Marechera, an object relations approach to shamanism and Nietzsche

It is the focus of this thesis to take an interest in Marechera’s “unconscious” determinations and their inner logic, since it is in these that one finds his total shamanistic sensibilities -- the aim to cure various social diseases, via certain practices and techniques of recovery from “brain death” that are based upon Marechera’s own experience with, to use a different term for the same thing, “soul loss” and later “soul recovery”.

While Marechera doesn’t use the term, “shamanism”, to describe his agenda in this regard, the inner logic of his ideas above testifies that  the key to his thinking is shamanism. One may consider that at the heart of shamanism there is a temporary ego loss (or ego “dedifferentiation”) [ie. in the paranoid-schizoid position (the early pre-Oedipal state, which is followed by the child’s late pre-Oedipal state of burgeoning awareness of oneself as a discrete entity – called the “Depressive position”]. It is worth noting here that shamanism has a flourishing intellectual tradition, even in the West, which goes through Nietzsche, to Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault.

One can, for instance, consider how Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence", is quintessentially shamanic, for it awakes awareness that the core self can offer the basis for affirmation of life, if it is itself awakened. Yet, shamanic awakening always involves facing death. The key point in shamanistic experience is in the understanding that by facing death (losing oneself temporarily to Thanatos and a sense of disintegration of the established self), one is entering a psychological realm dominated by primeval forces, so that if one is already healthy in the core self, one is destined to meet the countervailing force, Eros – which is the cohesive force of life, driving towards unity of mind and body. The overall health of the core self to begin with will decide whether the shamanic journey is successful. For it to be so, eros must win over thanatos, and thus the self is reconstituted – not on the basis of any prior existing “true self” having been discovered, but on the basis of an encounter with Eros as a primeval force. Other forces that we meet in Black Sunlight relate to Marechera’s knowledge from childhood – his “object relations”.