Jinn and mental health : looking at jinn possession in modern psychiatric practice

universal across cultures and is documented in many ethnographic studies. Khalifa &Hardie assert that possession states can be understood only through a combination of biological, anthropological, sociological, psychopathological and experimental perspectives. Psychiatrist and anthropologist Roland Littlewood sees possession as the belief that an individual has been entered by an alien spirit or other parahuman force, which then controls the person or alters that person’s actions and identity. In his classic, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, anthropologist I. M. Lewis speaks of two types of possession: central and peripheral. Central possession, highly valued by some, supports prevailing political, moral and religious beliefs, and views spirits as sympathetic to these. Such states are characteristic of religious ceremonies worldwide and are not considered pathological. Peripheral possession indicates an invasion of evil spirits, undesirable, immoral and dangerous. In the peripheral cults possession is typically open to all participants, whereas in the central religions such possession is reserved for the religious elite. Possession worldwide is found more commonly in women and marginalised groups and may be a vehicle through which they can express their complaints in a context in which they can be heard. Spirit possession generally occurs in cultural contexts in which the self is more likely to be fragmented. Whether or not possession is itself seen as pathological is dependent on the cultural context in which it occurs; by no means are all cases of possession seen as signs of illness. For example, during Zar ceremonies in Egypt and Sudan, women become possessed by Zar spirits who speak through them. Such experiences in the West would likely be deemed pathological. Anthropologist Emma Cohen further notes that 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 cause of illness and misfortune (pathogenic possession). In executive possession the afflicted individual acts as though their identity has been displaced by that of the possessing spirit, whereas in the pathogenic type, possession by a spirit is an explanation for abnormal behaviour while the identity of the supposed afflicted individual remains intact. In the latter type, spirit possession is merely incidental to the psychopathology rather than a cardinal symptom.