The key role of the shaman is healing the members of the community. Marechera attempts to heal whole communities. See Pamela Reynolds’ article, ‘Children of Tribulation: The need to heal and the means to heal war trauma.’.
Here are two other examples of contemporary shamanism:
1. The new-age neo-shamanistic book, Soul Retrieval, which gives an outline of retrieving fragmented parts of the self, which dissociate from the present due to a refusal to participate in situations unconsciously felt to be subjectively intolerable. This is most interesting. Whereas there are serious psychological books geared towards examining how dissociation and the splitting of identity (ending up in multiple personality disorder, for instance) can happen under situations of extreme stress, more subtle modes of splitting (along the same principles of avoidance of stress) can apparently happen within situations that we would consider objectively quite conventional. The fact that the subject in question considers the externally benign event (such as moving home) to be subjectively so intolerable is key to understanding the complexities and subtleties of individual personality development. Loss of aspects of self through dissociation during significant historical moments in one’s life leads to a devitalised form of existence, marked by resignation, in the present. The shaman retrieves these missing, split off bits of self in order to retrieve vital presence of mind for the subject’s life in the present.
2. The article on the Magical pre-Oedipal field (see biloiography), which also describes, in effect, soul retrieval, but from a Jungian perspective. To facilitate healing, the psychotherapist may permit the client (receiving the Jungian analysis) to project onto the therapist the character of someone who has caused the subject damage in the past. The damage caused in the past, creating loss, is psychodynamically transported into the present, to be dealt with skilfully by the analytical psychologist. . By feeling free to recreate the original psychodynamic within the healing circumstances of therapy, the client is able to experience healing. The self in the process of healing is thus viewed dynamically as an “emerging self”. This follows the pattern of shamanism: retrieving aspects of the vitalised self concept lost to the past, in order to bring healing and a revitalisation to the subjectively experienced present.
Here are two other examples of contemporary shamanism:
1. The new-age neo-shamanistic book, Soul Retrieval, which gives an outline of retrieving fragmented parts of the self, which dissociate from the present due to a refusal to participate in situations unconsciously felt to be subjectively intolerable. This is most interesting. Whereas there are serious psychological books geared towards examining how dissociation and the splitting of identity (ending up in multiple personality disorder, for instance) can happen under situations of extreme stress, more subtle modes of splitting (along the same principles of avoidance of stress) can apparently happen within situations that we would consider objectively quite conventional. The fact that the subject in question considers the externally benign event (such as moving home) to be subjectively so intolerable is key to understanding the complexities and subtleties of individual personality development. Loss of aspects of self through dissociation during significant historical moments in one’s life leads to a devitalised form of existence, marked by resignation, in the present. The shaman retrieves these missing, split off bits of self in order to retrieve vital presence of mind for the subject’s life in the present.
2. The article on the Magical pre-Oedipal field (see biloiography), which also describes, in effect, soul retrieval, but from a Jungian perspective. To facilitate healing, the psychotherapist may permit the client (receiving the Jungian analysis) to project onto the therapist the character of someone who has caused the subject damage in the past. The damage caused in the past, creating loss, is psychodynamically transported into the present, to be dealt with skilfully by the analytical psychologist. . By feeling free to recreate the original psychodynamic within the healing circumstances of therapy, the client is able to experience healing. The self in the process of healing is thus viewed dynamically as an “emerging self”. This follows the pattern of shamanism: retrieving aspects of the vitalised self concept lost to the past, in order to bring healing and a revitalisation to the subjectively experienced present.
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