Making Selves and Meeting Others in Neo‐Shamanic Healing
Ethos September 1, 2015 Nofit Itzhak 20 citations
Healing rituals may work not only by creating symbolic meaning and coherence, as Lévi-Strauss argued, but also by first confronting participants with something radically unfamiliar or other. An analysis of soul retrieval, a neo-shamanic ritual among contemporary Euro-Americans in the United States, shows that the healing process begins with and depends on a successful encounter with alterity. This encounter disrupts a person's implicitly coherent sense of self, and this disruption itself can be transformative. A fuller understanding of therapeutic processes must therefore include the transformative effects of discontinuities, not just the creation of meaning.