pathology or power?

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2006, 51, 125–144
0021–8774/2006/5101/125 © 2006, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
The developmental/emergent model of
archetype, its implications and its
application to shamanism
John Merchant, Sydney

This is an article that says that siberian shamanism is, in fact, pathological, on the basis of pre-oedipal dynamics.

The link I am constantly finding is between shamanism and early childhood -- even in Aboriginal culture, there is the conceptualisation of returning to infancy and then back to adulthood in shamanic ritual.

What this article doesn't depict (because it is just empirical, not broadly theoretical) is the regression followed by the return to a mature disposition and associated healing.

The whole issue of how this three-part process occurs and to what degree is probably not empirically verifiable. It is only mythically suggested in various texts that this is the nature of the process.

Also, I have the problem of answering the question: To what degree does the kind of ontological knowledge of how selfhood is constructed become redeemed of a pathological residue and useful for appropriating in a health-giving manner, for example in an expert dissection of the function of the pre-oedipal FIELD (NOT "stage" -- but some infantile residue that also pertains quite necessarily, and only in some cases pathologically, to a fully attained adult life)?

In other words, it is really hard to know about the degree of recovery that Marechera managed to attain, from his earlier illness. What IS clear to me is that he writes with a deep knowledge of the structures of pre-oedipal psychological mechanisms, and that he employs a lot of insights into how the pre-oedipal FIELD (in the sense that it affects adult social organisation) produces selective repression and the exclusion of some people, but not others, from power.

So, this is indicative of his turning his knowledge (and personal misfortune) towards healing others in society, especially the downtrodden.

And it is THAT pattern of sickness and recovery that IS shamanic. (But once again, to what degree are some of his earlier works? I don't know. Also why did he fear so much the "participation mystique" (in terms of the dynamics I have found in some of his works and in his life?) Perhaps -- and very likely so -- this has much to do with the way that blacks were infantised in colonial society (as often white women were, too, as I have pointed out). So there is a tendency to relate from the position of immaturity into which he had been interpellated. Also, the motif of the black identity as being "unborn" is very evocative of the power of political repression to create a forced immaturity.