Shamanism: creativity versus pathology

A certain amount of psychological and conceptual difficulty is linked to the psychological underpinnings of shamanism, especially in distinguishing it from everyday pathology. Anton Ehrenzweig spells it out the nature of my difficulty in conceptualizing shamanism as something distinct from pathology when he states that creativity and pathology are two sides of the same coin.

He presents an example when he contends that a schizophrenic cannot effectively create art, simply because he cannot dissolve his fears and anxieties in the depths of the psyche to remold them.  His traumas are unable to be transmuted via a dialectical relationship with the deeper or inner parts of his psyche.) Ehrenzweig also holds that creativity and pathology have superficial resemblance as both creators and mad people have a relationship with the depths of the psyche.  But only the artist integrates the elements of the unconscious with the elements of the more rational mind.

 The creator delves deeply into the constructs of his own psyche and uses the material there to reconstruct a world that is different from how it actually appears.In Nietzschean terms, the character structure of the one whose mind generates pathology has at its core a sense of decrepitude or lack, where the one who operates creativity does so from a feeling of excess or plenitude.  Thus a creator and a merely sick man, acting from very different senses of the world, must logically not be the same.  Nietzsche's view about their necessary separation seems to have changed, at least with regard to himself, later in his life, for in his memoirs he acknowledges that he was simultaneously "a decadent" and at the same time somebody who had healthy enough instincts to know how to cure himself.

This epiphany, written two years before his death (having perhaps sensed its approach) accurately encapsulates the age-old idea of a shamanic persona, being one who has gained insights into himself through his wounding and has thus gained the power to become a healer of himself and others.

The parallel between art and shamanism is already obvious:  both artist and shaman descend into a realm of uncertainty (where all that's solid seems to melt) and this extreme level of uncertainty is experienced as a state of ecstasy within discomfort.   Object relations psychoanalysis gives a name to this uncertainty -- the paranoid-schizoid position -said to relate to an early stage of childhood development.