Trance, Dreams, and Possession
Ideas of Possession October 29, 2024 Marsha Aileen Hewitt
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.