schizophrenia or posession ?

Hi ,

I have heard that someone can be posessed by an spirit and therefore hears voices and in that case you wouldn't say that he/she has schizophrenia, you would say that he/she is posessed.

Can this happen ?

It may or may not be correct.

The cultural aspects of this question are interesting when schizophrenia is taken into consideration.

In many developing countries, cultural norms would see possession as a legitimate phenomenon and it would be accepted as real.

Here in the West you'll end up in a psych hospital if you discussed your possession with a psychiatrist.

Either way your chances of recovery would be greatly enhanced if you lived in a developing country.

Anonymous wrote:It may or may not be correct.

The cultural aspects of this question are interesting when schizophrenia is taken into consideration.

In many developing countries, cultural norms would see possession as a legitimate phenomenon and it would be accepted as real.

Here in the West you'll end up in a psych hospital if you discussed your possession with a psychiatrist.

Either way your chances of recovery would be greatly enhanced if you lived in a developing country.

What does the Catholic Church think about this phenomenon ? Could the posessed one be healed by doing an exorcism ?

actually it's interesting that you mention that... my moms boyfriend is a tibetian buddhist preist... i was never really religious about buddhism but ever since an early age I've been surrounded by it... anyway it was until last year when I turned 20 that i got into it... i choose zen buddhism... i stayed at the prests place while he was away on vaction.. he lives deep in the forest... i was mediatating tons and reading zen buddihist scripts... i did this religiously for 2 months... then i finally went to the city and meditated at some zen centers... anyway i had this amazing/ unbelieveable and crazy experience... i wasn't imagining anything, i was just looking at the wall with no thoughts or ideas (thats zen buddihism) but then a real samuri approached me from the right... he stood in front of for a minute .. he had this really big and powerful preseence. then he continued to take out his sword and chopped my body into 2... as i was being split i suddenly turned into a third person spirt that started floating up to the sky... i was looking down and i saw what remained of my body being eatin by snakes and mice... really ######6 real and super super powerful... I still don't know what the ###$ it meant but i felt sorta enlightened... i felt like i knew what was going to happen after death and I felt super light like $#%^ didn't matter as much as it seems to... and then when i was taking the bus home.. my mala (buddhist beads) shattered on the bus ride home all over the bus... i wasn't even using them( in buddihism this is supposed to be a good omen) so anyway the psychaitrists think i'm crazy cause I here voices now...

i've quite buddhism now and i'm coming bac k to the regular world... but it was a ######6 trip... some serious practiioners have told me that this is a demon attack that i had... the "Buddha" before becoming enlightened had a huge demon attack that almost killed him... so I don't really know... it was just to realistic and powerful to make any sense of.. and ever since I've been schizophrenic so maybe it is a demon... and in that case exorcism might help... does anyone have any info on exorcism?

peter wrote:Hi ,

I have heard that someone can be posessed by an spirit and therefore hears voices and in that case you wouldn't say that he/she has schizophrenia, you would say that he/she is posessed.

Can this happen ?

The belief of spirits and demons and being possessed can't really be proven. They are just religious aspects. So there is no way to know for sure if someone is 'possessed' or not.

I certianly feel and believe i am possessed (though, not by demons or anything like that, because i'm not religious) I hear voices, and also have strange feelings in my body. I will feel someone/something taking over me, trying to control my arms and legs and such. It feels like i am sharing my body with someone else. Sometimes, i feel something trying to pull me into another demension.
I've heard voices talking in other languages which i have never even heard. Supposedly, this is a sign of being possessed by the "devil" but i don't understand why people always assume it's the devil . it could be anything. There are millions of possibilities.

-becka

shadowsinme wrote:

peter wrote:Hi ,

I have heard that someone can be posessed by an spirit and therefore hears voices and in that case you wouldn't say that he/she has schizophrenia, you would say that he/she is posessed.

Can this happen ?

The belief of spirits and demons and being possessed can't really be proven. They are just religious aspects. So there is no way to know for sure if someone is 'possessed' or not.

I certianly feel and believe i am possessed (though, not by demons or anything like that, because i'm not religious) I hear voices, and also have strange feelings in my body. I will feel someone/something taking over me, trying to control my arms and legs and such. It feels like i am sharing my body with someone else. Sometimes, i feel something trying to pull me into another demension.
I've heard voices talking in other languages which i have never even heard. Supposedly, this is a sign of being possessed by the "devil" but i don't understand why people always assume it's the devil . it could be anything. There are millions of possibilities.

-becka

My personal experience is that I started reading about the occult and parapsychology and all of a sudden I was posessed by some kind of good / bad spirit for a year that wanted to drive me crazy. I started to hear voices that were saying what i was thinking, it was ######6 unbelievable, it happened at home, in the bar, in the cinema, everywhere. Yesteday the threw me the tarot cards and they said that the spirit is a woman that loves me and at the same time hates me and she was jeaolus of my parter during this year of hallucinations.

One thing is clear, something I did that triggered the hallucinations, I don't know what, but it could perfectly be a matter of parapsychology. Anyway the power of Zyprexa could beat up the hallucinations, so it's stronger that the spirit that was driving me mad. Therefore i think that psychiatrist have ways to beat up daemons and spirits with antipsychotics.

Do you believe in the tarot ? It's unbelievable what you can discover with it, but the person that throws the card must be good at it.

Luis

Tarot, Freud, and
The Wise Doctor from Zurich

© by Arthur E. Rosengarten, Ph.D

The “Right View”

It is estimated that over 400 systems of psychotherapy now occupy the bustling stalls of the robust psychotherapy marketplace. To date, however, no single system has been proven significantly more effective than any other.1 While this fact will likely be challenged by individual careerists invested heavily in their own hard-fought access to “the right view”, the simple truth of therapeutic heterogeneity suggests that when properly adhered to, therapeutic value is probably lodged in most if not all psychological points of view. Whereas the integrationist or eclectic therapist finds this fact confirming and freeing, many professionals greet such news as might a narcissistic child being told by his father that he loves all his children the same. “But aren’t I more special, Papa?”

Contemporary psychology, for all its impressive advances enhanced by empirical research and the technologies of science, has never been a more internally fractious lot of pretenders. Arrogantly, therapy experts seek to persuade us of the intellectual or practical superiority of their particular ideas and methods. The intent of their rhetoric is nearly identical to the politician’s--they must persuade by exposing the flaws of their competitors. But in the realm of human suffering and happiness is this self-serving stance itself in the “best interest of the patient?”

The question is asked because it remains the prime directive of the Helping Professions. In today’s “healing industry” as it were such aggression and self-righteousness seems tremendously suspect--wise and powerful professional egos competing for ever larger blocks of “healing turf” by singing out the praises of their own unique healing methods and equally, the pitfalls of their adversaries. But who really is served in such displays?

To my mind, the task of integration and bridge-making between multiple approaches would seem the more worthy and respectful endeavor. This is why I’ve been taken by the Tarot. Its symbolism is inherently universal and its application uniquely versatile, that in principle, all approaches may utilize it creatively in the service of their own philosophies. An early champion of this ancient tool, the famed 19th century French metaphysician and scholar Eliphas Levi described the Tarot as “a book which is the sum of all the sciences and whose infinite permutations are capable of solving all problems, a book which informs by making one think.”

My own more recent study and practice has found that as a psychological instrument introduced into psychotherapy, Tarot has an uncanny ability to reflect and predict subjective experience. Though beyond the scope of this paper, I have detailed Tarot’s therapeutic assets in the following ways: (1) its essential visuality and nonverbality in the service of envisioning; (2) its economy, complexity, and condensation in the service of brevity; (3) its multidimensionality and relative simplicity in the service of “depth perception”; (4) its inherent numinosity and evocative powers that stimulate emotional arousal, and (5) its intentionality and extraordinary versatility in the service of therapeutic utility and efficacy.2

As a psychologist and Tarot scholar I’ve long been saddled with the intriguing possibility of blending these strange bedfellows, Psychology and Tarot, despite (or perhaps, sheepishly, because of) those incredulous brows of mystification evidenced in many of my esteemed colleagues. The Freudians and Post Freudians, for instance, naturally find this mission dynamically odd and tainted much as the Behaviorists and Cognitive Behaviorists see the prospect as farcical and ill-conceived. Not surprisingly, however, the Jungians and Post-Jungians, as others of a humanistic/transpersonal bent, seem generally at home with the idea. Psychology and Tarot, why not?

There is a certain historical irony along such party lines, one which I believe has very little to do with Tarot cards per se, but much to do with the postmodernist dismissal of anything thought to be ‘occult.’ But why should this be? It is known, for instance, that of the two psychological giants of the 20th century, it was Sigmund Freud who had firsthand experience with Tarot, not Carl Jung. As a dabbler in Kabballa, the occult dimension of Jewish mysticism believed by many to form the philosophical basis of Tarot, Freud apparently regularly experimented with Tarot cards early in his career. Bakan (1958) suggests The Tarot contributed significantly to Freud’s early formulation of the unconscious:

Participation in the B’nai B’rith in Vienna was one of the very few recreations that Freud permitted himself--among his recreations was his weekly game of taroc [sic], a popular card game based on Kaballa. It was there that he first presented his ideas on dream interpretation.3

This information however was suppressed, the author conjectures, due to the fierce anti-semitism pervading Viennese (and all of European) society at the time. Sigmund Freud and Tarot cards, who would think? Jung, on the other hand, the accomplished scholar and enthusiast of a great range of esoteric topics, by all indications was never adequately schooled in Tarot. In fact, throughout Jung’s voluminous writings addressing so many related systems, only one mention of Tarot is ever made, to wit in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, [paragraph 81] Jung remarks:

It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli. 4

Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic roots and early association with Sigmund Freud are of course well documented. Their saga includes an early exchange of groundbreaking ideas between 1903 and 1906 regarding controversial theories of the unconscious, their energetic correspondences during that period, their shared invitation to lecture in America in 1909 that culminated in Jung’s appointment as President of the First Psychoanalytic Congress. At this early stage in their unrivaled friendship, the Swiss psychiatrist was so esteemed by the Father of Psychoanalysis as to be regarded his eldest son and future “Crown Prince to the Psychoanalytic throne.”

Curiously though perhaps inevitably, it is the subject matter over which their eventual breakup occurred, officially in 1913, that is directly relevant to our discussion. Years later Jung was to recount this famous parting of the ways (as told by Joseph Campbell in The Portable Jung) :

`My dear Jung,’ [Freud] urged on this occasion, `promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark. . . .' In some astonishment Jung asked him, `A bulwark-- against what?' To which [Freud] replied, `Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.'

Taken aback, Jung countered that it was “the occult”, in fact, that was the very thing that struck him most profoundly:

I knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude. What Freud seemed to mean by `occultism' was virtually everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche. To me the sexual theory was just as occult, that is to say, just as unproven a hypothesis, as many other speculative views. As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis that might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time. 5
Psychoanalysis and Tarot

One may speculate as to why Freud reversed his outward position towards the occult, but it is quite obvious that his high regard for the ‘hidden’ dimension of symbols continued throughout his powerful career. But suppose, if you will, that Professor Freud had been brave (or daft) enough to incorporate his earlier esoteric fascinations into his psychoanalytic method--how might Tarot operate in classical analysis?

Imagine for the moment, absurd as it may sound, that Dr. Freud was an adept Tarotist and wished to incorporate this tool into “the talking cure.” In place of free association and dream analysis, fantasy content would now be stimulated and analyzed through the projective properties of the evocative and mysterious Tarot cards. Picture, if you will, the analyst perhaps taking copious notes from behind the ‘card table’ next to the couch. Of course, Tarot’s manifest content would not seem unduly disguised to the father of psychoanalysis; the Tarot ‘suits’ of Swords and Wands would be easy marks for phallic symbols, while Cups and Discs depicted resplendid images of vaginal openings. The Lovers card, for example, obviously illustrating thinly disguised ‘oedipal wishes,’ while The Devil no doubt carried a classic portrayal of ‘oedipal guilt.’ On and off the psychoanalytic dream-maker. Tarot’s Hanged Man signaling ‘oedipal failure,’ and that voracious Queen of Swords… ‘castration anxiety’ not to be outdone by the suggestive Queen of Wands-- ‘penis envy’ if there ever was such a thing.

Notice in this mock revery that ‘classical theory’ remains about the same; Tarot serves more as a method to elucidate than formulate. Unfortunately, classical Freudian interpretation has tended to degrade symbols by confusing them with signs, oversimplifying their mystery into “latency”, and then reducing to presupposed basic drives in keeping with theoretical doctrine. In the unlikely scenario above, the “here/now” transference reactions are directed away from the analyst, at least for the moment, and displaced onto the cards themselves, which serve as solicitous receptacles of projection. Interpretation, in this context, relates Tarot associations and reactions to longstanding ego/id conflicts within the individual, or so it might unfold in the waning days of classical analysis. The absurdity of this vision, however technically feasible, reflects the anachronistic decline of classical Freudian analysis today, though even current psychoanalytic trends today (Object Relations/Ego Psychology/Self Psychology etc.) continue to uphold Freud’s tendencies towards pathological reductionism, symbol degradation, and emphasis on the primacy of the past. To arrive psychologically to the wider and perhaps deeper dimensions of Tarot we must turn to the other major school of 20th century depth psychology, Jungian analytical psychology.
Jung’s Analytical Psychology

It is said that Jung, among his extraordinary contributions throughout a long and productive career, was to provide a strong foundation for the serious study of occult traditions by establishing a rational position from which to take the irrational seriously. This remains a controversial subject to this day, however, and provides an opening in this article for us to set the record straight regarding that unvanishing and most troublesome of terms to the modern sensibility, “occultism.” Let it be known for our purposes here, that Jung’s description (even as he impugned it to Freud) remains a most apt working definition of ‘occultism,’ that being “virtually everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science of parapsychology [has] learned about the psyche.” Of course, the adjective ‘occult’ as in ‘the occult sciences” means nothing more or less than “beyond the range of ordinary knowledge; mysterious; secret; or hidden” (Random House College Dictionary).

Why C.G. Jung was unlearned in the Tarot method is unclear, but easily pardonable given the great breadth of his researches. But it seems quite conceivable, at least to this author, that had he chosen to explore deeper Jung would have quickly found in Tarot a natural ally of analytical psychology, as it so naturally fits within his own theoretical framework. A number of key parallels between Tarot and analytical psychology can be cited. First, Post-Jungians today find obvious parallels between the Tarot’s Major Arcana and the archetypal images of Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’. Such obvious correspondences as those between The Empress and the archetype of The Great Mother, The Lovers and the anima/animus, The Hermit and The Wise Old Man can be followed throughout the 22 Major Arcanum of Tarot, which as Jung himself suggests, may comprise a full compendium of the ‘archetypes of transformation’. Still, other significant parallels are found as well.

Tarot’s Minor Arcana divisions into four suits naturally correspond with the four personality functions of Jungian typology: thinking (Swords), feeling (Cups), sensation (Pentacles) and intuition (Wands). Several Tarot researchers have begun to explore striking parallels between the 16 court cards and the 16 personality types described in the Jungian-based Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Also, the laws of opposition and polarity (enantiodromia), what Jung was to call “the most marvellous of all psychological laws,” can be seen to operate clearly throughout the structure and application of the Tarot pack. Another area shared between Jungian psychology and The Tarot is mandala symbolism, that is, circular religious imagery suggesting psychic wholeness, a key theme in archetypal psychology. Mandalas appear widely in Tarot, notably in such trumps as The Chariot, The Wheel of Fortune, The Moon, The Sun, and The World, corresponding with Jung’s theory of ‘the archetypal self.’ Tarot, in fact, can easily be conceptualized as a psychological wheel; some in fact have speculated that the mysterious word ‘Tarot’ itself is derivative of the Latin ‘rota’ or wheel.

The history and symbolism of Tarot forms a syncretic blend of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance esoteric traditions, with certain philosophical borrowings from the East as well, including the great traditions of India and China, unquestionably subjects close to Jung’s heart and theory. Of course, the relationship between Jung and Tarot has grown quite reciprocally over recent decades as well; modern tarotists today have in turn relied heavily on certain analytical ideas such as compensation and opposition, shadow projection, the collective unconscious, introversion/extroversion, number and dream symbolism etc, all themes which have taken a central place in a wide array of intuitive arts in general, sometimes unknowingly. Yet it is ultimately Tarot’s methodology itself that most interlinks it with Jungian theory. Tarot divination, based as it is on “empowered” random selection, brings to the clinical format an efficient, direct, versatile, and essentially Western application of one of Jung’s least understood, but nevertheless, most compelling psychological theories, namely, the theory of ‘synchronicity.’ For those interested in this controversial but fascinating theory, what I believe best explains the mechanism behind Tarot divination, please see my article ‘Divination And Synchronicity’ (also posted on this website).

So, Freud was reading the Tarot cards, very interesting ...

That's the reason why he was so good as psychoanalyst

I keep a tribal mask on my wall above my bed. Its supposed to keep away bad spirits.....I paid a hundren and fifty bucks for the damn thing. I had it there for like a year before I started thinking hummm...I wonder if this thing has been working? So I removed it from the wall and put it in a draw. two days later things start happening.....So I put it back up and thats where its gonna stay...Not IN THE DRAW

dmk81m wrote:I keep a tribal mask on my wall above my bed. Its supposed to keep away bad spirits.....I paid a hundren and fifty bucks for the damn thing. I had it there for like a year before I started thinking hummm...I wonder if this thing has been working? So I removed it from the wall and put it in a draw. two days later things start happening.....So I put it back up and thats where its gonna stay...Not IN THE DRAW

I always carry on a gold necklace with a wholy cross which I blessed several times with wholy water. It makes God and the good spirits and angels protect me against the evil and bad spirits. It seems to work out partially because i still hear voices sometimes.