Psychoanalysts vs. Shamans
05/29/02 3pm

	As a psychology major, I have touched upon the psychoanalysis topic before. Levi-Strauss did a fine job in trying to show the similarities between psychoanalysts and shamans, but he did not go into much detail about their differences. I believe we can deepen our investigations on the many parallels and differences between psychoanalysts and shamans. (Just like one of the students in the class who relates jazz musicians to shamans.) They can even be seen from the perspective that psychoanalysts are the “shamans of the western world” and shamans are the “psychoanalysts of the eastern world”.
	First of all, the fundamental concept or purpose of both psychoanalysis and shamanism is “healing”. While psychoanalysis emphasizes more on the “psychological” aspects of healing, shamanism emphasizes more on the “spiritual and physical” aspects of healing. In other words, psychoanalysis heals the “psychological problem” of a patient while the shamans claim that they can heal the “physical problem” of a patient through the spiritual context. In fact, Levi-Strauss argues that shamans themselves overlook the fact that they are also healing the “psychological problem” of a patient through similar healing mechanisms as psychoanalysis.
	The treatment process of both psychoanalysis and shamanism involves a sense of commitment from both the patients and the “healers”. From the patient’s perspective, psychoanalysis requires a large number of sessions spread out in a long period of time. For example, a psychoanalyst may require his patient to come to his office four times per week for two years. This long period of time (with a large sum of money) spent by the patient really needs the patient’s “belief” in the system of psychoanalysis. In shamanism, the patient’s commitment is also based on the fact that they must “believe in” the shamans. When a patient is in “incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system … the shaman, calling upon the myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful” (P. 108 in Shamans Through Time) to the patient. By Levi-Strauss’s comparisons, it is evident that the patients participating in either psychoanalysis or shamanic healing have to be essentially committed to the therapeutic practices.
	Besides the commitments from the patients, the “healers”, psychoanalysts and shamans, are also committed to their school of tradition. Both the psychoanalysts and the shamans are taught in a “tradition” or a specific “school of thoughts”. Psychoanalysis is a branch of psychotherapy. Psychoanalysts are people who have been through many years of training under Freud’s fundamental concepts and ideas (e.g. “sublimation”, “repression”, “transference”, “unconsciousness”, Freud’s defense mechanisms: “reaction formation”, “projection”…etc.) to achieve a common goal: treat mental disorders (or abnormal behavior) by bringing repressed fears etc. into conscious mind. For a psychoanalyst to succeed, he must be committed to Freud’s school of thoughts and psychoanalysis tradition heavily. For a shaman, as we have seen in Eliade’s Shamanism, he must be committed to his “job” faithfully and be respected by the others in the community. In both psychoanalysis and shamanism, we see a tradition that has been passed on through generations that requires commitments from the participants.
	One interesting thing regarding both psychoanalysis and shamanic healing is that both therapeutic techniques are somewhat outside of medical context. Freud’s theories for psychoanalysis is mostly constructed and derived from his philosophical background rather than his medical background. After all, the goal of psychoanalysis is not to cure mental illness through drugs but through a series of methods and techniques (such as “dream analysis”, “free association”, and “transference”). These therapeutic techniques of psychoanalysis often result in “interpretations” from the psychoanalyst. Often these conclusions and interpretations drawn by the psychoanalyst are too “theoretical” to be scientific or replicable. In other words, interpretations may vary widely from a psychoanalyst to another. Similar to the shamanic tradition, the idea that the shamans cure people through spiritual context is too weak, from a scientific perspective, to be recognized as a “good/replicable way of healing”. Both psychoanalysis and shamanic healing lack strong biomedical background.
	Levi-Strauss has already trying to compare the effects and procedures of psychoanalysis and shamanic healing. He points out that “in both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which ahe remained unconscious, owing either to their repression by other psychological forces…” (P. 109 in Shamans Through Time). He further points out the similarity that both psychoanalytic cure and shamanic cure provoke an experience. Then, he also indicates the differences: in psychoanalysis, the patient constructs an individual myth and the psychoanalyst listens in “abreaction”; whereas in shamanic cure, the patient receives a social myth and the shaman speaks in “adreaction”.
	Levi-Strauss’s indications of the difference between psychoanalysis and shamanic healing, however, can be elaborated more. The main difference between the two curing techniques is that the Shamanic curing emphasizes greatly on the spiritual world. They claim that illnesses usually are directly related to the world of spirits and they cure these illnesses through “trance” (according to Eliade) by traveling to the world of beyond. Furthermore, the shamans are seen by the modern anthropologists that they practice as a religion or along with a religion. Psychoanalysts do not mention anything about a patient’s spirits in their fundamental theories and concepts. In this sense, psychoanalysts are more “modernized”, and thus can survive in modern society without requiring their patients to believe them “as a religion” or “along with a religion”. When Levi-Strauss compares psychoanalysts and shamans, he fails to distinguish this important difference between them.
	The religious aspect of shamanic practices directs us to the idea of documentation. According to Eliade, shamans are “initiated” and taught by sprits, celestial beings, and old shamans. Some shamans are even “initiated” hereditary. The tradition is passed down without any means of writing or detailed documents. However, lacking well documented writings is not the case for psychoanalysis. Thousands of pages have been written about the history, techniques, and theories of psychoanalysis. The most influential writer, as everyone knows, is Sigmund Freud who brings up the concept of unconsciousness to the world of psychology and philosophy. In conclusion, psychoanalysis has a record of good documentation history as oppose to the shamanic practices, which lack of written documents to pass on their traditions. In this respect, this is another reason why psychoanalysis is being more widely accepted by the general population comparing to shamanic practices in the western culture.
	The idea of documentation finally brings us to the comparison between the length, in time, of shamanic history and that of psychoanalytic history. Psychoanalysis has a very short history comparing to shamanic healing. Psychoanalysis originates from theories of Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and is officially introduced to the modern society by a group of six Freudian loyalties during the early 20th century. According to the shamans, they have much longer period of history. Furthermore, by the virtue of its tradition (verbal, non-documental), shamans are also able to speak of “mythical times”.
	Psychoanalysts can be seen as the “shamans of the western world” and shamans can be seen as the “the psychoanalysts of the eastern world” in the sense that they share the same fundamental purpose (healing), sense of commitment, sense of tradition. Furthermore, they both lack the strong biomedical background that modern medical doctors have. However, they are different in the aspects of spiritual world, documentation, and history.