Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy

Healing through the Symbolic Process

Robin van Löben Sels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000739794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy: Healing through the Symbolic Process, Robin van Löben Sels uniquely and honestly recounts her personal journey toward a shamanic understanding of psychotherapy. Exploring the disruptive breakthrough of visions and dreams that occurred during her analysis, personal life, and psychoanalytic training, van Löben Sels illustrates how the phenomenology of ancient shamanism is still alive and how it is a paradigm for the emergence and maturation of the psyche in people today.

This original book delves into van Löben Sels's personal experience of the shaman, identifying such eruptions as a contemporary version of the archaic shaman's initiatory call to vocation. The book is split into two parts. It begins by outlining the shamanic personality in history, recognizing this as an individual that has been called out of a collectively sanctioned identity into a creative life, and the unconscious shaman complex they consequently face, especially in psychotherapeutic relationships. Practical as well as theoretical, the second part outlines the shamanic attributes that underline psychotherapeutic relationships - silence, sound, mask, rhythm, gesture, movement, and respiration - and usefully describes how to use them as asanas for consciousness, or vehicles toward psychological awareness. With clinical examples and personal stories throughout, this book's unique Jungian perspective addresses contemporary expressions of the shaman complex in our current world.

Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy: Healing through the Symbolic Process will be essential reading for Jungian analysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, as well as for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies. It will be especially helpful and illuminating to those who have experienced an involuntary plunge into the depths and who seek ways to articulate their experience.

Part 1

Personal, cultural, and historical aspects of the shaman

Chapter 1

The shaman in history

The shaman and cave art

One of the first things we notice about our Cro-Magnon ancestors is that they drew, and they were skilled. The walls of Northern Spain’s Alta Mira Caves and the Caves of Lascaux in Southern France are covered with petrographs, painted with colors that so expertly employ already-existing stone formations in the cave walls that when I saw them I could imagine that the standing bison and the running deer still lived. Scholars suppose that the roots of shamanism reach back to the Paleolithic era, thirty to fifty thousand years ago, and they also suppose that these painted caves were the work and province of archaic shamans; apparently, in addition to the shaman’s role as healer, balancer of society, maker of songs, dances and rituals, the archaic shaman gives us our earliest example of the ‘artist.’ Images of animals drawn by shamans conveyed a world of spirit as well as matter. Unlike the sleepers that we are today, scanning our memories as if our dreams were pictures in a book, archaic shamans painted instinctively, drawing the first figurative images we know of and presenting them to the impressionable eyes of other human beings around them – images that are now visual traces in our present, collectively evolving human memory.

Most scholars recognize that the whole primitive world must have been flooded with mystical experience. But what we interpret as a ‘constellation of mystical images’ was no such thing to an archaic shaman, for typical archaic societies recognized no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. Then, as now, the holy welled forth from the unconscious rather than appearing by means of conscious intent. What an archaic shaman depicted in the secret recesses of a Paleolithic cave sanctuary signified immediate contact with the spirit world – what Giedion (1962, 279) called contact immediate with realities invisibles. Shamanic images were concerned with far more than the tribe’s hunger and the hunt: there were spirits to be propitiated and souls to be found. Seen through a psychological lens, the distinction we make between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ occurs only with the development of an ego, but an archaic shaman did not have an ego as we understand ego and consciousness today.

The bird-masked man

In addition to the extraordinary animals found in the Caves of Lascaux, one engraved tableau depicts a small anthropomorphic figure of a naked, ithyphallic, bird-headed man, clearly lying in trance. With him are an auroch, wounded, its intestines spilling out, and a bird-topped pole, perhaps representing a tutelary spirit. In 1952, Horst Kirchner published a symbolic analysis of this pictograph, interpreting it from the point of view of his studies of shamanism (Eliade, 1964, 481). We can read these images concretely, as a man, a wounded beast, and a bird stick, but by taking them altogether instead of one by one, Kirchner understood them to represent the interior process of an archaic shaman, reasoning that the naked man was caught at a precise moment of ecstatic metamorphosis, his aroused body fallen into rigid trance and his soul embarking on a celestial journey. The auroch or bison that accompanied the shaman, then, was not hunter’s prey but depicted the shaman’s instinctive animal self sacrificed to ecstasy and the shaman’s self-transcendence. Additionally, the bird-pole lying alongside the bird-headed man symbolized the shaman’s simultaneous, subjective experience of transcendence and celestial ascent (ibid., 503). In other words, this shaman left his body behind in the form of a wounded animal self as the shaman’s spirit ascended.

Historically, the bird-pole symbol is directly antecedent, and comparable to bird staffs long known to be an essential piece of shamanic paraphernalia in the Americas and elsewhere. It is also antecedent to the bird-topped World Tree found in the Americas and the myths and cosmic schemes of many peoples. We will return to the motifs of bird and flight in some detail in Chapter 3: The shaman and the vertical hierarchy of worlds. For now, what is striking is the possibility that even so long ago, instinctive human conflict and/or conflicting instinct – what psychoanalysts call ‘the dynamics of a divided mind’ – appear to have been imaged by the psyche in a tension between a spirit-possessed human being and a wounded animal. We can imagine this early drawing in Lascaux as a depiction of an entranced human being as a living battlefield between colliding archetypal energies, one energy represented by the wounded animal self, the other energy represented by invading spirit (the bird.) Although no observing ego is depicted, each spirit has become, in effect, an ‘object’ of knowledge and perception to the other, and in the ensuing collision, both the entranced shaman and the shaman’s unconscious animal nature are broken into. The entire constellation of images – masked, entranced human being, and the gathering of wounded animal, bird, pole, soul, and spirit – may be understood as a self-portrayal of the psyche as it leans toward the possibility of slowly accruing ego consciousness developing in an individualizing human being – the ‘individual’ person that this particular shaman in trance was in process of becoming.

Apparently, this evolution in consciousness started with an invasion by the spirit world entering a wounded body self – impossible to say whether the invading spirit created the wound, or whether such a wound was simply a ready site for spirit’s penetrating impact. But through such wounding, and the imagery that floods into such wounding, the contemporary ego also gradually accrues its own agency as an ‘affiliate’ of Jung’s self, and through similar imagery the psyche gradually evolves and develops from such collisions. Therefore we sometimes say that a wound is ‘a blessing in disguise,’ as was the situation in Genesis into which Jacobfell when he wrestled with an angelic being who dislocated his hip at the River Jabbok:

Then (the angel) said, ‘Let me go, for the day has broken.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ And (the angel) said to him, ‘what is your name?’ And (Jacob) said ‘Jacob.’ Then (the angel) said ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed… . The sun rose upon (Jacob) as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.’

(Genesis 32:22–32)

Jacob’s body bore the mark of transformation into Israel.

In later Christian tradition, this often-painful conjunction between the human world and the spirit would be referred to as the Incarnation, and beyond the understandings of Christianity our contemporary psychological understanding emerges that the conscious suffering of affect in the body builds up ego resources, thereby uniting spirit and matter into a mysterious ‘third.’

The roots of shamanism

As mentioned earlier, the roots of shamanism reach back approximately thirty to fifty thousand years. Yet ethnological and prehistoric documents go back to the Early Stone Age, so we can imagine that as a species we had not only healing practices but a vivid and variously experienced religious life during thousands of years preceding. Seventy-five thousand years earlier, Neanderthals left remains designated by paleoanthropologists as exhibiting religious sensibilities in that they buried their dead with flowers, and marked ceremonial areas have been found in and near Neanderthal dwellings, so perhaps the human shamanic sensibility goes that far back. Having found a skeletal structure identical to our own in Cro-Magnons, however – and because we assume that present-day human consciousness had to evolve from psychosomatically similar human beings, most writers place the recognizable beginnings of shamanism here too.¹

Late Paleolithic tribes inhabiting the vast Central Asian steppes ranged in race from Caucasoid Finnish and Turkish types to pure Mongolians in the East. We also suppose that American Indian immigrations began from this geographical matrix, so perhaps that is why Indigenous tales from the Algonquins, Athapascans, Navaho and the Apaches perfectly match the structure of tales told in Siberia, and Navaho sand paintings suggest sand paintings found in the Tantric colleges of Tibet (Alexander, 1967, 56). Shamanic motifs have been traced in the religious systems of the Near East, in Islam, in North Africa, and in the religions of India, while Tibetan Buddhism is permeated with shamanistic relics (Lommel, 1967b, 10). Whether such structured expressions of human experience were carried from place to place by immigration or sprang sui generis in each location, scholars find ideas derived from shamanism (or first cryptically manifested) in the myths, philosophies, and religions of many later cultures, including those we think of as ‘high’ civilizations. With this in mind, I propose that in the history of the archaic shaman we can see an evolving image of the original human mouthpiece and enactor of what Frederick Myers would come to refer to in 1903 as ‘the mytho-poetic function of the unconscious psyche’ (Ellenberger, 1970, 314).

The functions of shamanism

For Joseph Campbell, in early societies the archaic shaman stands out vividly against a backdrop of almost complete cultural conformity. Apart from the tribal group, Campbell says,

individuals would neither have come to maturity nor been able to survive on their own. Nature was then very hard: society, therefore, too. Youngsters found to be intractable were simply wiped away. Conformity in the narrowest sense was an absolute necessity. And yet even then there was an allowance made for a certain type of deviant, the visionary, the shaman; the one who had died and come back to life, the one who had met and talked with spirit powers, the one whose great dreams and vivid hallucinations told effectively of forces deeper and more essential than the normally visible surface of things.

(Campbell, 1970, 384–385)

These visionary gifts, Campbell notes, were put to practical use in early hunting societies – such as in healing the sick, influencing weather, causing game to appear, vanquishing enemies, and so on. But this was not the shaman’s central purpose:

it was, in fact, from the insights of just these strangely gifted ones that the myths and rites of the primitive communities were in largest part derived. They were the first finders and exposers of those inner realities that are recognized today as (the realities) of the psyche. Hence the myths and rites of which they were the masters … touched and awakened the deep strata and springs of the human imagination.

(ibid., italics mine)

The depth of a shaman’s visionary perceptions gives them their historic importance, and for Campbell, this had nothing to do with mental instability:

Although the temporary unbalance precipitated by such a crisis may resemble a nervous breakdown, it cannot be dismissed as such. For it is a phenomenon sui generis; not a pathological but a normal event for the gifted mind in these societies, when struck by and absorbing the force of what for lack of a better term we may call a hierophantic realization: the realization of something far more deeply interfused, inhabiting both the round earth and one’s own interior which gives to the world a sacred character, an intuition of depth, absolutely inaccessible to the “tough minded” honest hunters

[…]

The crisis, consequently, cannot be analyzed as a rupture with society and the world. It is, on the contrary, an overpowering realization of their depth and the rupture is rather with the comparatively trivial attitude toward both the human spirit and the world that appears to satisfy the great majority.

(ibid.)

This access to depth and the collective foundations of the mythopoetic psyche is, for Campbell, both a source of the shaman’s superior vitality of spirit and physical stamina over normal members of their group and also the powerful source of their overall significance as a historical figure in the history of human culture in general:

This crisis, consequently, has the value of a superior threshold initiation; superior, in the first place, because spontaneous, not tribally enforced, and in the second place, because the shift of reference of the psychologically potent symbols has been not from the family to the tribe, but from the family to the universe. The energies of the psyche summoned into play by such an immediately recognized manifestation of the field of life are of greater force than those released and directed by the group.

(Campbell, op. cit. 252–254, italics mine)²

In a profound sense, then the shaman stands against the group and necessarily so, since the whole realm of interests and anxieties of the group is for him secondary. And yet, because he has gone through – in some way, in some sense – to the heart of the world of which the group and its ranges of concern are but manifestations, he can help and harm his fellows in ways that amaze them.

(ibid.)

Mircea Eliade suggested that archaic shamanism consisted of archaic ‘techniques of ecstasy’ that were at once mystical, magical, and religious in the broadest sense of the term (Eliade, op. cit. xix). Historically, a shamanic experience has been understood to manifest a basic primordial phenomenon that belongs to being human as such, not necessarily to a human being as a particular historical individual. Eliade also implies that an experience of ecstasy as a primary phenomenon that is fundamental to the human condition was known to the whole of archaic humanity: what has changed over time, and continues to change, modified by different cultures and different religions, are the interpretations and evaluations of this basic human experience.

Commenting on present-day differentiations between the crisis undergone by someone experiencing an initial shamanic call and modern forms of personality disturbance, San Francisco analyst John Layard muses that even though a liability to fits of unconsciousness might have been a necessary precondition of archaic shamanism – the important difference is that for a shamanic person today, this experience comes about nolens volens, almost as if it were an inherited disease. So to be called a shaman today is only generally equivalent to being afflicted with hysteria, and as in shamanism per se, acceptance of the ‘call’ can mean recovery: today, that includes gaining an ability to make use of such ‘seizures’ in the service of a craft – as artists do, as actors do, as psychotherapists do – rather than continuing to turn them against one’s self. Bluntly, Layard concludes that

The shaman is one of those persons, not absent among ourselves, who knew how to turn their affliction into an asset. Indeed, the period of preparation for office appears to consist largely in an artificial heightening of nervous tension… . Such psychic ‘forcing’ ends either in disaster or in some kind of ‘revelation’ [whereas] acceptance of a ‘call’ [leads to] a redirection of power and the ability to control it in the service of something within us which is stronger than ourselves.

This is how a shaman’s wound was a blessing in disguise.

A shamanic predisposition

Generally speaking, ancient cultures recognized that a shamanic ‘gift’ or predisposition was inborn, but it had to be realized only by ordeal, initiation, and revelation, or by a spontaneous experience of vocation. Sometimes the profession might be designated by hereditary transmission, evidence from a big dream, or an involuntary trance or illness. Designation also occurred by ‘divine election,’ like being born with a symbolic deformity or being ‘marked’ by an accident or a strange misfortune.

In my own case there were several signs of ‘shamanic inclination’ early on, unrecognized as such. Had I been born into in an early tribal culture, for example, the fact that I was covered with a birth caul, or the fact that I was a surviving twin might have been considered a shamanic ‘mark.’ Another factor might have been the eczema that covered my body, or the extreme sensitivity and porousness that later identified me as ‘too sensitive.’ Or my solitary, dreamy childhood might have been noticed: by the time I was four, I had pretty much disappeared into a world of book...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Personal, cultural, and historical aspects of the shaman
• Part 2 Seven expressive attributes used by the shaman: mask, rhythm, silence, respiration, movement, sound, and gesture
• Bibliography
• Index