Trance, Dreams, and Possession

A comparativist psychoanalytic approach to studying religion reveals how unconscious subjective experience is shaped by culture. This framework helps recognize culturally specific forms of human suffering and the ambivalent nature of desire. Analyzing ethnographic case studies of spirit possession, the work examines how possession opens and maintains connections with the dead and the living within individuals' minds. Spirit possession is discussed as a "co-habitation" of subjectivities, drawing on Michael Lambek's concept and Theodor Adorno's idea of subjectivity. The psychoanalytic reading of Vincent Crapanzano's ethnography "Tuhami" focuses on the creative and destructive dimensions of subjectivity and desire as individuals symbolize their internal worlds and negotiate boundaries between human and spiritual realms, without being diagnostic or pathologizing.

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Abstract

Abstract A comparativist approach in the psychoanalytic study of religion illuminates hermeneutic pathways to unconscious subjective experience. This approach contributes to recognizing and theorizing the culturally situated modalities of human suffering and the ambivalent nature of desire. A psychoanalytic reading of ethnographic case studies examines these themes as they appear through possession experiences, which open and maintain avenues of connection and communion with the dead and the living within the minds of individuals. Spirit possession is discussed in terms of what Michael Lambek calls the “co-habitation” of subjectivities. Theodor Adorno’s concept of subjectivity contributes to this chapter’s psychoanalytic reading of Tuhami, Vincent Crapanzano’s classic ethnography. The psychoanalytic approach presented here is neither diagnostic nor pathologizing. The central focus illuminates the creative and destructive dimensions of subjectivity and desire in the efforts made by contextually situated individuals to symbolize and articulate their internal worlds as they struggle to negotiate the permeable boundaries between human and spiritual worlds.