about the work that has been done and to crown it all when I asked a former dean of the faculty of letters Madame (F. Z.) to purchase a copy of the work for the university library she answered with arrogance: how can you ask me to waste public money on buying a copy of your book? This can only happen in a country named Morocco. Commenting is yours!

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News' editorial policy