Influence of Shamanism On Analytical Psychology

Jungian Shamanism and the Social History of a Sacred Heritage The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical
Psychology by Donald F. Sandner; Steven H. Wong Review by: Daniel C. Noel The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 1998), pp. 27-39 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.1998.16.4.27 . Accessed: 29/11/2013 20:29
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Noel, D. C. (1998) The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 16:4, 27-39.
Jungian Shamanism and the Social History of a Sacred Heritage

Donald F. Sandner and Steven H. Wong, Eds., The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical Psychology. New York and London, Routledge, 1997. Reviewed by Daniel C. Noel First some personal history by way of a preface. As a scholar of religious studies I have had a longstanding academic interest in traditional indigenous shamanism and especially in the attempts of neoshamanism to replicate this spiritual practice for postmodern Western culture. In the spring of 1991, I was teaching as a visiting faculty member at the University of Colorado in Boulder. A student in my seminar on Shamanism: Traditional and New gave me a flyer for a symposium on shamanism and analytical psychology, one of a series being held in the mountains at Winter Park, Colorado. My interest was piqued, and I arranged to have lunch in Denver with Steven Wong, a Jungian therapist and one of the organizers of these symposia. I enjoyed our meeting but was unable to participate in the series that spring. I did buy some of the tapes of the presentations, however, and referred to them as my own work on shamanism proceeded. Then, in the summer of 1995, I was a presenter with Donald Sandner at an art therapy conference in Albuquerque. Steven Wong was there, too, and I learned that he and Sandner, whose book Navajo Symbols of Healing I had long admired, were planning to edit a volume of the lectures from the Colorado Group symposia, their meetings at Winter Park to explore the connections between Jungian psychotherapy and shamanic healing. Having missed these meetings, I looked
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forward to the appearance of the book, and got a preview later in 1995 when Bradley TePaske, a contributor, shared with me his essay on Eliade, Jung, and Shamanism. This collection has now come out with an ambitious title and an intriguing range of selections. While I am delighted to have the opportunity to engage, at last, a group of commentators on a topic of mutual concern, I am saddened by the sudden death in the Spring of 1997 of co-editor Sandner, soon after the book was released. His passing is a great loss to the entire Jungian community as well as to his family and friends. Donald Sandner was probably the most accomplished analytical psychologist dealing with the difficulties of crosscultural interpretation. His guiding hand is clearly evident in the presentation of claims, conjectures, and testimonies about shamanism by the Jungian writers in The Sacred Heritage. Even before his own introductory essay, Sandners inspiration is acknowledged in Linda Schierse Leonards appreciative Foreword, which she leads off by mentioning her participation in a 1982 trip he led to study shamanism in Bali. So impressed was she with this experience that she later traveled to Australia, Thailand, and Samiland in northern Scandinavia in search of shamanic resources for her own Jungian practice and personal life. The large issue, raised here by Leonard, is how to integrate such resources into our own very different cultural context back home. This issue is an explicit or implicit one throughout the book. In particular, the book explores how ancient and nonWestern shamanism can influence the modern Western school of psychology Jung inaugurated. Or rather, it sets forth how this influence has been felt by Jung and the Jungians contributing to the collection, for the main thrust of The Sacred Heritage is the personal experience in their lives of this or that element associated in some fashion with shamanismas described, above all, by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. I. Eliades mediation of information on this archaic religious practice is central to the first of the books four sections, Beginnings and Meanings: The Shamanic Archetype. Here we not only have Sandners sensible introduction and TePaskes helpful piece on Jungs specific debts to Eliades definitive 1951
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overview, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (W.R. Trask, trans. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951/1964) We are also given Meredith Sabinis compilation of quotes from Jung suggesting the persuasively shamanic features of his life and thought (even though, prior to reading Eliade, Jung did not label them as such). C. Jess Groesbeck then builds upon Jungs statements to propose him as a veritable modern Western shaman. These four pieces interweave well, and are by and large convincing. At the outset of Sandners essay, however, the meaning of influence is rendered problematic when Jung is quoted as saying the symbolism of the shamans initiatory ordeal is a projection of the individuation process. (p. 3) Here the influence, by way of interpretation, seems the other way around: analytical psychologys maneuvers are scarcely being shaped by shamanism. Nor are they being influenced when the attractiveness of an animistic worldview is invoked later in the book. Like projection, animism is a notion from the scientific heritage of the nineteenth century, a heritage far removed from the influence of any indigenous practice of spiritual healing indeed, a heritage that defensively disdained such influence by the very use of these notions. So this is a problem: analytical psychology, given its debt to nineteenth-century science, has to some degree, in effect, served the forces that have sought to suppress the sacred heritage of shamanism. Since the concept of projection was so often used to denigrate the intelligence of indigenous peoples, it is fortunate that Jung himself was not always so convinced of the usefulness of this concept. (See Daniel C. Noel, Beyond Projection: Jungian Psychology and the Mythic Perception of Nature, Artifex, Vol. 7, no. 1/2, Spring/Summer 1988, pp. 1827.) Elsewhere in The Sacred Heritage we find the more accommodating term parallel to allow for the real possibility of influence of some kind on the theoretical level, at least as a respectful metaphor. Experientially the influence is witnessed throughout the books other three sections, although we will want to ask how much it is shamanism in any traditional sense that is providing the influence. For Sandner, in any case, there is a basic shamanic pattern (p. 4), or, in Jungian terms, a shamanic archetype roughly equivalent to the archetype of the wounded healer. The
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book mainly charts the influence of this archetypal pattern, rather than any specific cultures shamanism. Within such a wide focus there are, to be sure, several major ingredients of shamanism which The Sacred Heritage properly differentiates: the otherworlds to which the practitioner travels, with their powerful and power-bestowing denizens; the journey to such worlds with the ordeals unto dismemberment which it may require; the helping or tutelary spirits, often animal allies, provided to support the spirit traveler through his or her ordeals; the wisdom and techniques brought back by the reborn shaman for self-healing and the healing of others. All of these have Jungian parallelsin fact, parallels in Jungs own life and therapeutic style, as Sandner, Sabini, TePaske, and Groesbeck point to in various ways. Surely the psychic turmoil occasioned by Jungs famous split with Freud in 1913 can be likened to an initiatory trauma of shamanic proportions, just as the active imagination technique he fashioned out of his underworld confrontation can be seen as a Western means of journeying parallel to the willed trance-flight of the shaman. Several contributors make this point about active imagination, referring to their own or their patients experience of it. These references are of considerable value, though a patiently detailed description of exactly how the method is implemented would have even further underscored the extent of the shamanic influence being claimed. None of Jungs experiences, ideas, or techniques, as has been noted, were really understood as an inheritance from shamanism, however, until Jung read Eliade late in life. This raises an issue about the recent social history of the sacred shamanic heritage in the West: it is in important ways not ancient at all, but quite recent, partly a legacy of Jungs encounter with Eliades 1951 book and partly a product of the New Shamanism, a recent Western fascination with shamanism, which Sandner mentions but does not discuss. No one else writing in The Sacred Heritage goes into this social history of neoshamanismthe context within which, I would imagine, most of the contributors have come to be interested in the topic at allso I wish he had elaborated upon it in introducing the volume. There is a hint of this social-historical context in Jeffrey Raffs piece on The Ally later in the book. Also, Meredith
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Sabini, in discussing The Book of Knowledge in Shamanism and Mysticism, provides a different sort of hint. In her piece, a famed curandera from Oaxaca, Maria Sabina, has a vision of a sacred white book as the source of her curing knowledge. Sabini sees this visionary image as symbolic of all of shamanism. That is, she amplifies this vision of the book of knowledge as a key motif in shamanism generally. In this amplification of a visionary experience, Sabini may be unwittingly providing a clue to the neoshamanist context of the idea of a sacred shamanic heritage reflected in these therapists work. It is indeed a magical book of knowledge, with Mexican associations, that is the source of the New Shamanisms influence: Carlos Castanedas The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Without the appearance of this book in 1968, and its successors since then by Castaneda, Joan Halifax, Michael Harner, and others, there would be no widespread awarenessin or out of analytical psychologyof anything like a shamanic heritage pertinent to our lives today. Jungs Eliadean references to shamanism would be a footnote receiving the attention, say, of his ghost experience in England in 1920. His own shamanic experiences would not be understood as such. Only Jungians who were also historians of religion or anthropologists would be aware of the parallels that the Colorado Group, given the emergence of neoshamanism, set out to study in 1990 in the mountains behind Denver. It is therefore to Jeffrey Raffs credit that he acknowledges the role of Castaneda in alerting him to the identity of an ally in his own experience as dreamer and counselor. Only Castaneda (not Eliade) uses this term, so that every time Raff or anyone else in the volume refers to the ally they are invoking not traditional shamanism but the New Shamanism Castaneda launchedby making it up with his probable hoax. The same is true whenever Castanedas other term, nonordinary reality, creeps into these pages. It is also probable that Joan Halifaxs 1982 book Shaman: The Wounded Healer has lent its subtitle to the archetype The Sacred Heritage intends to explicate. Michael Harner, whose The Way of the Shaman (1980) continues to guide the neoshamanism movement, is only mentioned once in The Sacred Heritage, in Part Four, in the twentysecond of the books twenty-four contributions.
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II. In the interim we first have the six selections of Part Two on Shamanic Medicine: Explorations in Healing, where, in addition to Raffs essay on the ally, co-editor Steven Wong has written An Integrated Approach to Soul Possession, setting forth his theory of the clinical application of shamanistic and Jungian techniques. Wong is perhaps the most intent of any of the contributors on demonstrating that a Jungian therapist can function as a shamanic healer dealing with what is rather confusingly called the transpsyche. (Sometimes Wong prefers to say beyond the transpsyche, but the latter is already deemed to be beyond the collective unconscious.) Through dream analysis with two clients Wong seeks to demonstrate a soul retrieval that is shamanic as well as being a Jungian means to individuation. One could debate whether the soul in need of retrieval is the ego in need of flexible strengthening, as Wong holds, but assuredly Jung provided a bridge to shamanism when he wrote about soul loss or modern man in search of a soul. Again we have the possible influence of neoshamanism on Wongs efforts: one of Michael Harners students, Sandra Ingerman, published a book on soul retrieval in 1991, though Wong does not cite it. With a third patient Wong pursued his own shamanic journeying to diagnose and treat a young womans alcohol addiction. Harners method of drumming-induced guided imagery with ally spirits seems to be the technique employed. Wongs integrated approach relies on a distinction between a complex within the psyche and a soul possession outside of the transpsychic (that is, pure evil). (p. 69) The former he treats with traditional Jungian methods; the latter requires him to become, he seems to suggest, an actual shaman (or neoshaman, or what Harner calls a shamanic counselor). Two other selections by Wong in later sections, one describing a dream of dismemberment and the other chronicling his astonishingly full participation in a Lakota Sun Dance skin-piercing ritual, emphasize his seriousness in assuming a shamanic vocation which few in Western society could claim. Other contributions in Part Two by Patricia Damery, June Kounin, and Louis Vuksinick further elaborate the theme of clinical application. Damerys piece, Shamanic States in Our Lives, raises a question about the audience for these essays:
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who is our? Are Damery and her fellow analysts the ones who understand their experience as involving shamanic states (again Harner is brought to mind with his term shamanic state of consciousness)? Or is it their analysands who may be brought to see their experience in these terms? Probably the answer is either or both, though the inclusion of analysands experience interestingly extends the scope of the books subtitle: the influence of shamanism on analytical psychology. And what about the rest of us, interested readers who are not Jungian analysts or in Jungian analysis? Are we excluded, as Westerners, from being in shamanic states? Or, on the contrary, are we presented with the prospect of self-healing, even self-shamanizing? Part Three, Dark Encounters: Personal Transformations, implies answers to these last two questions. The seven essays here are not all by Jungian analystsNorma Churchill is a visionary and artist; Lori Cromer is an occupational therapist specializing in pediatricsand in each case the writer is speaking of her or his own personal experience. In these selections shamanic parallels not only occur to the person but also help explain their often traumatic episodes, and even contribute to the healing process. Nowhere is this more eloquently manifested than in Arthur Colmans riveting and deeply insightful testimony about his experience of extreme back pain and major surgery, Pain and Surgery: The Shamanic Experience. Here the parallels with shamanic dismemberment are undeniable. Colman, a medical doctor as well as a Jungian analyst, does not facilely borrow decontextualized indigenous principles or practicesa tendency that is occasionally evident in these pages. Rather, he stays close to his own Western passage through trauma and recovery. He recounts, for instance, a vision of a joyous Hasidic dance with his surgeon, hardly the usual parallel with indigenous shamanism that gets drawn in order to understand ones initiatory ordeal (despite the shamanic qualities of other Hasidic practices). He is likewise winningly reticent about relating his perception of and meditation on a small bright light during convalescence as a kind of disembodied shamanic spirit helper. The positive influence of Donald Sandner is once again evident in his gift to Colman of a book which helped him to sense the cross-gender symbolism of his surgical experience
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and to draw further delicate comparisons to the role of unconventional sexual identities in much of the data on indigenous shamanism. In addition to Colmans stunning piece, Dyane Neilson Sherwood and Carol McRae both contribute moving essays on the shamanic attributes of their experiences of breast cancer, and Janet Spencer Robinson joins Sherwood in referring to an encounter with the Dark Feminine, in her case involving the death of a daughter in childbirth and her own neardeath experience. Robinsons is another heartfelt and affecting testimony to the shamanic dimensions that can indeed be claimed for elements of our Western experience. She tells us that over many years of difficult introspection, analysis, and study between her intensely personal ordeal in 1964 and the writing of her essay three decades later these transpersonal shamanic dimensions became clearand deeply comfortingto her. After recounting details of her tragic delivery and the long time of shame and struggle that followed, she says, aspects of shamanism that relate to my experience and provide a framework are the shamanic crisis, soul loss, dismemberment, sacrifice, and transformation, and the returning to the community with a healing vision. (p. 174) For Robinson, the hard-won healing vision involves honoring the Dark Feminine. While she understandably emphasizes how this was a womans entry into the shamanic realm, as the subtitle of her piece puts it, much of the healing she passes on to the community of her readers is applicable to men as well. Although the Dark Feminine does not seem to be a specific motif in the ethnographic literature on shamanism produced mostly by male authorsperhaps neoshamanist Vicki Nobles Shakti Woman (1991), by contrast, reflects this themethe techniques employed by Robinson, Sherwood, and McRae to address it are shamanic enough. These include drumming ceremonies, dream work, vision quests, and active imagination (with a snake ally). In Sherwoods case there was considerable research done in the Jungian literature (and another trip with Donald Sandnerthis one also with Steven Wongthat revealed healing parallels), whereas in the situation of Carol McRae, herself a Jungian analyst, there is only one brief reference to Jeffrey Raffs work on the ally.
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In fact, the book oscillates somewhat between two extremes: pieces which say almost nothing about Jungian analysis and others which say almost nothing about shamanism, though assorted spiritual and mythological traditions are sometimes brought in. Still, most contributors bring in both, and the reader can usually make the psychology-shamanism connection even where the essays do not. Part Four, The Numinous Web: Cultural Connections, reminds us of this need, however, since its six selections are the least explicit about the Jungian side of the equation. Beyond this, its cross-cultural accounts are not always obviously about shamanism, despite their interest. Partly this goes to the scholarly issue of definition: are all Native American healing practices to be considered shamanic, for instance? Scholars might exclude Sandners Navajo singers for not being in an altered state as they chant and work with their sand paintings during a healing ritual. Pueblo ceremonial dances such as the communal corn dance are usually excluded as well. Plains Indians practices like the vision quest, on the other hand, are closer to the solitary initiating call of the shaman who journeys in an outofthebody ecstasy (it is hard to know whether Norma Churchills buffalo vision obtained in a meditation outside of community auspices quite qualifies). Whether the communal sweat lodge described by Pansy Hawk Wing (a Lakota who works as an addictions counselor and a major experiential guide for the Colorado Group over several years), or Steven Wongs Sun Dance, communal as much as individual, would fit under the shamanism category is unclear. Since ecstatic states are possible in the Inipi sweat lodge ritual and certainly in the pain and privation of the Sun Dance, a case might be made for calling these powerful experiences shamanic, though their availability to non-Indians, it must be said, is extremely problematic: few are invited to witness this ceremony, let alone to undergo piercing as Wong did. Elsewhere in this final section, Arthur Colman and Pilar Montero describe a trip to an Incan festival in the Peruvian Andes, and Sara Spaulding-Phillips attempts to prepare for a womens retreat by descending with a German guide into a Hawaiian cave sacred to the fire-goddess Pele. But are these experiences truly shamanic? As with Linda Schierse Leonards trips referred to in her Foreword, these literal journeys skirt the
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edge between tourism and true pilgrimagewith shamanic intent, as Colman and Montero put it. But then we must come home to Denver, the Bay Area, or my little town in Vermont, and lead our Western lives, with or without the aid of Jungian therapy. Such travel may be beyond our means, and even if we can manage it, what can we bring back that allows for authentic shamanic healing in our everyday situations of small as well as large soul loss? A concluding article by co-editor Sandner addressing this issue would have been wonderful, and we can hope that his final book on worldwide tribal healing, Sacred Medicine, will be completed from whatever materials he has left and published posthumously. III. In The Sacred Heritage as it now stands there are rich possibilities suggested for our personal praxis, inferences invited. The difficulties and opportunities of this cross-cultural assimilation of psychospiritual resources into individuating lives of Western seeking and suffering can perhaps be summed up through attending to Margaret Laurel Allen and Meredith Sabinis piece in the fourth section, Renewal of the World Tree: Direct Experience of the Sacred as a Fundamental Source of Healing in Shamanism, Psychology, and Religion. Let me begin with the editors prefatory paragraph:
This chapter presents a magnificent dream received by a contemporary woman that illustrates the timeless archetypal meaning of shamanic visioning. Beginning with images of the spiritual poverty of our era, the dream describes an archetypal process of transformation which brings renewed vitality and greater individuality into forms of worship that have lost much of their healing power through institutionalization. (p. 215)
We all have dreams, even occasionally big dreams, though we do not often interpret them, as these writers do, to give a message about the spiritual poverty of our era. They go on to indicate that we are suffering from collective soul loss (p. 215), hence this dream is said to offer a shamanic diagnosis and prescription for all of us. Moreover, they go at their work of dream interpretation (both are Ph.D. clinical psychologists) with a shamanic presuppositionboth have long involvements
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in shamanic studies and experiences predating the dream in question (though not, I would suspect, predating the auspices of neoshamanism). Their presupposition is that shamanism, which is not a religion but an ancient mode of experience still alive today, is a model for direct personal perception of spiritual reality. (p. 216) Just where and how shamanism is alive today is a matter related to the cross-cultural and social-historical issues I have touched on above. What might be entailed in appropriating shamanic wisdom from indigenous cultures? How much is our current fascination with the shamanic heritage merely a product of the recent Western creation of neoshamanism? These are questions this lively collection of essays leaves in its wake. For Allen and Sabini the focus is unquestioned: before, during, and after Allens big dream they are keenly concerned with directness. The spiritual crisis of modern times is that stultifying institutions, in particular the Christian Church, have interposed their outmoded dogmas and bureaucratic structures between the seeker and spiritual reality. The dream dramatizes for them, and points beyond, this troubling dilemma, one about which Jung despaired in his own way. This is a dream about Christ as universal spiritual teacher or master shaman (p. 217) who brings a new vision of the cross to the dreamer, and thereby brings a new relationship to worship. No more will there be
collective intermediaries. . . . At the end of the dream, Christ shows a group of contemporary seekers how renewal of the cross/world tree will take place and how religious experience can be mediated more directly and personally in the future. (p. 217)
The phrase mediated more directly may be tell-tale. Direct experience of the sort Allen and Sabiniand several others in this volumeseek is, of course, unmediated, immediate. But what would it mean to say that a dream provides such directness? In contradiction to the authors apparent intent, it might mean pretty much what Jung had in mind when he wrote that psychic experience is the only immediate experience, to which the phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey has added that . . . images . . . provide the primary content of psychic experience (Jung quoted in Casey, Jung and the Postmodern Condition, in Karen Barnaby and Pellegrino
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DAcierno, Eds., C.G. Jung and the Humanities. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990, with Caseys comment, pp. 32021). What this in turn suggests is a radical honoring of imagination as the very spiritual reality we seek, differing from the sort of personal mystical union these authors may have in mind. However, this entails that direct non-dual experience beyond psychic images, such as the images in Allens dream, is not an option the Jungian tradition offersat least Jung does not offer itnor is it a preoccupation, as I see it, of traditional shamanism. It is this dependence upon imagination, which The Sacred Heritage approaches at several points but does not develop (see Jeffrey Raffs piece on felt vision and the Index entries under imagination), that must inform the Jungian reception of shamanic influence or parallels. The current Western longing for what Allen and Sabini term direct perception of spiritual reality may itself be archetypal: a late-modern spirituality archetype that shapes the success of neoshamanism and the fascinations it has fostered, the social history which prompts my own writing efforts and those of the contributors to this collection of Jungian applications. This spirituality archetype may drive our subcultures automatic, often mindless, disdain for religion as a word and an institution, as we psychotherapists, scholars, and other seekers quest for the immediacy we fantasize exists in indigenous cultureswith their supposed tickets to immediacy: the hallucinogenic plants whose cultural imbeddedness we conveniently forget as we decontextualize them into our troubled Western complex of drug-taking. But with Jung as our shaman, we may look to the images in our fantasies and fascinations as clues to a shamanic spirituality which can be deliberately Western, directly engaging the imagination whose process and power are available from our own vexed heritage. Indeed, whose process and power produced, starting with Castanedas likely hoax if not Eliades scholarly construction, the very neoshamanism in the West which prompts our attraction to the non-Western heritage of shamanism. Could I have tried to make all these points at one of the Colorado Group gatherings in the early nineties? Perhaps not, because only reading the completed literary record of those
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gatherings in The Sacred Heritage has pushed me to see them more clearly myself. And for this I am truly grateful to the late Donald Sandner, to Steven Wong, and to their seventeen earnest colleagues.
Daniel C. Noels latest book is The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities, New York, Continuum, 1997.
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Influence of Shamanism On Analytical Psychology

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Jungian Shamanism and the Social History of a Sacred Heritage The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytical

Jungian Shamanism and the Social History of a Sacred Heritage

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