Loss and renewal

Shamanism and analysis share an openness to loss and renewal

I bought this deer’s head about ten years ago, around the time that I began to consider training as a psychotherapist. It was made in Scandinavia. The deer carries an acorn in its mouth. The head, the acorn and the mount are carved from wood, and the paint has worn with age. The antlers are real, attached to carved representations of the pedicles - protrusions from the deer’s skull where the antlers emerge.

I was drawn to this object because I was fascinated by the cycle of energetic investment, loss and renewal represented by deer antlers. Male deer grow and shed their antlers every year. In spring, new antlers erupt from the pedicles covered in velvet, before growing to their limit and hardening for the rutting season. As the stag matures, his antlers will become larger and more impressive.

Last year, at a British Museum exhibition about the world of Stonehenge, I saw an artist’s image of the costume worn by a Mesolithic female shaman with animal skins, feathers, teeth, bones, and a pair of young roe deer antlers attached to her headdress. These items were found in the grave of a woman who suffered from anomalies in the formation of her spine and at the base of her skull. Her condition likely induced symptoms - such as muscle spasms, disturbed vision and fainting - that resembled the trance states of a shaman. The woman was buried in what is now central Germany, and the presence of ritual objects in her grave suggests she was respected or revered in her society.

Indeed, the shaman was often someone who had endured the suffering and isolation of physical or mental illness. Romanian historian and scholar of religion Mircea Eliade notes that the shaman is ‘above all, a sick man who has been cured’. In his book, Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy, Eliade writes: ‘All the ecstatic experience that determines the future shaman’s vocation involve the traditional schema of an initiation ceremony: suffering, death, resurrection’. According to Eliade, the shaman’s initiation ordeal equips an individual to enter the sacred realm where ‘direct relations with the gods, spirits and ancestral souls are re-established’.

As a result of their initiation process, the shaman is transformed into a healer who can readily enter trance states to leave the constraints of the material body and travel to other worlds in order to mediate on behalf of an individual or an entire community. Shamans can learn to travel through time, to talk to the gods, to converse with animals, and to visit the underworld and communicate with the dead. Patients and therapists may also travel in time - to the patient’s childhood, to the intergenerational nexus - and journey to obscure realms of the unconscious in order to seek out the patient’s lost soul and retrieve it.

Deborah Bryon is a Jungian analyst living in Colorado who has studied healing practices with Q’ero medicine people in the Andes. In a recent paper for the Journal of Analytical Psychology exploring parallels between her analytic work and Q’ero medicine, Deborah observes: ‘Shamans attend to and nurture their spiritual experience without needing to figure it out, Jungians make meaning from it’. Deborah explains how she creates meaning with her traumatised patients by entering a ‘heart-based state of receptivity’ and tapping into ‘an energy source greater than my own’.

Deborah’s approach is similar to that of Malcolm Rushton, a senior colleague of mine at the Society of Analytical Psychology. Over recent years, I’ve heard Malcolm speak several times about the shamanic dimension to his work - in particular about his collection of ancient shamanic objects, and the way in which they mediate his access to the unconscious. I’ll be chairing his series of four online talks about shamanism, analysis and trauma this autumn. These seminars are open to everyone and if you’d like to know more, you can find the information here.

Both Deborah and Malcolm describe working in fluid states of compassion and loving connection, holding space for their patients in ‘shared pauses with no words’. Deborah speaks of healing ‘as an organic process that takes place at deep layers of soma and psyche’ and Malcolm often talks about the patient’s need to reach the therapist or the analyst at a deep unconscious level, perhaps appearing in the analyst’s dreams or affecting the analyst’s bodily sensations. While working in these deeply connected states with their patients, they both experience changes in the subjective quality of time, with Deborah writing that the sense ‘of being in linear time drops away’.

I recognise these phenomena in my own practice and I feel an affinity with ways of working that Deborah and Malcolm describe. I find shared meaning is the medicine that heals and for many patients, a shared experience of connection can alter the implicit belief they are fundamentally alone in the world. Moments of change in therapy or analysis often come with recognising loss, even though it can be painful, and with this, letting go of long-held beliefs about one’s self and others, no matter how much energy has already been invested in sustaining things as they are.