Possession ─ Jung's Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche

This illuminating study, addressed both to readers new to Jung and to those already familiar with his work, offers fresh insights into a fundamental concept of analytical psychology.
Anatomizing Jung’s concept of possession reinvests Jungian psychotherapy with its positive potential for practice. Analogizing the concept – lining it up comparatively beside the history of religion, anthropology, psychiatry, and even drama and film criticism – offers not a naive syncretism, but enlightening possibilities along the borders of these diverse disciplines.
An original, wide-ranging exploration of phenomena both ancient and modern, this book offers a conceptual bridge between psychology and anthropology, it challenges psychiatry to culturally contextualize its diagnostic manual, and it posits a much more fluid, pluralistic and embodied notion of selfhood.

Craig E. Stephenson is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich, the Institute for Psychodrama, Zumikon, Switzerland and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. He is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Paris, France.

Introduction. The Possessions at Loudun: Tracking the Discourse of Possession. The Anthropology of Possession: Studying the Other. Possession Enters the Discourse of Psychiatry: Recuperation or Epistemological Break? Reading Jung's Equivocal Language. Jung's Concept of Possession and the Practice of Psychotherapy. The Suffering of Myrtle Gordon: Cassavetes's Opening Night and Chaikin’s Open Theatre. Closing.