Abstract

A comparativist approach in the psychoanalytic study of religion illuminates hermeneutic pathways to unconscious subjective experience. This approach contributes to recognizing and theorizing the culturally situated modalities of human suffering and the ambivalent nature of desire. A psychoanalytic reading of ethnographic case studies examines these themes as they appear through possession experiences, which open and maintain avenues of connection and communion with the dead and the living within the minds of individuals. Spirit possession is discussed in terms of what Michael Lambek calls the “co-habitation” of subjectivities. Theodor Adorno’s concept of subjectivity contributes to this chapter’s psychoanalytic reading of Tuhami, Vincent Crapanzano’s classic ethnography. The psychoanalytic approach presented here is neither diagnostic nor pathologizing. The central focus illuminates the creative and destructive dimensions of subjectivity and desire in the efforts made by contextually situated individuals to symbolize and articulate their internal worlds as they struggle to negotiate the permeable boundaries between human and spiritual worlds.