The Shamanic Perspective: Where Jungian Thought and Archetypal Shamanism Converge (original) (raw)
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This paper portrays the functional linkage of each major Jungian archetype operating within the phases of Shamanic ceremony and clinical Jungian mentoring. Using Jung's classic Solar System Archetypal model to indicate activation attributes, their value and consequences. The full experiential life cycle for an Amazonian Pilgrimage is described in ASIF (The Archetypal Symbology Integration Framework). The archetypal landscape for phases 1,2,3,6 as set out below are not commented on as no clinical observations have taken place during them. The full ASIF Life Cycle Briefly described as a Geo-logistical context for juxtaposition analysis.
The Neurophenomenology of Shamanism-An Essay Review
considers shamanism in many of its facets. He explores shamanism's social and symbolic content, and the implications of its neurological underpinnings both for shamanic practitioners and for their clients. Winkelman asserts that shamanism played a fundamental role in both cultural and personal human evolution, especially in cognitive integration, healing practice, and self-transformation. In particular, the 'hardwired' basis of hallucinatory experiences and their perceptual constants provides an iconographic system extended metaphorically in rock art representations (p. 5). To Winkelman, rock painting represents neuropsychologically-based metaphors for visionary experience (e.g., death/rebirth, descent/ascent, light, flight, sex, drowning). At the core of shamanic practice is the belief in a cosmos populated by spirit entities that affect all aspects of nature and human life in particular (p. 58). This worldview is said to be based on the operation of neurognostic structures. Following Laughlin et al. (1992), Winkelman uses the term 'neurognostic structures', i.e., 'innate knowledge modules of consciousness' (p. 27), that also can be thought of as reflecting what Jung called 'archetypes' (p. 28). Shamans are described as 'technicians of consciousness' who utilize these 'neurognostic' potentials for individual and community healing and for personal and social
Psychology of Shamanism: The Transformative and Restorative
Using a multidisciplinary lens of exploration, the themes of healing (mind, body, spirit) are discussed in detail with the purpose of furthering the understanding of Shamanic Therapy and how the application of shamanic practice has as much relevance today as it's inception more than a thousand years ago. Disciplines such as Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeological and Ethnological Spirituality are used and cited to better construct a holistic view of cross-cultural shamanic practices that posses both a transformative effect upon spiritual and psychological growth and a restorative effect when used as a healing modality.
This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of 'neo-Shamanism' as a 'spiritual' practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between 'primitive' and 'civilized' which characterized nineteenth century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of 'Shamanism' to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made 'neo-Shamanism' thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary westerners. Analyses which suggest that 'neo-Shamanisms' are rediscoveries of a primal 'spirituality' write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.
‘ The Falling Sky ’ : Jungian reflections on the shamanic alert by Davi Kopenawa
2020
This study brings some Jungian considerations on the ethnographic narrative entitled "The Falling Sky" that will be presented seeking to demonstrate through a comparative-reflective analysis of similarities between the views of the Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa and the ideas of the Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung. To this end, it is necessary to present some points of indigenous criticism about the way in which technological societies relate to nature-marked by the exploitation of natural resources and disrespect for indigenous culture, reflecting on the similarities between this native view, described in this study and in Complex Psychology, mainly due to the bias Jung called the psychoid archetype, in which the body-mind-world relationship is in resonance and in an intimate interdependent relationship. Thus, the main objective of this study is to elaborate a dialogue between original thinking and Jungian thinking, in the sense of observing how both perspectives point to intrinsic connections between nature and culture.
Journal of Analytic Psychology, 2023
This paper will describe the spiritual states of "oneness" experienced by Andean shamans in relation to oceanic states in early infancy and working with trauma in Jungian analysis. The author's work exploring implicit energetic experience with Andean shamans will be referenced with comparisons made to depth psychology, in both theory and in practice. Definitions of Q'echua terms describing different psychic meditative states that Andean shamans enter into will be provided as Andean medicine people have a much more developed language for conceptualizing these experiences. A clinical vignette will be presented that demonstrates how the spaces of implicit connection that occur between an analyst and analysand in the analytic setting can be a catalyst for healing.
Psychological Healing as Religious Experience: In The Works of Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Nederlandse Associatie voor Analytische Psychologie (NAAP), 2020
This paper investigates how Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), the founder of analytical psychology, approached religion and the religious in pursuit of psychological healing. It begins with the idea of "religious experience," and its radical new approach to the study of religion. An approach in which the feelings and emotions stirred by religion gained center stage over religion's theoretical substance. First, it will place religion and Carl Jung's theories in a historical perspective. It then dives deeper into the works of Carl Jung to explore the psychological and religious importance of the unconscious mind, the Self and its various aspects, for understanding mental illness and psychological healing. Through a discussion of dreams, archetypes and individuation, this paper demonstrates how man has worshipped the psychic force within him as something divine and shows how psychological healing can bring about a religious experience.
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2022
Amerindians, living in a perspective of synchronicity, attribute to symmetry a negative value that produces an understanding of unstable dualism cosmologies, in a continuous and dynamic imbalance, in a notion of complementarity between conscious and unconscious. These notions are in line with the view of synchronicity proposed by Jung (1952/1972) and Cambray (2013), a view that expands temporal, acausal boundaries, within a perspective of interconnection, resonance and correspondence. Amerindian epistemologies break‐up the discontinuity between animals and humans. By establishing a parallel with the Jungian concept of the relationship between unconscious and conscious, we reach a dimension of personification of both, a continuous and permanent flow of meaning. We introduce the jaguar as a symbol of Amerindian cultures and as an archetypal image of the numinosum that activates the unconscious, in asymmetrical and symmetrical movements. This is a qualitative contribution of indigenous mythologies to the understanding of the relationship between unconscious and conscious. Through perspectivism and Amerindian shamanism, we reflect on the archetypal image of the jaguar, as a mythological Latin American knowledge, which contributes to an understanding of the human being in the world, in an instinctive and spiritual integration. Recognizing this cosmos expands the ability to observe and access another point of view, in which the human being is seen in the jaguar, a personification or psychification of his unconscious. In clinical practice, it means finding the humanity that was left behind by that human who became an animal. The Shaman, as a therapist, takes on the role of an active interlocutor in the exchange of human and non‐human subjectivities, in an amplification process.
Humanity's first healers: psychological and psychiatric stances on shamans and shamanism
2000
Background: the author describes shamans as practitioners who deliberately shift their phenomenological pattern of attention, perception, cognition, and awareness in order to obtain information not ordinarily available to members of the social group that granted them privileged status. Objectives: to describe how these phenomenological shifts were accomplished and used. Methods: archival studies of shamanic literature as well as field research