The cure would consist, therefore, in making explicit a situation originally existing on the emotional level and in rendering acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate. That the mythology of the shaman does not correspond to an objective reality does not matter. The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which believes in it. The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned their existence. What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon the myth. will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful.
Once the sick woman understands, however, she does more than resign herself; she gets well. But no such thing happens to our sick when the causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs, or viruses. We shall perhaps be accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not. And yet, the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is a cause-and-effect relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to his mind, whether conscious or unconscious: It is a relationship between symbol and thing symbolized, or, to use the terminology of linguists, between sign and meaning. The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression - at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible - which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected.
In this respect, the shamanic cure lies on the borderline between our contemporary physical medicine and such psychological therapies as psychoanalysis. Its originality stems from the application to an organic condition of a method related to psychotherapy. How is this possible? A closer comparison between shamanism and psychoanalysis - which in our view implies no slight to psychoanalysis - will enable us to clarify this point.
In both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious, owing either to their repression by other psychological forces or - in the case of childbirth - to their own specific nature, which is not psychic but organic or even simply mechanical. In both cases also, the conflicts and resistances are resolved, not because of the knowledge, real or alleged, which the sick woman progressively acquires of them, but because this knowledge makes possible a specific experience, in the course of which conflicts materialize in order and on a level permitting their free development and leading to their resolution. This vital experience is called abreaction in psychoanalysis. We know that its precondition is the unprovoked intervention of the analyst, who appears in the conflicts of the patient through a double transference mechanism, as flesh-and-blood protagonist and in relation to whom the patient can restore and clarify an initial situation which has remained unexpressed or unformulated.
All these characteristics can be found in the shamanic cure. Here, too, it is a matter of provoking an experience; as this experience becomes structured, regulatory mechanisms beyond the subjects control are spontaneously set in motion and lead to an orderly functioning. The shaman plays the same dual role as the psychoanalyst. A prerequisite role - that of listener for the psychoanalyst and of orator for the shaman - establishes a direct relationship with the patients conscious and an indirect relationship with his unconscious. This is the function of the incantation proper. But the shaman does more than utter the incantation; he is its hero, for it is he who, at the head of a supernatural battalion of spirits, penetrates the endangered organs and frees the captive soul. In this way, like the psychoanalyst, becomes the object of transference and, through the representations induced in the patients mind, the real protagonist of the conflict which the latter experiences on the border between the physical world and the psychic world. The patient suffering from neurosis eliminates an individual myth by facing a”real” psychoanalyst; the native woman in childbed overcomes a true organic disorder by identifying with a “mythically transmuted” shaman.
This parallelism does not exclude certain differences, which are not surprising if we note the character - psychological in one case and organic in the other - of the ailment to be cured. Actually the shamanic cure seems to be the exact counterpart to the psychoanalytic cure, but with an inversion of all the elements. Both cures aim at inducing an experience, and both succeed by recreating a myth which the patient has to live or relive. But in one case, the patient constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state. To prepare for the abreaction, which then becomes an “adreaction,” the psychoanalyst listens whereas the shaman speaks. (Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, volume 1, basic books, inc., 1963.)
I want to enlarge upon what Levi-Strauss has written here. But it is important to understand that I am not coming from a scientific perspective but from a creative/artistic one. I imagine the beginning, when both cultures - I’ll describe them as the Shamanic and the Analytic - had a common ancestor; this we can understand in both a metaphoric and literal sense, to be a child, for I am going to relate to how a shamanic culture could conceivably grow out of childhood mechanisms for understanding and survival - this it is important to note is not a suggestion that the shamanic culture is more primitive than the analytic but is simply an attempt to verbalise a hypothesis on the mechanisms of shamanism from the point of view of someone raised within an analytic culture - which opens up the debate on the importance of the the individuals isolated experience. The child first begins to understand the world around him by developing a sense of good and bad, in this world monsters are real, which helps the child to define an understanding of bad. The fact that monsters are real tangible beings means that they can be categorized and unltimately defeated, allowing the child to accept and deal with living in a world full of uncertainty. If we accept this as an innate evolutionary device that has remained because it is essential somehow to our survival, then we can assume the two cultures of adulthood are borne out of this, refined and developed in different ways that result in answers that are acceptable to each culture. The development into adulthood involves the continuing categorization of unknowns into compartments that can be neatly titled and shelved away, yet this maturation process necessitates the negation of factors that can’t be neatly shelved under specific compartments, resulting in a limited understanding. From the analytic perspective it has resulted in an understanding of outside factors upon health, such as germs, viruses etc but has somewhat limited the effectiveness of internal mechanisms to dictate health and healing properties. In the shamanic culture, whether consciously or not, there has been a more conserted study into the effects of mind upon health, by rendering the unknown maladies that we would understand as bacterial, or viral infection as real monsters, the shaman categorizes the illness, making it real and thus susceptable to defeat itself. This, performance based realising of the beast coupled with knowledge of local medicinal herbs has resulted in the shamanic tradition surviving for millenia often with a decent success rate of healing. Indeed it raises the issue that, if an individual or culture believes in the reality of something does this not make it a reality by the sheer fact that they believe it, an individual only exists within the confines of he or she has experienced previously.
