Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:40:28.844Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Psychosis is episodically required for the enduring integrity of shamanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

Joseph Polimeni
Joseph Polimeni*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada. [email protected]://umanitoba.ca/healthsciences/medicine/units/psychiatry/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The target article advances several original concepts about shamanism, including prospective explanations for how shamanism could express itself in different cultural settings. Although the potential for “innate psychological tendencies” is acknowledged, the target article prematurely dismisses one such hard-wired feature of shamanism: psychosis.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 41 , 2018 , e82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackerknecht, E. (1943) Psychopathology, primitive medicine, and primitive culture. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 14:30–67.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (2001) Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Devereux, G. (1961a) Mohave ethnopsychiatry and suicide: The psychiatric knowledge and the psychic disturbances of an Indian tribe. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Laubscher, B. F. J. (1937) Sex, custom, and psychopathology: A study of South African pagan natives. Routledge.Google Scholar
Polimeni, J. (2012) Shamans among us: Schizophrenia, shamanism, and the evolutionary origins of religion. EvoEbooks.Google Scholar
Polimeni, J. & Reiss, J. P. (2002) How shamanism and group selection may reveal the origins of schizophrenia. Medical Hypotheses 58(3):244–48. doi:10.1054/mehy.2001.1504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rudaleviciene, P., Stompe, T., Narbekovas, A., Raskauskiene, N. & Bunevicius, R. (2008) Are religious delusions related to religiosity in schizophrenia? Medicina (Kaunas) 44(7):529–35.Google Scholar
Stevens, A. & Price, J. (2000) Prophets, cults, and madness. Duckworth.Google Scholar