More Things in Heaven and Earth: Spirit Possession, Mental Disorder, and Intentionality.
The Journal of medical humanities September 1, 2020 Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed 17 citations
Spirit possession, a global phenomenon where a non-corporeal agent interacts with a human host, can cause maladies or displace a person's agency and identity. Drawing on fieldwork in Egypt, this paper links spirit possession to concepts of personhood and intentionality, extending Daniel Dennett's intentional stance. It proposes the 'spirit stance': an intentional strategy that explains behavior by attributing beliefs and desires to a spirit agent, but only invoked when a person's mental states fail normative distinctions. Applied to behaviors often labeled as mental disorder, this stance preserves intentionality where otherwise a malfunctioning physical mechanism would be blamed. Long before modern psychoanalysis restored meaning to madness, spirit possession socially preserved the intentionality of deviant behavior.