Culture & Psychology
August 28, 2025
William B. Parsons
This essay is designed to illumine Sudhir Kakar’s contributions with regard to psychoanalytic theorizing about mysticism and culture. It proceeds in five interrelated parts: (1) presents a broad definitional and comparative context with respect to the academically contested term “mysticism”; (2) explores the initial entry of the psychoanalytic engagement with mysticism (i.e., Freud’s famous...
Culture & Psychology
January 22, 2025
F. Saki
Zâr is one of the culture-bound syndromes mentioned for the first time in DSM-IV. Zâr is believed to be an evil spirit or wind that possesses people, causing various mental symptoms. Those affected rarely seek psychological help, believing the illness is of supernatural origin, with its cultural basis remaining largely unknown. The DSM removed this syndrome in subsequent editions, reasoning...
Culture & Psychology
March 3, 2022
Fatemeh Saki, A. Ahmadi
7 citations
Although shamanism dates back to the prehistoric era, reminiscence of its beliefs and representation of them could still be seen in Central Asian communities and the Turkmens of Iran. Spirit possession, fairy possession and Porkhani are all terms used to describe a severe psychotic disorder; this mental disorder can be found in the Turkmen culture in Iran and Central Asia and is commonly...
Culture & Psychology
September 1, 2021
Christian Lönneker, Andreas Maercker
The psychological phenomenon of a suddenly appearing, extremely enigmatic, and at the same time fascinating state in which one feels influenced by higher powers was described as a “numinous experience” by R. Otto and C. G. Jung. This condition is one of those subjectively non-rational experiences that have so far received little attention in cultural clinical psychology and yet have great...
Culture & Psychology
September 1, 2006
Charles D. Laughlin, C. Jason Throop
21 citations
Anthropologists and psychologists have long debated the relative importance of nature and nurture in human affairs. By and large anthropologists have opted for what might be called the ‘naïve culturological position’ that when our species developed culture, it left its biological roots behind. Psychologists, on the other hand, until relatively recently, have largely ignored the impact of...
Culture & Psychology
June 1, 1999
Cor Baerveldt, Theo Verheggen
The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within...
Culture & Psychology
June 1, 1999
Kurt Kreppner
The number of concepts which attempt to describe the exchange process between individual and environment is legion. The proposal offered by Baerveldt and Verheggen (1999) to deal with some of the problems of conceptualizing the exchange between individual and environment is reviewed and the authors’ main idea—to construct the individual as an enactive and autonomous unit, on the one hand, and...