Transcultural Psychiatry
December 1, 2000
Eli Somer, Meir Saadon
50 citations
Stambali, a Tunisian trance-dance ritual brought to Israel by Jewish-Tunisian immigrants, serves as a healing and demon exorcism practice. Based on observations and ethnographic interviews, the ritual is used for prophylaxis against the 'evil eye,' promoting well-being, and crisis intervention. Participants often interpret crises as punishment by demons, which the ritual aims to appease. Trance is induced through accelerating rhythmic music and faster head and limb movements, leading to dissociated eroticism, aggression, and convulsive loss of consciousness. The practice is discussed as a means for oppressed women with limited protest options to externalize and disown intrapsychic conflicts.
Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.)
October 30, 2021
Eli Somer, Etzel Cardeña, Ramiro Figueiredo Catelan et al.
19 citations
Reality shifting (RS) is a mental activity that gained popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily among post-millennials. Practitioners report using relaxation, focused attention, and autosuggestion to feel they transcend their physical surroundings and enter alternate, often fictional, universes—such as those from Harry Potter. Online forums have over 40,000 members, and RS-related clips have been viewed over 1.7 billion times. Some shifters report a strong sense of presence in these realities, with some believing the alternate world is concretely real. The paper describes RS's phenomenology from online reports, compares it to hypnosis, tulpamancy, dissociation, maladaptive daydreaming, and lucid dreaming, and proposes a theoretical model of interactive factors. It concludes RS is an important, uninvestigated phenomenon and suggests future research.