The Indian concept of Jīvanmukti - liberation while living - offers a critical challenge to dominant psychological models centred on ego integration, identity coherence, and performance. Drawing on cultural psychology, phenomenology, and classical Indian philosophy, this article examines how experiences of altered selfhood may be understood either as pathological dissociation within clinical...
This article examines how the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage functions as a culturally situated medium for activating what Maslow termed Being values (B-values)—such as wholeness, interconnectedness, and harmony. Situating Maslow’s concept of peak experiences within a cultural-psychological framework, the study investigates how transformative experiences emerge in liminal contexts where everyday...
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...
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...
In the present paper I investigate the phenomenon of mindfulness from a cultural-psychological perspective. During the past years mindfulness has been primarily treated as an independent (intervention) variable trying to evidence its effectiveness in relation to psychotherapy as well as to specific work outcomes such as a decrease in stress symptoms at work. Yet, what has been rather missing...
As a classical art form reserved only for the Yogyakartan royalty from the 18th to the 20th century, the Bedhaya does not simply serve as entertainment for its audiences. It is the epitome of Javanese meditation. This study aims to explore the experiences of court dancers regarding the Bedhaya to ultimately identify what psychological aspects are involved in the formation of their experiences....
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...
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 & PsychologyOctober 15, 2018Ruitong Guo, He Yong Shen, Yan-Cui Zhang et al.
The paper collaboratively probes the diachronic, cultural and psychological resources inherited from the classical heroic myth of China, Kuafu Chases after the Sun. With the conceptual system of Analytical Psychology and Chinese culture, starting with ancient mythological texts, the authors carry out studies on three dimensions of the historical and contemporary images of Kuafu, the conscious...
Although Enactivism and cultural anthropology share many core principles, a satisfactory Enactivist approach to culture has not yet been articulated. While the Enactivist embraces the cultural anthropologist’s skepticism with respect to a pregiven world described through objective truths, one of its stumbling blocks has been its difficulty in accounting for the normative background of...
Underlying all theories are philosophical presuppositions that lend themselves to different epistemological approaches, which need to be unfurled when comparing theories and offering alternative explanations. Contrary to Verheggen and Baerveldt's (2007) promulgation that `enactivism' may be an adequate alternative for Wagner's social representation approach, this commentary outlines how this...
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...
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...
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...