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A Critical Overview of the Psychiatric Approaches to Shamanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Philippe Mitrani
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Extract

As Kennedy has shown (1973: 1149), the question of whether the shaman is a disturbed individual (neurotic, psychotic, or schizophrenic) or is on the contrary a gifted, balanced and perfectly well-adjusted person, constitutes one of the oldest of all anthropological debates. Indeed R. Hamayon and L. Delaby (1977: 8) have pointed out that “the tendency to attribute a pathological source to shamanism, and to reduce its manifestations to the manipulation of epileptic and psychotic episodes” appeared simultaneously with the publication of the first studies on the subject, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Slavic authors in particular, most notably Bogoras (1910) and Czaplicka (1914), were anxious to establish a connection between shamanism and “Arctic hysteria.” Ohlmarks (1939), developing this theory, distinguished between Arctic and sub-Arctic shamanism in order to identify the degree of psychopathology in each shaman. Struck by the frequency of these types of phenomena in the Arctic regions, the authors believed that they had discovered their cause in race, heredity, and climate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 40 , Issue 158 , June 1992 , pp. 145 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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Footnotes

1.

Philippe Mitrani was still relatively young when he died, in 1983. We would like to thank the Société d'Ethnographie for permitting us to reprint this article, which was published in L'Ethnographie, no. 87-88, 1982 (special issue: Voyages Chamaniques Deux), but is now out of print. The editors of Diogenes consider it to be the best overview on the subject extant in French.

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