Shamanisms -- ultimately -- are just systems of knowledge as to how to keep inner experience alive. Most of psychology fails at it adjusts the victim/client towards conformity -- which is often conformity to a certain standard of deadness. Shamanism's standard of health is just to do with the liveliness and vitality of inner experience. Conformity to norms is just seen as exactly that -- but here it doesn't pass for a standard of health. Acute sensitivity to the fluctuations of eros and thanatos, and where and when these are most likely to appear, and how they may each be utilised and combated, respectively, are the shaman's stock in trade.
As for me, I am really only interested in the kind of literature that has huge supra-literary ambitions. Ordinary everyday literature I find neither very interesting nor appealing. It has to be the kind of literature that deliberately works upon the mind, in order to facilitate fundamental changes in the world.
Whether it is effective or not in its goals is much less interesting to me than its attempts in this direction, as well as the structure (aesthetically and emotionally) of psychological mechanisms that it employs towards achieving its political goals.
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