Spiritual Hysteria: A Gendered Perspective

Abstract

Trances, visions, speaking in many tongues, irrational social behaviour including the discarding of clothes have been widely interpreted by psychoanalysts as a psychopathological condition. However, parapsychologists are increasingly looking at the grey zone that blurs the rigidly held distinctions between psychoses and spirituality. Stanislav Grof, in his remarkable book Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy , published in 1985, goes beyond these neat divides between psychiatry and spirituality to take a fresh look at the phenomenon of ‘spiritual emergence’. To quote Grof: In principle, Western mechanic science tends to see spiri- tual experiences of any kind as pathological phenomena. Mainstream psychoanalysis, following Freud's example, interprets the unifying and oceanic states of mystics as re-gression to primary narcissism and infantile helplessness and sees religion as a collective obsessive-compulsive neu-rosis […] The great shamans of various aboriginal tradi-tions have been described as schizophrenic or epileptic, and various psychiatric labels have been put on all major saints, prophets, and religious teachers. While many sci-entific studies describe the similarities between mysticism and mental disease, there is very little genuine apprecia-tion of mysticism or awareness of the differences between the mystical world view and psychosis […] These psychi-atric criteria are applied routinely and without distinc-tion even to such great religious teachers of the scope of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, Sri Ramana Maharishi or Ramakrishna. (p.334)