: Trance and Possession States . Raymond Prince.

Dissociative trance and spirit possession: Challenges for cultures in transition.

The cross-cultural validity of dissociative possession and trance disorders is a matter of some debate, limiting research and meaningful interpretation of prevalence data. Intimate to these concerns is the status of spirit possession categories studied in the social sciences, particularly anthropology. These two categories are phenomenologically related and display similar epidemiological assoc...

Trance Possession Disorder in Judaism: Sixteenth-Century Dybbuks in the Near East

This article describes constructions of dybbuk, the Jewish variant of spirit possession, and its roots in sixteenth-century Kabbalist thought. Based on the analysis of documented early cases, this paper examines the possession idioms from psychological and socio-cultural perspectives by describing two case reports herein conceptualized as trance possession disorders. A comparison with the pheno...

Semi-trance, Mental Illness, and Altered States of Consciousness

The book “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” of Julian Jaynes provides, not only a fascinating scenario about the evolution of modern consciousness from the consciousness of bicameral stone age man, but also a holistic view about schizophrenic consciousness. In fact, Jaynes regards schizophrenic as a bicameral man receiving commands of “God” as auditory and visu...

Raymond Hu

What is Spirit Possession ? Defi ning , Comparing , and Explaining Two Possession Forms

Reviewing anthropological analyses of possession forms cross-culturally and drawing from recent advances in cognitive psychology, this paper attempts to explain recurrent features of spirit possession. Spirit possession concepts fall into broadly two varieties: one that entails the transformation or replacement of identity (executive possession) and one that envisages possessing spirits as (the...