The Shaman, the Therapist, and the Coach

______Manfred F. R. KETS de VRIES 2014/54/EFE

The Shaman, the Therapist, and the Coach

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries*

* Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, 77305 Fontainebleau Cedex, France. Email: [email protected]

A Working Paper is the author’s intellectual property. It is intended as a means to promote research to interested readers. Its content should not be copied or hosted on any server without written permission from [email protected] Find more INSEAD papers at http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/search_papers.cfm

Abstract

In this article I discuss various similarities and differences between the healing practices of shamans and the work of therapists and executive coaches. I also explore the extent to which the shamanic perspective can contribute to contemporary psychotherapy and executive coaching. I conjecture that it is important to recapture humankind’s phylogenetic patterns in our present-day “rational” world, if we are to tackle the increasing alienation of humankind.

I suggest that the shamanic worldview does not differ greatly from that of the founders of depth psychology, Freud and Jung. While shamans are involved in “soul retrieval,” contemporary psychoanalysts, dynamic psychotherapists and many executive coaches are engaged in “self-retrieval.” In addition, reviewing Jung’s writing, I make a number of observations about the collective unconscious, mystical experiences, spiritual healing practices, active imagination, and visualizing. I raise the question whether contemporary psychotherapists and executive coaches realize the extent to which they are following in the footsteps of their shamanic predecessors. Furthermore, in this paper I also address the question whether the shamanic, more holistic perspective will help humankind to reduce their sense of rootlessness.

Key words: Shamanism; Psychotherapy; Coaching; Depth Psychology; Collective Unconscious; Archetypes; Mystical Experiences; the Sacred; Active Imagination; Visualizing; Journey.

2

“… The experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied.” ——Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you enter into the world of soul, you are like a madman” —Carl Jung, The Red Book

Introduction In a world that is changing ever faster, it’s not difficult to become alienated, that is, to experience a disconnect between ourselves and others, our social and our work environments and, at a fundamental level, the natural world we live in. Many of the presenting problems that psychotherapists and executive coaches encounter have this element of alienation at their core, negatively affecting their clients’ sense of self, ability to function, and potential for happiness. In post-industrial society, we have become increasingly estranged from the vast hinterland of our evolutionary human history. Yet civilization (as we know it) has only been around for a very limited amount of time. Some people have even suggested that if we take a time scale whereby the Earth was formed only a year ago, we appeared as a species less than 12 minutes ago, began farming a little over one minute ago, witnessed the Industrial Revolution less than 2 seconds ago, began using computers 0.4 seconds ago, and the Internet less then 0.1 seconds ago. From this perspective, we can see how bonded we are to nature, as a species, and for how long. Behind the thin veneer of our civilization, much of our primitive nature remains.

All our rationality notwithstanding, our understanding of the exigencies of our lives has remained fairly limited. We continue to struggle with alienation in contemporary society. Often the result of psychological trauma, alienation can also be triggered by our increasing physical mobility. Migration and deracination induce different forms of stress, with the loss of the familiar, and disruption in cultural norms, language, religious customs, and social support systems. This form of cultural bereavement 3 impacts on our mental well-being.

During our prehistoric beginnings, shamanism took root among people who lived in an intimate relationship with the Earth. However, the price we have paid our evolutionary history has been our increasing estrangement from the Earth and its natural forces. This disruption has contributed to our alienation from our emotional and psychological roots and has also led us to endanger the survival of our planet. With the realization of the Earth’s fragility, there has been increasing awareness of the need for rebuild our connection with the living world. Consciousness of this has inspired a strong resurgent interest in the cultures of contemporary primitive peoples who still practice shamanism, which has also become a growing, if cultish, practice in the western world.

In this article I point to a continuity in orientations in the helping professions and look at the similarities and differences in the healing practices of shamans compared to psychotherapists and executive coaches. Have contemporary therapists and coaches anything to learn from the ancient ways of the shaman?

Generally speaking, psychology and psychiatry have not dealt with shamans very well, however, often dismissing them as mentally or neurologically deranged. But is it possible that in our “rational” society, recapturing our phylogenetic patterns could help us tackle the increasing alienation of humankind? Could we, by incorporating aspects of the shamanic perspective, reduce our sense of rootlessness? Could shamans help make us more sensitive to the ecological forces that threaten our planet today?

Shamans represent one of the oldest continuous ways of human sense-making. The origins of shamanism are prehistoric, represented in oral traditions developed over tens of thousands of years (Lewis-Williams, 2004). Their practices situated humans in a world in which everything animate and inanimate—all animals, growing things, landscape features, and weather systems—was an individual entity. For millennia, shamans held a central position as healers within the living body of the Earth, understanding how a change in one part of an ecosystem might affect all the other parts.

4

Shamanism is considered the world’s most ancient spiritual healing practice (Eliade, 1972; Harner, 1980; Hutton, 2001; Graham, 2003; Pratt, 2007). It is still practiced around the globe by indigenous peoples such as the Sami (Lapps) of northern Europe, the Inuit of Greenland, the Ainu, Evenks, Altaians, and Buryats of the northern parts of Asia, the Aborigines of Australia, the Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, and the native North and South Americans.

Ancient as shamanic practices may be, with the passing of the centuries primal belief systems and native cultures have been diminished or displaced by the spread of the great missionary religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. This has led to the near extinction of the indigenous shamans, and the loss of much of their knowledge (Kehoe, 2000). Contemporary practitioners have found it difficult to accept “irrational” shamanic practices. Altered-state experiences are regarded as mysterious, paranormal, or even pathological when compared to today’s scientific and rational healing approach. This is unfortunate, because shamans (like therapists and coaches) have always been committed to the mental and physical health of their people.

All practitioners in the helping professions are involved in the reconstruction and well-being of the human psyche and shamans are no exception. However, shamans do not relegate psychic difficulties to the realm of the unconscious or repressed memories. They believe that parts of the soul are free to leave the body and that illnesses derive from split-off parts of the self that lodge in a kind of parallel universe. These splits occur while we dream, or when we protect ourselves from potentially damaging emotional or physical situations. Trauma might prevent these split-off parts of the soul from returning to the body. People feel depressed, lonely, bored, fearful, manic, or anxiety-ridden as they try to reintegrate their soul. Their search might lead them into other relationships, addictive behavior, or religious sects, all of which may prove to be inadequate. People who subscribe to this belief may need the help of a shaman to restore the soul’s essence (Hultkrantz, 1985; Halifax, 1991; Ingerman, 2004). The shaman comes to the rescue as a communicator between those split-off parts and the main body of consciousness, and ultimately as a soul retriever. In contrast, psychotherapists and executive coaches also engage in a form of soul retrieval, although their work can better be described as “self-retrieval”: the retrieval of the self, by the self. 5

Shamans

From the earliest days of our human history, shamans have provided us with a direct and experiential connection to a naturalistic, spiritual world (Levi-Strauss, 1962, 1963 Campbell, 1976, 2004). They have helped us to elucidate where, why, or how we fit into the general scheme of things—what our place is in the cosmos. Shamans presented life as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. They were the original eco-psychologists, pointing out the need for environmental reciprocity for the healing of humans, animals and the Earth.

As we have become more “civilized” over millennia, we have lost these spiritual connections with nature, however. Today rationality and reason (enforced by science and technology) reign supreme. Shamans have become relics of the past, while the mystery of magic and the art of mythology have degenerated into popular entertainment and other forms of media management (Znamenski, 2007), the preserve of filmmakers, advertisers, lobbyists, and public relations professionals.

Yet we could be justified in considering shamans as the original founders of dynamic psychotherapies because in many ways the shamanic worldview is not that different from that of the two founders of depth psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud (who was Jung’s mentor but later became estranged from him) viewed the unconscious mind as a depository of repressed desires, drivers that could be diagnosed and treated (Freud, 1933). He used the metaphor of the iceberg to describe the human psyche, its small, visible top representing the conscious mind and its submerged bulk the unconscious. In Freud’s conceptual architecture, most of humankind’s drivers are found in the hidden part of this iceberg, where primitive desires, repressed emotions, memories and conflicts reside. In contrast, Jung had a more spiritual outlook to diagnosis and intervention. While he, too, paid attention to the submerged part of the iceberg, he also considered the ocean in which it floated— the “collective unconscious” (Jung, 1968, 1983, 1996). According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains patterns of memories, instincts, and experiences common to all humankind, observable through the analysis of dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and actual behavior. 6

Just as shamans mediate between the living and the spiritual world, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and executive coaches mediate between their clients’ conscious and unconscious. They all take their clients on a journey and guide their exploration of another world: the world of fantasy, dreams, daydreams, and reveries. In therapeutic and coaching interventions, the relationship between practitioner and client is central. In both instances, the goal is to actualize their clients’ healthy growth and support their developing sense of self. The degree to which clients are willing to engage and move to action is critical to the process. In shamanic healing processes, mythical realities are invoked, comparable to the implied historical (or autobiographical) themes deployed in therapeutic or coaching interventions. The aim of both approaches is to bring to consciousness desires, conflicts and resistances that have remained unconscious and need illumination.

Shamans as healers There is no consensus about the definition of shamanism among anthropologists (Hutton, 2001) and the term has been used in a variety of ways. The most common definition of a shaman is an individual who is able to communicate with the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness. A shaman’s principal role is to restore health through cleaning, purifying, and repairing the soul. The aim of their work is to improve individuals’ relationships with their community and surroundings, embedding that process with meaning (Laufer, 1917; Devereux, 1961; Kakar, 1991; Harner and Tryon, 1997; Jenkins, 2004).

Considering the terrifying world our ancestors inhabited, it is not difficult to imagine why shamans were so much in demand. Prehistoric humans faced endless natural dangers that begged to be understood, from weather systems and wild beasts to illness and attacks from other groups. The shamans took on the role of sense-makers. They explored the magnificent hidden universe that lay beyond the visible world. As the chosen intermediaries between these different worlds, they could communicate with the spirits, an interface that might assure cosmic harmony. They were the guardians of ancient traditions, ensuring that the correct ceremonies and rituals were performed to appease the spirits. They were the custodians of the land and ecosystem. They were responsible for determining what had gone wrong when game was scarce, or sickness 7 was prevalent. They performed soul retrieval for individuals who were mentally or behaviorally disturbed.

From time immemorial, shamans performed a similar role to today’s psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and executive coaches. But they did so in a trance- like state, often induced by the use of sound and powerful psychotropic substances, invoking spirit helpers from the “otherworld,” the realm of animal spirits, spirit guides, and ancestors. In many respects, this aspect of the “otherworld” corresponds to the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious.

Soul loss and disassociation In shamanic belief, the experience of feeling incomplete, as if something vital but unidentifiable is missing, is taken literally: parts of the soul might have split off and gone elsewhere. Soul loss may occur as a result of trauma, life-threatening accidents or illnesses, sudden bereavement, or dreaming. This leads to a physical, psychological, or spiritual loss of power that, in turn, can prevent people from leading healthy, creative, and fulfilling lives.

In some ways, soul loss can be compared to the psychological concept of disassociation. Symptoms include depression, a feeling of incompleteness, the inability to move forward on some issues, lost memories, not being in control of our life, or feeling only half-alive. But while the direct relationship between therapist and client is critical to psychotherapeutic and coaching interventions, shamans act as conduits between the client and a third party—the helping spirits invoked to help restore the client to health.

Mystical experiences

Whether they work as psychotherapists, coaches or shamans, all healers use the state of the illness or stated problem of their clients as the raw material to help them feel better. Clients provide clues in the form of their dreams, fantasies, and narratives. In a psychotherapeutic dialectical process, the therapist/coach and client work together in equal partnership to arrive at solutions that engage the whole person, consciously, 8 unconsciously, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. To be able to do their work effectively therapists and coaches need to take a holistic, systemic/psychodynamic approach to healing, respecting personal dignity, choice, and self-determination.

But the extent to which psychotherapists and executive coaches recognize, respect, and respond to or influence their clients’ spiritual or religious values is not always clear. Seemingly irrational experiences often conflict with the notions of rationality held by many practitioners of Western medicine and psychology. This leads to efforts to pathologize clients’ behavior—that is, to see non-ordinary behavior as abnormal.

Treating mystical experiences in this way may do both practitioners and clients a disservice. Paying explicit and non-judgmental attention to religious and spiritual concerns can improve the quality and effectiveness of clinical work. People with a more spiritual outlook on life may be uncomfortable with the rational models of human behavior that inform psychotherapy and coaching.

Fortunately, psychology is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the spiritual aspects of life. For example, the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), now pays attention to the implications of religion and spirituality in diagnostic and treatment procedures (APA, 1994; 2013). Many astute therapists and coaches acknowledge the existential, religious and spiritual elements of their clients’ belief systems and how these influence their behavior in public and private life. Religious beliefs, experiences, and practices can transform reality for some individuals and the (cultural) groups to which they belong (Lukoff et al, 1992; Torrance, 1994; Griffith and Griffith, 2002; Sperry and Shafranske, 2005; Peteet et al, 2011). Some clients will be more susceptible to different forms of healing than others, which can widen the spectrum of a general psychotherapy.

To be effective in their work, psychotherapists and executive coaches should be able to handle a wide range of spiritual experiences and emergencies. They need to be open and responsive to sometimes puzzling points of view. If non-ordinary experiences are pathologized or ignored rather than explored, powerful possibilities for healing can be lost. However, this demands a lot from practitioners, who will need 9 to be able to integrate findings from a variety of disciplines, including clinical and experimental psychiatry, neuroscience, existential psychotherapies, cognitive and experimental psychology, anthropological field studies, thanatology, comparative religion, and mythology.

Religious fears, confrontations with mortality, existential crises of meaning, and moral conflict are themes that tend to emerge when people feel out of control, or are in great physical, mental, emotional or spiritual pain. In many instances, something has happened to shatter their original belief systems. Consequently, they may be looking for a new meaning in life. Currently, few therapists or executive coaches have been trained in assessing or working with religious and spiritual problems, despite the fact that the importance of understanding them and of developing effective treatment approaches is increasingly recognized as a necessary competency in clinical work.

Although the definitions of mystical experience used in research and clinical publications vary widely, most scholars agree that a “mystical” experience is one that diverges significantly from ordinary conscious awareness and represents exposure to a very different reality. People report strange subjective experiences, including autoscopy, tunnels, bright lights, life reviews, and encounters with spiritual beings. Reports of “near-death experiences,” which include similar phenomena, suggest that they can produce long-lasting and positive effects, including more empathic attitudes, greater involvement with family, a stronger sense of life’s purpose and meaning, interest in spirituality, reduced fear of death, belief in an afterlife, and greater appreciation for the ordinary things of life (James, 1902; Moody, 1975; Jilek, 1982; Ring, 1998; Greyson, 2000; Van Lommel et al, 2001).

In any intervention, psychotherapists and coaches should assess their clients’ religious or spiritual upbringing, and current religious affiliations, practices, and beliefs. Might a client’s religiosity or spirituality contribute to presenting problems and disturbances in some way? Could a client’s religious or spiritual resources be used in therapy to help promote coping, healing, and change?

Integrating a spiritual dimension into a psychotherapeutic or coaching practice can be an extremely fertile exercise. The main difference between various 10 therapeutic/coaching interventions and shamanic healing is that the helping elements in the former are viewed as parts of the individual client’s personality, and in the latter as spirits independent of the individual. The basic premise behind an integrative approach is that paying attention to both the secular (as in psychotherapy) and the sacred (as in shamanism) can be beneficial to any intervention.

The therapeutic journey

While therapists, coaches and shamans all work in the same area, they come to it from very different directions. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, “The psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman speaks” (1963, p. 199). Yet both depth psychology and shamanism accept the reality and power of the human unconscious, and have more in common than is often acknowledged (Winkelman, 2000). The famous divergence between the two fathers of depth psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, hinged on the latter’s rejection of the former’s scientific rationalism. Over time, Jung became disillusioned with this orientation (Jung, 1977). The visionary encounters within his own inner world that he described in The Red Book (Jung, 2009) contributed to his belief in the collective unconscious. He began to transform psychotherapy from a practice that treated the sick into a means to achieve higher development of the personality.

An essential preparation for the psychotherapeutic approach involves the shaman or therapist/coach acquiring insight into the way their own psyche works by undertaking their own inner journey and healing themselves. Only by having experienced the depths of their own pain, can they understand, or be able to heal, the pain of others. They also need to be aware that their vulnerabilities may be activated in certain situations, especially if their clients’ wounds are similar to their own. But while therapists or coaches consciously choose their profession, undergo formal training, and practice under the regulation of a number of academic and supervisory organizations, shamans have to be “called,” either by being born into a shamanic lineage or by certain physical or behavioral “signs”—a birthmark, being born with a caul, epilepsy, and so on. A person cannot simply decide to become a shaman. Of course, the acid test is whether they get results. 11

In their healing work, shamans try to construct a useful association between a symptom, its diagnosis, its etiology, and the most effective way of intervention. The work of psychotherapists/coaches is similar. They also attempt to use the presenting symptoms for diagnostic purposes. They also try to connect them with a dynamic understanding of the life story of the individual concerned. Of course, in contrast to contemporary healers, shamans believe that they are merely the mediums for healing their clients, which is done by a greater force—a power they cannot control, but can only influence (Vitebsky, 2001). In the shamanistic healing process, trance provides access to understanding what the client is experiencing and what needs to be done to help the client recover. Trance is a term that comes from the Greek ‘ekstasis,’ meaning the ability to step outside oneself. In psychotherapy, insights into the clients’ problems are achieved differently, using “tools” like transference, free association, evenly suspended attention, intuition, and the therapeutic alliance. Shamans, therapists and coaches know, however, that they have no control over their clients’ unconscious mind. They recognize that they cannot change the client but can only influence, providing insight by reframing the situation the client is in. Whatever insights they provide, it is up to the clients to accept and make use of them—or not.

Dreaming

Dreaming is of great interest to shamans and psychotherapists alike. They know that dreams provide clues to individuals’ inner lives. While we as dreamers may wake and think what nonsense our mind has been up to in the night, to those initiated in dream interpretation our dreams make a lot of sense and provide a magnificent window into our inner depths. They are in Sigmund Freud’s words, “the royal road to the unconscious.” Carl Jung believed that dreaming served a specific purpose in stimulating the physiological processes that are essential to our survival and prosperity as a species (Jung, 1968, p. 85):

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural 12

phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.

This enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols in our dreams. They bring up our original nature—its instincts and peculiar thinking. Unfortunately, they express their content in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us.”

As Jung acknowledged, dreams contain many elements with which the dreamer will have difficulty making personal associations. As we all know, dreams have their own logic and interpretation often requires expert help. Dream interpretation is a vital part of therapeutic and shamanic practices. While shamans use their own trance-like dreaming to enhance their powers and insights, depth psychologists focus on elements of their clients’ dreams to help uncover unacknowledged aspects of the dreamer’s psyche. The challenge for all would-be interpreters of dreams is to translate the language of the dream into the language of consciousness—to transform the content into a meaningful reality.

The Red Book Carl Jung was sometimes called the Hexenmeister or master sorcerer of Zurich, a title prompted by his interest in exploring dreams, myths, imagination, and the occult. The shamanic elements in Jung’s way of looking at the world are unmistakable in his writing. For example, in his posthumously published The Red Book, Jung follows a spirit guide and embarks on a shamanic, mystical journey, descending into the lower depths of his psyche (Jung, 2009). Jung had these confrontations with the unconscious in 1913, when he was 38. He recounts how he entered a profound dark night of the soul, sinking deep into a frightening world of visions and voices, at times even fearing he was losing his mind. He had fallen out with Freud the year before, was struggling with marital issues and had a sense of foreboding about the threat of war—a 13 combination of factors that set the stage for a profound mid-life crisis. Jung later referred to this episode as a frightening experiment, a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious. He expected that his dreams would show him what the soul wants in life.

Jung wrote The Red Book between 1914 and 1930, drawing on material from a number of journals and notebooks that he kept during this period. He describes the “imagery dream” technique he used to embark on his journey into his personal underworld. Also known as “active imagination,” Jung’s technique was closer to a shamanic trance than the forms of guided imagery used in mainstream medical and psychological practice today. The overall theme of The Red Book is how Jung overcame his spiritual alienation. In it he documents a number of gruesome visions and fantasies filled with blood, destruction and cruelty. As he describes it, the “spirit of the depths” ripped him out of the comfortable, rational assumptions of the “spirit of our times” and dragged him, night after night, through the terrifying stages of underworld initiation. But out of this personal experience, Jung crafted a depth psychology, including his theory of the collective unconscious (Jung, 1978, 1996, 2009; Hillman, 2004; Lachman, 2010; McGuire & Hull, 1993).

Jung viewed the collective unconscious as a genetically inherited psychological structure that is common to all human beings, objective rather than subjective and universal rather than individual. According to him, all our human struggles and conditions are representative of aspects of this collective unconscious, including archetypal human experiences like birth, death, coming of age, marriage, sexual maturation, transformation, and so on. The collective unconscious also includes pre- existing forms—archetypes or collective representations. Jung labeled these the shadow (a part or parts of ourselves that we don’t like, don’t know, or don’t want to know); anima (the feminine side of a man) and animus (the masculine side of a woman); the wise old man (inner wisdom); the great mother (sympathetic, caring, and solicitous as well as devouring, seductive, and poisonous); the hero; and the innocent child. Natural imagery, such as fire, oceans, rivers, or mountains, was also seen as part of the collective unconscious.

14

On his journey to the interior, Jung had done what innumerable shamans from prehistoric times onwards had done before him and tapped into the rich symbolic world of dreams, daydreams and visions that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives (Lévy-Bruhl, 1923; Hillman, 2004). Furthermore, having undertaken this journey, Jung realized that archetypal psychology could be viewed as a modern offshoot of shamanism (Jung, 1978, 1996, 2009; McGuire & Hull, 1993) and concluded that the spiritual plight of the western world derived from its loss of soul and disconnection from the natural world. He pointed out the need for a balance between “inner” and “outer” to arrive at a complete ecology of being. Active imagination Jung’s technique of active imagination encourages an individual to enter a reflective state of mind with the intention of creating a dialogue with the unconscious. Active imagination can be done by visualization (which is how Jung himself did it), a similar technique to shamanic journeying (Finke, 1990). In this form of meditation, the contents of an individual’s unconscious are translated into images or narratives, or personified as separate entities. It is critical, however, to exert as little influence as possible on these mental images as they unfold. For Jung, this technique had the potential to allow communication not only between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the personal psyche but also between the personal and collective unconscious. There are many other ways, however, to enter such a state (dance, music, painting, and so on).

In therapy or coaching, in guided affective imagery or in dream work of various kinds, the images that show up can be seen as an expression of the momentary condition of the psyche, which give clues for the healing process. Similarly, shamans use their trance experiences and dreams to gather concrete information about suitable healing methods for their patients.

It is noticeable that the fundamentals of the shamanic journey and psychodynamic psychotherapy share many common elements, the most important of which is the collaborative relationship with the client. They differ significantly, however, in the states of consciousness involved and in the necessity of acknowledging spirits as an integral part of the shamanic belief system.

15

Altered states of consciousness Psychotherapy usually takes place in a normal waking state of consciousness for both therapist and client. (Obvious exceptions are hypnotherapy, sonic-driving, or drug- facilitated therapy.) Creative visualization and other practices are also used. In contrast, a shaman enters a non-ordinary reality in order to connect with the lost parts of the client’s psyche (soul) (Ingerman, 1991, 2004). Shamans developed techniques for lucid dreaming, and what has been called autoscopic or out-of-body experiences, sometimes with the help of psychotropic plants or mushrooms. In this condition, normal logic is suspended and replaced by visions and sensations. On the hypnotic beat of the drum, the shaman rides into the “otherworld,” having reached states of ecstasy that contribute to a heightened or visionary state of expanded consciousness (Harner, and Tryon, 1996). The shaman accesses the unconsciousness of the client, tunes into the situation that has caused the soul fracture, visualizes the missing piece, addresses it, and coaxes it back to reality. Leaving the issue of process aside, however, there is considerable methodological overlap between shamanic lucid dreaming and active imagination techniques.

The therapeutic alliance There is a natural tendency for a client in any therapeutic relationship to see the therapist as having special power. When a psychotherapist uses methods that involve a spiritual dimension and non-ordinary reality, perception of the therapist’s power can be amplified, causing difficulties in the therapeutic relationship. Clients who overvalue the therapist’s power may undervalue their own abilities. Deification of the therapist is a real danger in the helping professions and very bad for building a truly effective therapeutic alliance.

Shamans have the help of spirits in their work and therapists and coaches have to do without them. Nevertheless, all have to perform the essential task of building an alliance with their clients. The psychotherapist’s familiarity with their clients’ underworld, gained through their own training analysis, enables them to work as a kind of assistant and guide. However, shamans have an advantage here. In tribal societies, shamans hold a respected position; anyone requesting their services knows them personally or by reputation, and views them in a positive light. A healing alliance is established from the outset. 16

Personal development As many scholars of myths have noted, the archetypal journey is always one of initiation and self-discovery (Campbell, 1976, 2004). It is a path to regaining harmony and balance in our lives and developing our creative potential. Shamanism recognizes that all individuals have their own spiritual paths and considers spiritual development the most important thing in life. This explains why shamans were asked to assist their clients in their journey of self-discovery. The notion of soul fragmentation meant that shamans needed to help their clients find and reconnect with the parts of their soul that had been broken, disconnected, or lost due to various traumatic experiences. By searching for these fragments within the memories of the retriever, their clients could become whole again. In this way shamans were like prehistoric psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists or executive coaches, and engaged in similar activities to their contemporary equivalents. But shamanism considers the real to be “out there,” outside the individual, and assumes that the soul has wandered into a foreign land that only a shaman can enter, helped by a spirit guide to direct the search for the client’s soul fragments.

In comparison, psychotherapy takes the real to be “in here,” inside the individual, and the assumption is that the soul is not lost but remains unrecognized. It is the task of the therapist/executive coach to make the client conscious of the soul’s presence. The doors of insight have to be opened so that the client can consciously connect with a soul that has been there all along. However, both shaman and therapist/executive coach have to enter an altered state of awareness to be effective. A shaman enters a state of involuntary belief while therapists/coaches work within an altered state of consciousness in which they choose whether or not to accept the visions that appear.

A systemic orientation Another similarity between the work of the shaman and the work of a therapist/executive coach is a systemic orientation. Contemporary therapists and coaches are more than ever aware that their interventions do not take place in a vacuum. They realize that the people they treat are part of a system. They acknowledge the family or community as a vital component in their clients’ recovery of psychological health. Systemic connectedness for shamans consists not only of 17 their clients’ human contacts but also everything that has existed and will exist, from the beginning to the end of time—animals, plants, inanimate objects, and the whole cosmos. Systemic forms of family therapy take a very similar approach, if at a more modest level. And the therapist/coach engaged in individual interventions can learn from the shamanic model that sometimes there is value in having members of the family participate as well.

Extending the frontiers of healing

Mainstream psychotherapy and coaching (in particular approaches that focus on depth psychology and are rooted in contemporary science) can build on the shaman’s way of looking at the world to extend the range and scope of contemporary therapeutic interventions. Shamans, psychotherapists and coaches may have very different ways of looking at the world, but in spite of their differences they can learn from each other.

All are preoccupied with helping their clients understand the symbolic meaning of their lives by explaining the underlying reality of what they are experiencing. And although they may use different words, they are often are talking about very similar things. They all recognize that there is a large unconscious domain to the human psyche. They all believe that many of the problems experienced by their clients lie on the border between the physical and the psychic world. They all recognize the healing power of dialogue. They all believe in the effectiveness of the talking cure. Both shamanic and depth-psychological interventions are based on mediation and conflict resolution between our conscious and unconscious worlds.

Far too frequently, however, contemporary healers only treat the physical symptoms of their clients and suppress their feelings of emotional distress with various forms of medication. Shamans take a more holistic orientation and are inclined to look for underlying causes in the spiritual realm. This approach may lead them to prescribe a set of rituals to help their clients find some kind of psycho-spiritual equilibrium within the larger context in which they operate. This is one way to deal with the sense of malaise and alienation that characterizes present-day society. If they are open to 18 learning from shamans, contemporary psychotherapists and executive coaches can become true explorers of the mind, bringing new methods and insights to psychology and extending the frontiers of healing.

19

References

American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Campbell, J. (1976). The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York and London: Penguin Books.

Campbell, J. (2004). athways o liss : Mythology And Personal Transformation. ew ork: ew World ibrary.

Devereux, G. (1961). “Shamans as eurotics,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 63, (5), Part 1,1088–1090.

Eliade, M. (1972). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen 76. Princeton University Press.

Finke, R. A. (1990). Creative Imagery: Discoveries and Inventions in Visualization. London: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1933). “ ew Introductory ectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII, Transl. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Graham, H. (ed.) (2003). Shamanism: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge.

Greyson, B. (2000). “ ear-death experiences.” In Cardena E., Lynn, S. J., Krippner S., (eds.). Varieties of Anomalous Experiences: Examining the Scientific Evidence.

20

Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Griffith, J. L. & Griffith, M. L. (2002). Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy. New York: The Guilford Press.

Halifax, J. (1991). Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives. New York: Penguin Books.

Harner, M. (1980). The Way of the Shaman. New York: HarperOne.

Harner, S. and Tryon, W. (1996). “Psychological and Immunological Responses to Shamanic Journeying with Drumming,” Shaman, 4 (1–2), 89–97.

Harner, S. & Tryon, W. (1997). “Therapeutic Effects of Shamanism,” Shamanism, 9 (1), 27–8.

Hillman, J. (2004). rchetypal sycholo y : rief ccount . urich: Spring Publications.

Hultkrantz, A. (1985). “The Shaman and the Medicine-man,” Social Science Medicine. 20 (5), 511–15.

Hutton, R. (2001), Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination, London and New York: Hambledon.

Ingerman, S. (1991). Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self. San Francisco: Harper.

Ingerman, S. (2004). Shamanic Journeying. Boulder, Co: Sounds True.

James, W. (1902), The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Touchstone.

Jenkins, P. (2004). Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. New York: Oxford University Press. 21

Jilek W. G. (1982). “Altered States of Consciousness in North American Indian Ceremonials,” Ethos, American Anthropological Association. 10 (4), 326–43.

Jung, C. G. (1968). Man and his Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing.

Jung, C. G. (1977). On Synchronicity and the Paranormal. London: Routledge.

Jung, C. G. (1983). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Fontana.

Jung, C. G. (1996). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London: Routledge.

Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Kakar, S. (1991). Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kehoe, A. (2000). Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. London: Waveland Press.

Lachman, G. (2010). Jun the Mystic: he Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jun ’s Life and Teachings. New York: Tarcher.

Laufer, B. (1917). “Origin of the Word Shaman,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 19 (3), 361-371.

Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1923), Primitive Mentality. London: Allen & Unwin.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Lewis-Williams, D. (2004). The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames & Hudson.

22

Lukoff, D., Lu, F. & Turner, R. (1992). “Toward a more Culturally Sensitive DSM- IV. Psychoreligious and Psychospiritual Problems,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 180 (11), 673–82.

McGuire, W. & Hull, R. F. C. (eds.) (1993). Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. New Jersey: Princeton University Press).

Moody, R. (1975). Life After Life. New York: Bantam Books.

Peteet, J. R., Lu, F. G., & Narrow, W. E. (eds.) (2011). Religious and Spiritual Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Research Agenda for DSM-V. Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Publishing.

Pratt, C. (2007). An Encyclopedia of Shamanism. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group.

Ring, K. (1998). Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-death Experience. Needham, MA: Moment Point Press.

Sperry, L. & Shafranske, E. P. (2005). Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Torrance, R. M. (1994). The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science. London, UK: University of California Press.

Van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). “ ear-death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the etherlands,” Lancet, 358 (9298), 2039–45.

Vitebsky, P. (2001). The Shaman: Voyages of the Soul – Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon. London: Duncan Baird.

Winkelman, M. (2000). Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and

23

Healing. Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey.

Znamenski, A. (2007). The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press

24