The longstanding debate between anthropologists and psychologists over nature versus nurture has been hampered by a mind-body schism. Anthropologists often assume culture replaced biology, while psychologists tend to ignore culture in favor of a naive scientism. Bridging this divide requires a language that can simultaneously address individual experience, culture, and extramental reality. The authors propose a cultural neurophenomenology and argue that the concept of 'information'—specifically Fisher information—provides a unifying framework. Fisher information allows modeling interactions among experience, culture, and reality in commensurable terms and suggests mechanisms by which individual psyche and societal culture remain 'trued-up' to reality and the individual's own being.
A severe psychotic disorder known as spirit possession, fairy possession, or Porkhani occurs among Turkmen communities in Iran and Central Asia. Patients experience psychosis resistant to psychiatric treatment but find relief through specific cultural rituals. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork including observation, interviews, and attendance at healing ceremonies, the author argues that understanding this phenomenon requires considering the patient's cultural background, lifeworld, symptom descriptions, and cultural treatment methods, rather than relying solely on biomedical frameworks.
This essay examines Sudhir Kakar's contributions to psychoanalytic theories of mysticism and culture. It first defines the contested term "mysticism" and reviews Freud's analysis of the oceanic feeling. It then describes three psychoanalytic models of mysticism—classic, adaptive, and transformational—that developed from and after Freud. Kakar's specific advances and debates with other psychoanalysts are placed within this framework. Finally, the essay discusses Kakar's work and psychoanalysis more broadly in relation to contemporary academic study of mysticism.