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Table of Contents

THE ETHNOGRAPHY 2

1. Introduction 2

2. Claire‘s Life History 4

3. Chronology of the Illness 14

4. Medical Pluralism 17

5. Life Politics 20

6. The Child and the Adult 23

7. The Victim 24

8. The Shaman 26

9. Living the Dreaming Body 27

10. Moving On 30

11. Discussion 30

THEORETICAL ORIENTATION 34

12. Theoretical Introduction 34

13. The Ontological Hierarchies of Illness 36

14. Anthropological Representations of Illness 39

15. The Soteriological (salvation) Function of Medicines 43

16. Lifeworlds as Worlds of Experience 43

17. Symbolization; the Struggle for a Name 46

18. The Making and Unmaking of Worlds 48

19. Aesthetics, Rationality, and Medical Anthropology 51

20. Soul Loss 54

21. Illness conceived as the wild body 61

22. Introduction to Burkitt‘s (1999) Relational Theory of Embodiment 64

23. Cartesianism as a 'Lifeworld.' 65

24. Emergence of the Cartesian Self 70

25. Modernity 89

26. Neo-Shamanism 92

REFERENCES: 94

APPENDICES: 95

Appendix 1: An extract from Claire‘s personal diary in 2003 95

Appendix 2: An extract from Claire‘s personal diary 2004 105

Appendix 3: An extract from Claire‘s personal diary 2005 109

Appendix 5: Interview July 2005 - Honours Year 115

Appendix 6: Interview July 2005 - Parents 117

Appendix 7: Interview September 2005 - Claire‘s Literature Review 124

Appendix 8: Interview July 2005 - Food and Categories 128

Appendix 9: Interview July 2005 - Visualising the Body 129

Appendix 10: Interview July 2005 - The Victim 133

Appendix 11: Interview July 2005 - The Shaman 142

Appendix 12: Interview July 2005 - Sociability 151

Appendix 13: Interview July 2005 - The Sacred and the Profane 153

2

The Ethnography

1. Introduction

The subject of this ethnography is 'Claire', a 26 year graduate who has for the last two and

half years pitted her being (self and body) against the autoimmune disease referred to most

widely today as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). During the

course of Claire's illness she has dwelt in the ‗wild horizons of the body‘ (Connolly and Craig

2002: 451), in which her lived experience has manifested as a desperate struggle for control

over her 'wild body' and the resultant threat of the dissolution of self it has brought with it.

The so-called 'wild body', at this stage, can be glossed the uncontrollable body, which,

because it is uncontrollable, is therefore part of 'nature' in so far as it is uncontrollable. This

'nature' is juxtaposed, in modern society, to the productive body or 'social' body, which is

characterized primarily as a stable, healthy, productive entity in the world. I have therefore

set out in the ethnography to uncover the emic perspective (i.e. the insider‘s view) of the

lived experience of ―dys-integrated sensory perception, where waking up every day might

present a different array of bodily variables, decisions, and survival choices which play

themselves out in paradoxical complexities in the politics of lived body, space, time, and

relation‖ (Ibid [emphasis added]).

Being ill means not being able to conform to what society expects, in the sense of being a

productive body. Emic studies (i.e. the insider‘s view) of illness expose the common sense

lifeworlds which belong to so called productive bodies as sufferers struggle to conform to

these normative standards. Hence when we juxtapose the 'wild body' with the 'productive

body', we expose how these 'bodies' are connected normatively (i.e. by prescribed standards),

in the context that there are social norms for being in the world that are taken for granted.

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My literature review will bring to bear an etic (i.e. outside viewpoint) vantage where I will

address some of these so-called norms to uncover how they articulate with the emic (i.e. the

insider‘s view) view presented in the ethnography.

As a guide to the reader I would like to at this point say what I am aiming as an overarching

theme in the theoretical side of this ethnography. Claire's illness, from an emic or insider‘s

perspective, cannot be separated from her lifeworld and I will use Gidden's (1991) notion of

'life politics,' as discussed in Burkitt (1999), to argue therefore, that Claire's journey and

search for meaning has culminated in an ethical quest for the so called 'maturity' of the (post)

modern subject.

This 'life politics,' is ―a form of politics which is common only in late modernity‖ and is

focused on the ―body, self-identity and the environment, and involves the collective re-

appropriation of institutionally repressed areas of life – such as birth, sex and death – which

became moral-existential questions to be addressed politically‖ (Ibid).

In this particular case, I suggest that 'maturity' be interpreted as the subject as leaving behind

'childhood' and the notions of being a 'victim' where the self is overly regulated by the

normative standards of hegemonic powers, and through a process involving Neo-Shamanic

practices an embracing of an 'adult ethical' persona which is responsive and connected to the

social and natural environment helps Claire overcome many of the experiential aspects of her

illness.

Therefore in this study I have that the current relations between people, in modernity, tend to

be based more on normative forms of control rather than ethical considerations – although I

do not pursue the reasons why this is so - such as the advancement of technology, capitalism,

globalization and utilitarian relations, to name a few.

That is, through the application of norms to the behaviour of others and to ourselves, we seek

to control and police activity rather than to realize it in an ethical form – for this to happen we

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need to feel free to act freely. In this sense ―the modern subject is still in a sense of

immaturity, tending to look to external authorities for the validation of behaviour and

applying norms created by hegemonic powers‖ (Ibid:150- 1). To this end Burkitt (1999)

suggests that

―in the West, our moral codes have become focused more on a

concern for control than for care, for regulating one another rather

than for caring for each other...the effects of normative control on the

body are ones of armouring, where vulnerability and openness become

dangers that need to be closed off behind layers of defensiveness‖

(Ibid).

The theoretical discussion traces the origins of these overly normative relations to modernity.

The quest for healing, as described in the ethnography, is integrally linked to this so called

'life' politics and the Neo-Shamanic quest is part of a journey towards connecting with the

body, self, community and the environment.

2. Claire’s Life History

Claire has had a history of illness starting in her childhood where she would often miss

school because she was ill. In March 2003, during the first term of her Honours year in

English she contracted glandular fever (a form of M.E.), as diagnosed a medical doctor.

From that time till now (a period of about two and a half years) she has suffered from chronic

fatigue and many other debilitating symptoms which have constrained her to a quite life

where loneliness has become another symptom of this chronic condition.

In this ethnography I have included accounts from Claire's personal diary (in Appendix 1, 2,

and 3) which vividly show how the intrusion of the 'wildness' (so-called nature), in the form

of the ill body, into the social sphere. This vividly shows the desperate struggle for healing

and meaning that can literally take over one's lifeworld.

Claire's parents moved to the coast in the early 1980s. They were young, poor and liberal in a

country gripped in the throes of an oppressive regime. Claire stayed with her grandmother

when she was about two for an extended period while her mother worked in the city. This

was before Claire's mother unlocked memories of being abused by her father, Claire's

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grandfather. Claire's parents were soon divorced and have since split up and made up on

countless occasions. Claire's father did his military service, a degree at University and moved

into broadcasting. Within the family he is sometimes described as a malingerer because

although he is not ill he has not been gainfully employed for over ten years. He is of an

intellectual orientation and tends to be dominated by his wife. He often seems stressed and

on occasion suffers road rage from time to time, which could indicate pent up emotions.

Claire's mother took control of the family finances and fought her way up from a secretary,

to estate agent and finally into the movie industry as a line producer, but this is not a secure

work environment so Claire has always been plagued by her parent‘s lack of financial

stability.

Claire has moved between five schools. She chose to leave each time because she was having

'issues' at the school. These issues where mostly with her peers, because she tended to do

well scholastically and her teachers tended to appreciated her.

She describes her parents as ―completely rebelling against anything conservative, no matter

how good or bad it was... they threw out the baby with the bath water...completely‖ and

carries on to assert that she grew up with ―very little structure and stability‖.

It was during her many moves between schools that she said she learned her

particular interaction skills, which she identifies as dysfunctional. This is particularly

pertinent to when she moved from a ―working class‖ school to a ―wealthy middle

class‖ school in an up market suburb. Of that time she said that she learnt the 'rules' of how

to relate to groups:

―You fuck'n check [Please note that I have included expletive here

because Claire is normally very ‘proper‘ but these interviews were

conducted after a Tantric course. She tended to swear a lot more than

normal after these courses. I will address this issue later] out who is

the power player in the group. You make sure you keep them in your

eye at all times and check how the people rank. Where do you rank,

what are the energy exchanges. When I am sitting with a group of

people I want to know exactly what's what at the table and it's only

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when I know where I stand with every single person that I can relax

and come out of myself‖ (interview).

Over and above this reaction to exclusion and symbolic violence at the hands of other school

children, Claire also had to watch her social relations in the home extremely carefully and

had to constantly check the 'emotional temperature' of the home. She said that she was

always ‗the sick one‘ in the home and related this to:

―a need to opt out of being so stressed most of the time. The incredible

tension of having to be so alert and so tuned into what is going on

around me. Being sick is an incredible relief. It‘s like I can just ... [or

rather] people can just leave me alone. I won't get a lot of flack when I

am sick, I'll just be able to turn inward and shut the world out for a

while. That was mostly the feeling then‖ (interview).

Claire describes her mother, who was entering the process of coming to terms with and

remembering her own shocking childhood abuse, as a person who at times broke the so-

called 'sacred rules of motherhood' by making terrible threats to Claire when she was young

and vulnerable.

There seemed to be a very close link between Claire's desperate need for love and protection

from her mother and the sicknesses at that time. Claire said of illness, that

―getting sick [then and now] is the same as shutting down – that

might happen during sex or when I get into a rage. It‘s like, nuh; it‘s a

power thing [saying] ' you can't budge me‘. Kind of like a catatonic

person...It‘s like 'I'm taking my power here...the only thing you

cannot do is actually make me better'‖ (Interview).

She went on to say that maybe it was a way of making her mother feel weak, a kind of

punishment. Of this she said

―my mother keeps telling me that as a child ―Oh I'm [i.e. Claire] so

much stronger‖ and that ―I am actually fucking with her.‖ Ya ... So,

there is this total disbelief about myself. I can't....All the power that I

might have in my own life gets used against me. So in a sense I need

to be in a space where I no longer have power, and that‘s being sick.

[Its] like my body takes over my choices for me. Because when I

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make the choices my mother uses them against me. [Being sick] is a

choice she can't use against me. But then obviously the sickness is

against me. Sorry this is new, now is the first time I've thought about

it. This is interesting...‖ (Interview).

When I asked her to comment if being sick was a way of communicating she continued...

―Ya, a way of communicating that I was being hurt. Ya, I mean that‘s

really where I started from. In terms of ―Oh, I‘m being hurt.‖ And so

I get sick to express it because I can‘t express it in another way. But I

think ya, this aspect of control… - because I have been trying to work

out what I understand about being sick, being a victim of being in

control. I haven‘t been able to work it back to my childhood – but

now I think I see it‖ (Interview).

And she continues...

―I was just recognizing if I had to get sick just to stop the process that

was going on with my mother, it just brings back the incredible

frustration and tension that I must have been living with…That was

the only way I could say stop…or gain some sort of foothold. Jees, it

must have been hectic mmm …huh‖ (Interview)

Claire played no sport at school and said that she only expanded her network of friends at

school when she started drama. She loved her drama and said:

―Ya...It was a lot of fun – it allowed me to experience dialogue, the

dialogue I would create on my own would not have been so fluid.

Whereas on stage its set up, you experience, by acting, by staging

what I should be experiencing in life anyway. Now that I think about

that, it might also be the case. I can play with you, you can pretend

to love me, and see how it would be like to be in a real exchange

which on my own I still [even now] struggle to do‖ (interview).‖

Claire became a vegetarian at about thirteen and says now that it was partly an act of

rejecting her family. She left her school and finished her High School in a college. She took

a year off after school during which time she entertained herself at home.

She did her undergraduate degree at University in English and Psychology, taking another

year off just after her second year during which she worked at a local video shop - a job she

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hated. The following year she struggled to choose between Psychology and English as an

honours course. She chose English and became ill during the first term of 2003.

During this time Claire had a desperate need for community but she thought of herself as

somehow wounded and not the same as everyone else. Claire is fairly serious about life

politics issues and by looking at the personal journal for 2003, an excerpt of which is in

Appendix 1, an in-depth look at her private life is available. Appendixes 2 and 3 are glimpses

spaced out in yearly intervals which for the diligent reader will bring home the meanings

attributed to the disease in Claire's lived experience.

Aside from the physical manifestations which all seem to point towards a disconnection with

the body, there is also a dream about living outside of her house (I always interpret houses in

dreams as representing the self) which also is a representation of this condition too (i.e.

living outside of her ‗body‘).

As a preface to reading this extract I would like to offer some introductory remarks. Claire

and her brother inherited money from their maternal grandfather, the same person who had

abused Claire's mother, and Claire was standing up to her mother who was the trustee of the

money. The money had been invested in a loft and so selling the loft was the only way for

her to inherit her trust fund and gain some freedom, in financial terms at least, from her

mother.

Claire's Personal Diary 20th

April 2004

―Dizzy, weak, numb hands. Managed to [just] avoid getting a

migraine this morning.

Promised myself I would work on connecting with my emotions

today. They are so far back and locked up.

Thursday night's [therapy] session with [my therapist (i.e.

psychologist)] was hectic. I fell right through the block[age]. [I] had

this picture of myself having a beautiful little house full of mud and I

am living on the roof. I need to excavate, wash clean all the rooms,

open doors and live down there in my house.

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I'm very far from that right now.

I'm hurting I think. [Its] because of my mother...because she

understood me on Saturday night, because she cared. Because I

opened up to her. Because I realized I don't want to let her go. I don't

want to make this change, and then I saw I had to. That I have to cut

loose. And then [I] saw that she'd withdrawn her love of Saturday

night.

And now I'm ashamed of how I was with her. I'm running from my

vulnerabilities. I can't allow myself to feel like I did when I spoke to

her ... and she was kind. It hurts so much. It feels like [I'm] breaking. I

could go crazy over this. [My therapist] was right. I can only handle

so much at a time. No wonder the numbness has set in.

I feel endangered. I feel as if I have to disappear for a while. But my

body isn't allowing it' I can't zone out because I start feeling

'migrainy'.

So I promised to make contact [with my body/emotions]. It‘s already

helping a bit to write. I feel emotion for seconds at a stretch. If I try to

push – to feel more – it is as if something catches in my throat and

chest – like dry retching. I've actually just got to let go of the feelings

when they go.

It‘s terrible that I have been going around for so long with this ability

to disconnect. To be smooth and calm. To 'live on top of my house

and forget that it exists'.

Poor me. Poor me, poor me. I really deserve a lot of sympathy.

I've been aware of my disconnecting for ages but I think I've only now

seen just how drastic it can be.

I went from one way of being into another in one day on Sunday.

From being convinced that I should keep the loft [which is part of my

inheritance for when I turn twenty five in August] and be supported

by my mom; to knowing the only real choice is to take what I can and

leap into the unknown. I watched myself going through that process. I

watched as I struggled to make a choice. I realize why it was so hard.

I couldn't feel anything. I had to get a Stuart to help me talk my way

into the emotional aspects of the decision. And then I knew. I could

see that not selling was a symbol of wanting to hold onto a dream of

my mother's love. If I don't take her money I have nothing to prove

she loves me [with]. And I am afraid of taking the money from the

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sale because it is a kind of payout to make up for what is missing [i.e.

my mother's love]

Money + love...so complex. If she could really parent me it would be

safe to accept her support. But she gives money instead of love. I must

take my own money and be left with nothing.

[later]

I'm watching TV, if I do it for too long at a stretch my fingers start to

tingle. Then I switch it off and focus on my body. I try to feel a

sensation of downward flow into my legs. Try to get grounded.

I don't deserve a migraine. I'm doing my best. Tomorrow I'm going

for a massage. Tomorrow night I speak to [therapist] on the phone.

Please, dear body, warn me in other ways. I will listen. I'm trying to

stay centered.

I need to talk to someone. All this silence here by myself. It‘s easy to

just switch on the TV for company.

I'm scared to open up. I keep thinking of talking to my mom, being so

real with her while being so unsafe. I knew it too [at the tine].

Body, please just know that I'm not abandoning you. I'm trying to get

back to you. I'm trying to heal you.

[later]

I feel frustrated. 'What must I do?' I should have gone for a walk.

Sitting in my house all day is not good. I can force myself to feel. I

can force myself to be grounded.

[later]

I'm tired. Exhausted. Can't get comfortable. My back hurts and I need

exercise but I just want to sit down all the time.

Is this ever going to go away?

I'm not sleeping well at the moment because of anxiety.[I] don't want

to get a migraine.‖ (Appendix 2: Claire's diary 2004)

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In the next excerpt from Claire's diary, nearly a year later, is representation of how the illness

is still manifesting itself and was being interpreted through her relationship, both with her

family and with her own body and emotions. A lot of the money from her inheritance had

been spent on trying to normalize her body so that she could start a productive year, working

or studying – finding her passion. Her illness would not relent however, and the dissolution

that confronted the self was manifested in bodily symptoms, her lack of decision making

capacity and depression was, I believe, mostly caused by the tenuousness of her control over

her life.

Claire's personal diary 23rd

January 2005

―I phoned [my brother]. Feel drained and insecure. He's so pumped up

and motivated after his trip [abroad]. [He] was giving me advice about

getting out of my comfort zone etc. etc.

Felt invalidated. Like my whole life is a waste. I began ruminating

about the money I've spent [, money from my inheritance which I

have spent on medical therapies]. I felt like I did after speaking to my

father.

NO

My family does this to me. I must recognize that this is how I feel

about myself in their presence. Like a miserable failure who just floats

through life with no direction and no real hopes.

It‘s so hard to know what I want with those feelings. I'd come very

clearly to the knowledge that I want to pursue music and that I'm not

that keen on Drama. I drew a [tarot card, asking] ―Is it in my best

interest to do Drama 1 at University this year?‖ I got: ―Judgment‖

which seemed to indicate a resounding yes. But then I heard from

[English Professor] and it perhaps refers to that?

I played [my brother] my song. He seemed to like it. I enjoyed it but

by the end of the chat I rejected it.

I need to hold onto myself. I feel like I have no space – like I'm being

crowded. The criticism has started up.

I think I got sick so that I could do precisely that. [That is] hold onto

myself. I need a long time.

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I see what [my therapist] means by differentiation. I need to know my

own life and worth no matter what my family projects onto me.

[I have] been doing Vipassana meditation.[I] need to be in my body

even though it feels very uncomfortable. It‘s who I am. I realize how

hard it is for me to listen and let my body have its say. It‘s from doing

that, that I came to the sense that Drama isn't quite what I want.

Depression and retreat is my way of validating myself. I've always felt

more real in those spaces. I could retreat and tell myself that one day

they will know.

God! It's still so important for me to keep away from them [my

family].

I just sat with that feeling of indecision and confusion left from that

chat with [my brother]. And I see how that is how I've felt most of my

life. There is such a feeling of being in danger.

Tuesday 25th

January 2005

[I] went for UBI [treatment], after first canceling again [because it is

so expensive]. I wanted it. I wanted it to let this thing [this treatment]

be done to me.

It's so clear why I feel like I've been raped now. The UBI Doctor is

awful. He cannot make the experience less invasive, more calming

and sacred as it should be.

I feel raped. I felt the urge to let it happen even though I knew I had a

problem with its invasiveness.

[My therapist] made a connection between the needs of babies being

breastfed and sexual abuse. I didn't understand it but now I do. A baby

wants to be embraced and enveloped. It needs the total blurring of

boundaries. [My therapist] pointed that this becomes increasingly so

as they start to make eye contact.

The willingness to surrender in sexual abuse comes from the same

need, [it is] an urge to be overpowered, to give in.

I have that urge, in an ugly, bad situation I get ―hooked‖ on one

pleasant or comforting thing and allow the rest of the situation to

engulf me.

My illness is like that.

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My whole approach to the world is like that.

Like my fantasies as a child of being strapped into a sex machine that

would do things to me.

Inhuman, uncaring, un-nurturing but embracing nonetheless.

This is difficult. I'm barely processing it all. I've just come back from

the UBI Doctor. I've been trying to contain myself. I feel physically

violated.

And when I think about this job in another city I get the same sense. I

wake up in the middle of the night with this intense physical horror of

that job. Of packing up and leaving [here]. Fulfilling some

expectation. The pull – the candy – is the actual work. But the rest is

not comfortable. I feel pressurized to go for it – especially by myself.

I want to prove myself. I want to be something.

God! I have an awful time making decisions. It‘s because I cannot

allow a full body/being response to the presented situation as a whole.

It would mean breaking the habit of allowing myself to be 'raped'. It

would mean feeling other horrors.

I wasn't aware [the] last time, of UBI Doctor‘s affect on me.

Last night‘s horror was a childhood feeling. Just like my past UBI

feeling. A deep loss of something very personal. Something precious

thrown away. It felt like I had already accepted the job and thrown my

life here away. Thrown away my young, sacred, tentative self who

needs to take things slowly.

Friday 20th January 2005

Feel tired. Bone tired. My brain is jammed. Not foggy, just too tired to

think.

I'm not going for UBI, I'm not going to look for work. I will take

things very slowly. I'm going to get in touch [with my body/self]

I realize that it‘s my driveness that makes me ill. I still don't feel I

have a right to rest. I've been tackling this illness with all my strength

and I can't keep doing it that way. I have to stay with myself no matter

what.

I just feel so very strange. So ungrounded. I feel myself standing in

one spot for ages. I can't make up my mind what to do.

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I need to rest. Really rest. But I don't know how to let go. I don't want

to be in my bedroom. I feel stuck in there. I think I should change it

around a bit. Clear it of bad energy.

I've been pushing myself so hard for so long. It‘s got to stop. It has to

stop now.

[Later]

Drivenness = me = lack of replenishing energy. It‘s also an urge

towards something partially satisfying, partially destructive.

There is some energy released when I run into or collapse into one of

those bad addictive situations. Disconnection from myself. Running

on adrenaline. Like the high when I get dressed up and look good. Or

the frenzy of finishing a painting that‘s purely done to impress.

The way I went to see the UBI Doctor.

It‘s not sustainable energy. That‘s why I haven't quite been able to

follow through on things I enjoy. That adrenaline (over stimulation) is

just too exhausting to maintain.

When I am driven I am denying something in myself. I am overriding

some signal.

Like being molested. Overriding the signals that say get out.‖

In this next section I want to focus on Claire's retrospective view of her illness after returning

from two Tantric courses.

3. Chronology of the Illness Claire was quite well at the end of 2002. She was running and exercising ―for the first time

ever – consistently‖. She ―started honors in English at University in 2003. It was quite

stressful for her. In first term, about March 2003, she became ill. The illness, as she now

knows it was glandular fever, it lasted for about a week. Although here was no proper

diagnosis, in the form of a blood test, Dr D, a medical doctor and acupuncturist, said it was

Glandular fever (also known as ME). She had acupuncture and he was quite sure that it

would cure her.

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The acupuncture didn't help at all, she thought. She did get better, it was like recovering from

flu but the illness then became a constant thing. Her heart developed a tired beat. She would

be lying down and would feel as if I had run a marathon. She experienced palpitations at this

stage.

During this time she experienced recurrent bouts of glandular swelling and a feeling of being

generally tired. At the time she couldn‘t connect the persistent tiredness with this particular

illness. It was only towards the end of the year, after exams in November when she was

planning to leave for an overseas trip, that it became really bad, chronic. It was then that she

knew something was really wrong.

That December she went to see her parents and while there she experienced incredible stress.

She realized that this illness was directly linked to ongoing issues surrounding her

relationship with her whole family. She said she knew internally at that time that this illness

was a big problem but did not consciously link it to her relationship with her family to a great

extent then. She knew then, however, that this wasn't just going to go away.

Back in her University town she was stuck with it for a while, and it wasn't getting better. It

was then that she consulted a homeopath in a nearby town. She worked on it with her

homeopath to a point where she could function ―OK‖ and almost feel like it was just about to

get better. She would however experience relapses. This went on for a long time. She then

she broke her left ankle and didn't really notice the illness so much while she was

recuperating from her it. This is because she was immobile for about three months and the

ME consequently took a back seat. She still experienced the heart palpitations and her

symptoms resembled having influenza.

When her inheritance money came through in October 2004 she thought ―OK lets nail this‖

disease with medical treatment. She started by having her fillings out. This was because she

believed that her symptoms were partly due to mercury toxicity from fillings – as it turned

out this was not such a good idea. It made her much more ill than she had been before.

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The experience of the metal detoxification was very bad. She had mental problems: such as

lack of concentration, being incredibly moody and even suicidal. She said she had been

depressed before but at this time she had days of being seriously preoccupied with

contemplating suicide. The intensity of the effects of the metal detoxification wore off by

about January 2005. It was at about that time that she went to see the UBI Dr for UBI (ultra

violet blood irradiation).

The UBI treatment seemed to work at first but it was very expensive. She went for treatment

for four weeks in a row. It helped a lot, she felt lifted out of a slump and she had the sense

that she was on the road to recovery. This lasted for about two months and she started

planning her life again. She wanted to go back to University to study either Anthropology or

Drama. She was trying to find her passion. It didn‘t seem to come so easily.

It was at about that time that she went away on a trip, alone, into the nearby desert – it was

meant to be a kind of spiritual journey, a quest and self-initiation. She found that incredibly

difficult, perhaps, she said, because she hadn't been away for a long time. The desert trip

brought up her recurrent issues about being alone to the surface once more. While there she

experienced how, when she was alone, her own consciousness seems to get ―stuck in my

head‖, so while sitting with her own thoughts her experience was that she could not

experience just being in her body (unselfconsciously) – it really showed her about her

intractable problem related to her so called ―mind/body split‖. This helped her to realize

more profoundly that she had a serious desire to work with spiritual and environmental

healing, and finding sacredness in her life.

It was, however, after that experience that she had another serious relapse. She had a serious

relapse of glandular fever (M.E.) which she sat with in her flat in her University town for two

months. This was very frustrating for her because she would have two good days in which

she would try to get her life back again and then she would become sick again.

17

Shortly after this she had a breakthrough in her understanding of her illness which

culminated in her attending, two Neo-shamanic or Tantrica courses in a nearby coastal town.

After this she believed she had found her passion in life and it motivated her to move down

to the city where her parents lived. On the course she found new ways of coping with her

illness and her energy levels surged significantly.

Claire is now in the city, working as a project manager for a very subversive publishing

company that has a strong anti-capitalist stance. Although she still has problems with her

health she now has a better understanding of the illness.

In the next section I will look in more detail at how Claire negotiated her way through the

various healing methods.

4. Medical Pluralism

In Claire's experience both the western and the alternative medical therapies she had chosen

have based their views on the idea of the body needing to be controlled. She had a strong

feeling that there was ―some 'will' that needs to be acted upon the body‖. She said her ill

body was ―like this thing that is not behaving well and needs to be managed – so that it will

fit [into society] again‖.

Due to the manner in which Western Medicine ―isolates parts of the body, breaks it up into

pieces‖ and the lack of interest in the 'whole person', Claire from the beginning of her illness

completely rejected this form of treatment.

Homeopathy, on the other hand suited Claire. Here, for her, ―the image is more of the body

being off balance or out of kilter...and by giving the body back the thing that it is seeking in

the unbalance – the disease itself‖ – the body is healed. So for her it was more geared

towards health.

18

She also used herbal remedies, but she said that the principal of the healing was the same as

Western Medicine because there were still side effects, even though they tended to be to a

lesser extent. She sees herbal medicines as still based on a chemical theory of efficacy

whereas Homeopathy is based upon an electrical theory (or vibrational theory) of the body

where the energy of the body is attended to, to restore balance and effect healing.

Homeopathy was however, for Claire, still frustrating because in her experience it tended to

still treat a seemingly endless array of symptoms and it didn't address the 'core' of the illness.

Similarly, acupuncture, was used and seen by her as based on an energetic conception of the

body where therapy involved opening up blockages in the body. Claire's experience was that

this seemed to work well if it was concerned with a specific organ but not for a general

condition like M.E.

Claire also used massage as a therapy but said that she found it too gentle for her needs.

She also tried Kinesiology, which she said is based on muscle testing. The Kinesiologist ―has

lists of issues and illnesses, parts of the body, how things work and then you set particular

intentions to shift‖ the unbalanced issues. Claire said that it is mostly based on using words

and gestures to talk to the body, which then responds via muscle testing. This did not work

for Claire at all, she said:

―Frankly I didn't feel like it did anything. It didn't work for me

because, particularly with my illness, I need to grapple with it

logically and ... it is an emotional expression that needs to happen.

Whereas [Kinesiology] doesn't encourage that sort of thing‖ [i.e. it

works largely on a body (unconscious) level].

The UBI Doctor, a medical doctor who uses Ultra-Violet Blood Irradiation (UBI) annoyed

Claire intensely. This was because he knew ‗too much‘ about 'the body' and she says he was

not interested in 'her body'. Therefore his preoccupation with 'the way the body works' made

Claire feel that if her body responded in a fashion contrary to ‗the norm‘, then that bodily

expression was 'bad news'. She continued to say:

19

―He just makes it feel as if everything is so set and structured – there

is no fluidity and you are doomed or you can be saved. He is just a

medical doctor – the machine [i.e. the body] is working or it isn't

working. It made me so depressed when it did not work, he said it

would – when it didn't I felt like a complete failure. And that is why it

has been so important for me to find the way that I am not a failure.

He doesn't understand the deeper level of what is happening. [To his

credit though,] he never made any promises‖

Therefore for Claire, the UBI doctor had holistic ideas but was still constrained

within the biomedical paradigm.

All of these healing therapies, according to Claire are about trying to get the body back in

balance. The breakthrough for Claire was through a new interpretation of illness which she

discovered through the Process Work psychology of Arnold Mindell.

For Claire, Arnold Mindell's idea is of

―rather extending the imbalance to understand what the body is

trying to say, so if the body is achy in this spot then you say – make

it more sore – just extend that pain, go into the pain – exaggerate the

pain, speak the message of the pain, pull your body into the position

of the pain and then the whole picture comes out. Whereas

kinesiology and all kinds of other medicine are just about shutting

that message down.‖

When I questioned Claire about the so called ‗Wellness Revolution‘ she started her

explanation with the following quote from Arnold Mindell: ―health (good physical health)

might not be the best thing for the soul.‖ Mindell therefore encourages seeing a spiritual

message in the illness. The 'soul' is given priority over the fluctuating rhythms of the body.

This is how Claire could now take a new outlook on her illness and say: ―Nothing is 'wrong,'

just uncomfortable. It‘s painful, it‘s in discordance with maybe your environment but it is

something new, it is a creative thing that is happening.‖

Before, Claire said she had thought something was very wrong with her, her constant health

problems created a sense that she was lagging behind everyone else, that she was below

standard. She emphasized this by recounting how her (psycho-) therapist said ―why don't you

20

give your body its own autonomy.‖ Claire and her friend's reaction was: ―huh? No! You can't

just give the body its own autonomy – it‘s like – it will want to just eat and I'll get fat or it‘s

like a child that needs to be roped in.‖ The problem as she sees it now is that people have

performance anxiety because they are always comparing themselves to other people.

5. Life Politics

Before going on the Neo-Shamanic quest Claire had a breakthrough in terms of knowing

what she wanted to do with her life. She was particularly inspired Arnold Mindell and his

Process Work, Ecopsychology literature and Derrick Jensen.

Beginning with Derrick Jensen, she said that he stirred her emotionally in terms of her

―illness and discomfort and terrible unhappiness with the world‖ not being a consequence of

her own weakness, illness or pathology. Instead, after reading Derrick Jensen, she felt it was

―something that is part of being in a really difficult place in the world right now... in terms of

the environment, in terms of our western culture and the denial which is inherent in it‖. This

was, she said, the first book which made her feel that, possibly, her illness was really ―just

something sane in an insane world‖ and she ―'could go with' [her illness] and let it be what it

is.‖

After this insight she then stumbled onto the Process Work Psychology of Arnold Mindell

whose ideas seemed to take the ideas developed by Derrick Jensen about the ultimate

meaning of illness ―so much further in terms of the body's illness being part of the soul's

dreaming and illness being inherently meaningful in itself.‖ Illness in Arnold Mindell's

framework is that illness is the soul's way of unfolding a message and trying to reach out

with some sort of creative act.

When Claire integrated that line of she thinking she recounted how she suddenly thought:

―'fuck it', I am not crying for me, because my mommy was shit to me, I'm crying because

there is pain in the world and we are all sharing‖ this pain.

21

When she was entering the English honours course (the year she became ill) and then later

the world as a working adult, she said that she realised that her terrible angst was ―all a part

of this terror of losing my soul in consensus reality, of the death of the sacred. That is what it

felt like to me. It felt like the big wide world would swallow me up‖.

She said this was linked to how her mother taught her that 'in the real world' one had to

―wear this mask and please everybody, work hard (fingers to the bone) and then go home and

crash and hide all the pathology, all the illness.‖ She recounts how:

―the distress is left to the bedroom where you stay for weeks and

weeks and weeks – that's how my mother handled it and that‘s how I

saw it in my childhood – I was raised not to offend, and no matter

what was being done to me I had to not be offensive. To offend other

people – the world – a sense of them, their agendas and issues, not to

step on peoples toes. Ya.‖

Claire continued to say

―My mother told me once, when I was a little girl [when it] felt like we

were always in a war zone together, she told me that ―we are going to

fight… get through‖ – but it didn't come out that way overtly – for me

the message was more – ―not, come, be strong in yourself against the

world‖, it was – ―you‘re shit… prove yourself and never let anyone see

who you are‖. Yes there is un-safety but there is this constant – strain –

to be constantly pushing against the world. If you are going to crash

you have to make damn sure nobody sees you. So for me M.E. is great

[laughs] it hasn't been an illness that [I could say:] ―OK I can go to

hospital, get really sick have tons of operations come out and go back

into the world again.‖ It‘s like: ―I'm OK enough to be in the world with

my defenses on. I can't be the perfectly masked smiling girl. M.E. has

been very good in [the sense of] breaking that down… I can't wear the

mask when I am just trying to get through the day.‖

Her new understanding about the world was that life is about reciprocity. She said that she

had not been in a reciprocal relationship with the world on an ongoing basis. The messages

within the shamanism course are all really about connecting. She said that on the course she

was urged to – ―stay moist‖ – ―stay flexible‖ – ―be with the moment‖ and that is exactly what

connecting is about, she said.

22

It is about being in a constant negotiation between your body and the world. She said for her

it was: ―not like I can shut my body down and do what the world tells me,‖ meaning that her

body had stopped wanting to abide by all the so called norms of the world or as she herself

puts it: ―my body has stopped wanting to cooperate with...the consensus world –it is just

saying no!‖

When I commented that her interpretation of her illness was a very reflexive view of being

sick, because most people see illness in the biomedical paradigm - that is as being attacked

by a virus, she said that she felt that her illness is an initiatory illness, and that it was as if

something inside of her forced her onto the path that she always wanted to be on but that felt

she couldn't follow. She said that the whole time she was ill that as soon as she recovered

that she knew that she would have to go and do something she really didn't want to do, that is

enter the job market. And so her illness was a way of preventing that.

She then recounted how her shaman teacher said the soul's battle with the ego was because

―the soul wants to move but the ego has worked for years... just to function in a way that it

does‖. The ego is therefore ―not prepared to give that up and so there is a war going on

inside‖ and Claire said she could feel herself in that war.

She spoke about how she came to realise how the safe space that she had created in the last

year and half is just safe in a completely cloistering way and it has 'fed' her ego. She

therefore became more and more restricted and controlling of her life. It has been such a

battle, she used to get excited about 'taking on her life', 'really shifting inside' but the ego, in

her words ―just takes over and says NO! You can't do this; you‘re too... weak.‖

Claire lamented how she had been, in her own words:

―crying out for initiation into sacred space, but I have also been

looking for the sacred in the profane, that‘s why everything becomes so

‗precious‘, like I can't eat this because its messed up and because

everything is so dirty because I am trying to find goodness and even

with people – like making friends with really silly shallow people and

trying to find depth there. [My therapist] mentioned my family as well,

23

how I have been doing that with them, and it is true. I always try and

make this sacred space with them and they betray me in it.‖

After her shamanic course she explained how she had had ―an experience,‖ a kind of

initiation into ―sacred space‖ during the course. After this she said she felt completely able to

enter the world because she knew that although the world is profane - its money, living,

eating, and getting through the day – but there is also a place for something sacred. She felt

like her life was possibly set up because when she needs that sacredness, she knows where to

go.

With this new understanding of the world she reflected on how she used to feel like she

needed to be so pure, good and never lie but she is eating meat and swearing a lot more.

Finding that sacred space was described as such a relief because being allowed to be mad on

the course, to let her imagination and her body go – to just play - was fantastic and liberating

for her. This so-called madness was linked to Mindell's Process work and letting the body

have free expression without enforcing the controlling norms of society.

Being on the shamanic course also challenged her sense of being a 'child' because she was

challenged directly on these issues.

6. The Child and the Adult

She then went on to say that this illness has been a separating factor, something that has

pulled her out of her family. She blamed them for the illness and I still ―kind of‖ does. When

I interviewed her, after her 'breakthrough' she was still angry with them but said that her

illness had shown her that she doesn't really want to be separate from her family. She said

that she realises that being apart from her family doesn't make her happy and she had decided

that she can't always live in resentment. This was something she had not fully understood

until recently.

24

This was tied to how her shamanic teacher‘s concept adulthood – that is, that you have to

retrieve the inner child, as Claire had been doing with her therapist to a large degree, ―to look

and see and find the original wounds deal with them and experience them, and all of that but

the point is not to recover the inner child‖ she said. The point rather is to 'grow up', to find

the 'inner adult' because that‘s what she is now. She said how she had not wanted to 'grow

up', because growing up meant entering this ―harsh world‖.

7. The Victim

In Claire's understanding the Ego is a system of defences which are formed through personal

regimes of coping with the world. Sometimes these regimes are held onto after they are

helpful, and so become pathologies.

On the shamanism course, Claire's so called ‗preciousness‘ was identified, by herself and

others, as one of her defunct coping mechanisms. Claire explained this in terms of

dispositions gleaned from her childhood:

―Well what‘s come up for me about the illness is, its… my mother

has this attitude about herself and about everything that she has been

through in her life – its she's a victim and she's um – 'this is just the

way she is' – she is like forever going to be like this – and everyone

around her must just accommodate her and everything just kind of

gets fed into that persona. So even the work she does is just feeding

that image of herself‖.

Claire believes that she has held onto that idea or disposition of being the victim and being so

sick and so sad. She sees how that is a measure of control in her life – being the victim. It

allows her to handle her environment, it means never having to surrender anything because

she has to be dealt with so carefully – and so ultimately it allows he have a sense of staying

in control a bit.

This realisation brought up issues related to being creative in the world. Being a victim for

her was related to not wanting to interact with an 'other' that is unpredictable, because as

25

soon as something is unpredictable she says she gets scared and withdraw from the

interaction.

This issue, then, is at the heart of her not connecting to other people because in her opinion,

getting to know someone is about ―taking that risk to be with something unpredictable‖. In

this way it is, for Claire, an odd paradox that being sick is a measure of control because it

allows her to, more or less, control her environment.

This passage from Claire expresses how, while on the course, her notion of being a victim

was challenged:

―It‘s funny what happens because [my shaman teacher] wasn't taking

my victim thing seriously. I saw then how the control then expanded.

I got into quite a power struggle with him. That became an obsessive

power struggle that I often got into. [When I was there] I couldn't

even take him saying anything to me about what he had recognized. I

would always say ―oh yes I know that‖. Ya I really picked that up. In

fact [I thought] ―you can't teach me anything... I am already on top of

it.‖ It was coming out in ways at dinner, lunch, picking up trays...

[once] something dropped onto the table and I was ―oo I saw that

coming.‖ You know I'm always actually in control, on top of things. I

can't bear to let go‖.

This issue of control and victimhood for Claire was part of her whole pluralistic

method of treatment. After she inherited her trust money she expanded her scope

of treatments in a desperate bid to defeat the disease.

The shaman course was for her completely different to all of her other therapies because this

time around it was much more about surrendering. Before, as she said, the other forms of

treatment were much more about control. Claire summarised it in the following way:

―OK…I have a problem with surrendering; this is a block that I am

encountering with interacting with people. The moment it gets to the

point when I have to surrender I have to let somebody in and I have to

start accepting gifts and I have to accept potential – what I was saying

– unpredictability. That is when I back off. So with being sick I think

it was also a sickness which requires a measure of surrender …

[surrender] that I haven‘t wanted. And the illness and the treatments

have all been about control and about getting more on top of things,

26

whereas the choice to go into this experience; I didn‘t quite know

what I was doing. I was really putting my body and mind – my being

into a space that I knew was going to require things of me that I would

feel uncomfortable with, and that I need at the same time. So I was

really opening up and taking a risk, more than the other ones were.‖

And she continued on the same theme in another interview:

―Ya, you have to dance with the world. I grew up in a home where I

was being messed with psychologically, like there were mind games

and so just holding onto reality, thinking what is reality – what is real

and holding it tightly was very important for me to survive. Like just

to be able to say: ―No! This is who I am‖, and strengthen and fortify,

and say – ―because everything was so messed up when I was a child,

my mother was crazy, I couldn't figure out who I was and the way

things were.‖ So the idea of being fluid is incredibly frightening to

me. I feel like I am going to go crazy because what if I lose that grip

on reality that I had to fight so hard to find.‖

8. The Shaman

Claire talked about how the Shaman is quite a post modern figure, in terms of her teacher‘s

understanding of it (i.e. shamanism). The Shaman she said is the ―technician in terms of

culture‖, the one knows the discourse, and knows how to change the particular things

through entering the realm of ―undifferentiatedness.‖ On her course she began to realize that

the Shaman is ―aware that the culture creates categories for things‖. Therefore, the Shaman,

―by going into realms that don't have categories ...can see how culture creates itself and

therefore he can function as a tool for changing mythologies or bringing in a new discourse‖.

The Shaman, she said, ―lives in the post-modern state where everything is equal, where there

is no dogma‖. He however delivers his message ―within the culture he is talking to‖ and so in

a sense straddles the two worlds. She used an example of how ―the young shaman in training

might see an animal or a person with an animal head‖ in their visions. This is not a 'monster'

but a sign that defines categorization so that the shaman knows about categorization. So in

this sense it is post modern, she says, because the shaman becomes aware of the artifacts of

culture.

27

The Shamanic workshop was revelation for Claire. When she went there she was ―very ill.‖

She recounted how she sat there with the illness and ultimately discovered her energy again.

She realized that ―there was energy behind the sickness‖. She discovered how to ―just sit and

boost that energy‖. She had a very strong realization that she had found how she would like

to work through her illness. She said that although she wasn't brilliantly healthy, her outlook

is better and that now she could finally see a ―light at the end of the tunnel‖.

9. Living the Dreaming Body

In this chapter wish to briefly outline the Neo-Shamanic experience. This first excerpt is

from the brochure of the shamanic course Claire went on:

―The dreamingbody requires more than wellness; it wants challenge, risk,

personal power, and freedom. Even more than this, the body must seek

danger in order to become itself. The dreamingbody will never be healed

through healthy living alone, because it seeks the uncanny, at the edge,

through dreaming." Arnold Mindell

LIVING THE DREAMING BODY

In this workshop, we move deeply into exploring alternative realities. In

addition to power tools, we learn to use the Body as Ally. We face our

ultimate fear-threshold in our own Death Dance.

So we come to understand what is required of us to live experientially in the

place of the True Self. Using breathwork, trance dance, ritual drumming and

process work, we sustain deep altered consciousness. At the same time, we

live amongst a loving and conscious group of like-minded fellow travelers.

In this way, we bridge the gap between the actualized self and ecological

community.

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[Course outline]

The Roots of Classic Shamanism.

Recapitulation and erasing personal history.

Working with an Ally and Spirit Guides.

The Shaman‘s Horse and Soul Songs.

Regaining the Lost Soul.

The Descent into the Underworld.

Facing Consensus.

The Great Death Dance.

Moving on an ocean of Spirit without an anchor.

The Ascent into Destiny and Purpose.‖

Claire related some her experiences from the course to me. There was quite a lot of nudity on

the course. For example when Claire arrived at the retreat one of the instructors asked one of

the women to take her down to the lake for her cleansing. This person was busy so one of the

men took her down and there were one or two men already in the lake. She said to herself to

herself ―fuck it‖ and stripped down and got into the water. Normally Claire is very shy about

her body but I believe that on this course there is an understanding that everyone is entering

sacred pace.

I was told of about three rituals on the course. The ―death dance‖ was held around a fire after

drumming and perhaps some breathwork. The leader, the shaman, went first and exposed

himself to the trainees and told them many disgusting things about himself. The purpose of

the death dance is to get some of the ―muck‖ inside yourself exposed in public. Claire said

that she was surprised to see that everyone was carrying around problems with them. Later

everyone had to strip down and expose their genitals to the fire. Their ‗Yonis‘ and

‗Lingams‘. They all had to do their own death dances and tell everyone their dirty little

secrets.

When Claire had to do her death dance at first she started off quite coyly but the leader

prodded and goaded her with a stick until she became angry and wrestled (naked) with him

violently on the floor. After the death dance they all showered together. Claire seemed to

29

quite enjoy the liberation of it all. She explained how this was all ‗sacred space‘ and so it was

framed within that – that is why speaking about it in the ‗normal world‘ doesn‘t do the

experience much justice.

During her death dance she realized that she had been acting like the 'victim' so when she

was prodded and goaded and not allowed to settle for her old patterns she acted out a caged

cat. She came out hissing and spitting blue murder, snarling and prowling.

The other ritual involved going into the underworld. This I think involved hyperventilating

for about an hour. She said that the breathwork was hard rough for her but that conceptually

she could 'get to the underworld', which was played out in a game space but was very

meaningful for the participants.

The last journey I was told about was the 'journey to heaven space'. Claire, like the others,

was given a token that would allow her to pass into heaven when she found the right place.

She said she had to wonder around the forest for a bit until the environment gave her a clue

that she was there and then she had to use the token to 'pay the gate keeper' to get into

heaven. Here she struggled to get going and kept on bumping her head, or plants would pull

her hat off; this, was interpreted as her being too much in her head. She eventually, after a

long time, she found her way in and paid her pass.

The introduction to the Tantra course was more challenging for Claire. This involved

breaking down restrictive bodily space issues and connecting to other people through

touching and other various exercises.

There were lectures everyday and they seemed great. She has some notes for them and says

they were wide ranging and profound. What was very important on the course was aligning

the body with the mind through breathing techniques and spirituality. The teacher said that

some people have chosen to approach shamanism by going to traditional healers. Though this

may work for some, he said, the problem as he sees it is that the world which 'we westerners'

live in is very different from most so called traditional people and so for 'westerners' there are

many new problems to deal with that the so called traditional shamans are not adept at

dealing. He called some of these ―the 'white' man‘s burden.‖

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10. Moving On

After doing her homework assignment for the Neo-shamanism course, which involved

driving out of town in her car with no preplanning, just going ( I suppose a bit like ―On the

Road‖ by Kerouac), Claire realized that she had to leave her University town because it was

too cloistering for her. She felt it was difficult to step out of that ―narrowness‖ there. This

was further reinforced when she met and interacted with the people on the course who she

said had interesting and creative lives. Furthermore by moving to the city she could find

better employment opportunities and start attending Process Work group sessions.

Claire packed up her belongings and left her University town in her little red Golf. She found

a place to stay in a picturesque part of the city, and even started waitressing. She stopped the

waitressing after a few attempts and has instead found a publishing related job. She still has

problems with her family, she still struggles to connect and make friends but she is aware of

what she needs to do now and has started going out at night with her brother. She even had a

few glasses of wine the other night!

She has stopped taking expensive medicines and is working with a very well respected

Chinese Medicinal Healer. The strange thing is that he has told her to stop eating all the raw

food that she had been eating and told her to eat three cooked meals a day. In addition he has

given her some herbal teas to make. All the treatments seem well priced.

Claire‘s health seems to have returned and I am hopeful that she will follow this path because

it seems to have had a transformative effect on her.

11. Discussion

[You should read the Theoretical Orientation below for a more detailed explanation.]

Claire has, because of her traumatic experiences during childhood, I believe, struggled with

issues of belonging. This is why when she became ill, these issues were much made worse by

the illness. Her struggle for healing initially fed into her need to control her life, her body and

31

her environment. Through her interests in life politics (connecting to others, her body,

emotions and the environment) she has been drawn towards Neo-Shamanism.

My interpretation of her Neo-Shamanic experience is that is seems to bring back the

carnivalesque, grotesque body of the medieval times and therefore offer an new experience

of the energies of the body, self, and a sense of connection to others and the environment

which is not governed by the norms of society (which I have discussed as being formulated

into a ‗Cartesian lifeworld‘). She says that she can go into the ‗profane‘ world because she

knows (experientially, that is) that there is a ‗sacred‘ world. The Neo-Shaman teacher, talks

about Tantra (an important aspect of his Neo-Shamanism) as making no issue about its

radical methods of breaking down the individuals habituated perceptions of reality. The

Tantric method is to actively seek out such intense and even shattering experiences in order

to achieve a higher freedom. Part of its success is to transform unconscious content into

action.

When passions or emotions manifest, Tantra teaches, that the correct approach is to actively

open into and identify with these energies until the very roots of these emotions surface. The

adept should not become separated from these powers. Rather, assume those powers and

bring them to the highest degree of intensity whereby they consume themselves.‖1

He goes on to say ―this intensifying of feelings might seem similar to psychological methods

that explore sexuality and attachments to family and society, Tantra also works with the deep

spiritual forces that are accessed later in the journey‖. This, he argues, is ―past the edges

where psychology operates‖. ―The total disintegration of personality that is a prerequisite of

Tantric training is part of a lifestyle that affords few compromises on the journey to self-

realization‖.

It is essentially because of these understandings of overturning the norms of society, those at

least which tend to be experienced by many subjects, within so called ‗late‘ modernity, as

disruptive, that I have introduced Burkitt‘s (1999) theory of embodiment. This is because I

see a close correlation with his so called ‗maturity of the (post) modern subject‘ and the

1 Reminiscent of Nietzsche‘s ideas.

32

principles and aims espoused in the Neo-Shamanic (or Tantra) movement as represented here

by the shamanic teacher.

These were expressed by Claire‘s understanding of the ‗child‘ and the ‗adult.‘ The relational

theory of embodiment is insightful here because (with Claire) there is an overturning of the

‗ontological [i.e. nature of being] order of being‘ in her search for meaning, in which through

the privileging of the transcendent the ethical self is privileged over the normative self

resulting in a rejection of the radical doubt of Cartesianism. These Neo-Shamanic aims

discussed directly above, are also very similar to that in the so called ‗maturity of the (post)

modern subject‘ discussed in Burkitt‘s (1999) relational embodiment theory and the ‗life

politics‘ of Giddens (1991) –that is, from a philosophical view point.

Therefore in this study I have suggested, following Burkitt (1999), that the current relations

between people, in 'late' modernity that is, are overly based on normative forms of control

rather than ethical considerations (Burkitt 1999: 150). That is, through the application of

norms to the behavior of others and to ourselves, we seek to control and police activity rather

than to realize it in an ethical form. In this sense ―the modern subject is still in a sense of

immaturity, tending to look to external authorities for the validation of behavior and applying

norms created by hegemonic powers‖ (Ibid: 150- 1). To this end Burkitt (1999) suggests that

‖in the West, our moral codes have become focused more on a

concern for control than for care, for regulating one another rather

than for caring for each other...the effects of normative control on the

body are ones of armoring, where vulnerability and openness become

dangers that need to be closed off behind layers of defensiveness‖

(Ibid).

The quest for healing here is integrally linked to this so called 'life politics' and the Neo-

Shamanic quest is part of a journey towards connecting with the body, self, community,

environment and ultimately the transcendent (or God).

Furthermore Good (1994) in discussing the saliency of lifeworlds has opened a path for

understanding that lifeworlds are actively constructed through ‗lived experience‘ and belief.

33

Belief here is not seen as the rational choosing of one ideology or the other but rather in the

Medieval sense in that it is a commitment to a ‗way of being in the world‘ and an active

construction of that lifeworld.

He has also underscored (following Shutz 1971) the taken for granted importance of the

common sense world which can be severely disrupted by illness. This I have also argued is

related to the norms of the productive body. In this conception, following Connolly and

Craig (2002), the so called ‗wild body‘ is seen as an intrusion of ‗nature‘ into society and is

therefore a source for the disruption of the sense of an integrated self.

The integrated self of productive bodies takes for granted the somatic experiences of life and

therefore severe disruptions can occur when the body does not ‗behave as it should.‘ The

concept of ―Soul Loss‖ as discussed by Desjarleis (1994) emphasizes the somatic aesthetic

experiences of the body and I believe that these closely correlate to Claire‘s search for

healing.

In conclusion then I would like to emphasize the courage and creativity that Claire has shown

in actively constructing a spiritual path that has had positive implications for her overall well

being (wellness). This I believe highlights how the quest for meaning is an essential task for

culture in that it turns pain into suffering and thereby reconstitutes a valid lifeworld. The

answer for Claire has been to connect; this was however something she knew intellectually

for a long time. It was not until she had a visceral experience of something ‗sacred,‘ that is

something other than what she considered as the ‗profane world of production,‘ that she

could finally ‗see the light at the end of the tunnel‘ and make the decisive move towards so-

called ‗adulthood.‘

34

Theoretical Orientation

12. Theoretical Introduction

In this section I wish to present the theoretical framework for the interpretation of the case

study.

In Chapter 13: The ontological hierarchies of illness, I argue that Western Biomedicine

places biology at the centre of its ontological hierarchy of illness and social relations at the

periphery where as this is reversed in Alternative (or so-called Traditional) Healing therapies

to a large extent. This highlights the reason for both the rejection of Western Biomedicine

and the attraction of Alternative medicines for many sufferers of chronic illnesses because

when Western Biomedicine cannot cure them, sufferers seek to manage the integrity of their

'lifeworld.' Here the orientation of Alternative therapies suits this endeavor because it

counters the objectification of the body as an object and so offers a path toward the integrity

of self and body.

In Chapter 14: Anthropological Representations of Illness, I review discuss the relevant

medical anthropological concepts and perspectives for a study of chronic fatigue from an

emic socio-cultural perspective.

In Chapter 15: The Soteriological (Salvation) Function of Medicines, I briefly discuss why,

in a society characterised largely by materialist individualism, Biomedicine has become the

ultimate source of salvation because life, health and youth are privileged above earlier forms

of transcendence such as the messianic realm.

Chapter 16: 'Lifeworlds' as Worlds of Experience, introduces the notion of the lived worlds

of experience which are the subjectively lived lives of chronic fatigue sufferers.

Chapter 17: Symbolization; the Struggle for a Name, suggests illness needs to be

incorporated into the symbolic domain so as to be made manageable by the sufferer. Positing

meaning onto the disease turns pain into suffering, thus giving it meaning.

35

Chapter 18: The Making and Unmaking of Worlds, examines the healing process from the

viewpoint of re-making lost 'lifeworlds'.

In Chapter 19: Aesthetics, Rationality, and Medical Anthropology, I argue that from an emic

perspective the biological reductionism of biomedicine does not account for the experience

of illness.

In Chapter 20: Soul Loss, I introduce the anthropological concept of soul loss for a cross

cultural perspective on a syndrome which seems to closely resemble chronic fatigue (as it is

experienced in Western cultures), and I stress the importance of embodiment theory in

understanding the 'lifeworlds' of sufferers.

Chapter 21: Illness Conceived as the 'Wild Body', introduces Connolly and Craig‘s (2002)

concept of the 'wild body' and situates the research in a critical stance, which I argue exposes

the 'productive body' of normal subjects within a modern capitalist world.

In Chapter 22: Introduction to Burkitt's (1999) Relational Theory of Embodiment, Chapter

23: Cartesianism as a 'lifeworld', Chapter 24: Emergence of the Cartesian Self, and Chapter

25: Modernity a comprehensive review and discussion of Burkitt's relational embodiment

theory is undertaken to argue that within modernity there has been a construction of the

Cartesian Self which is common to so called modernity and 'late' modernity. The reason I

introduce this here is to argue that 'existential fright,' (Burkitt 1999: 141) at experiencing the

disruption or disintegration of the so-called productive body, within 'late' modernity tends to

be dealt with through a nostalgic (or neo-Romantic) search for connection with the self,

body, community and environment. This is discussed by Giddens (1991) under the rubric of

‗life politics.'

The overarching theme of Claire's search for healing and meaning is I argued situated within

the framework of 'life politics' and can be interpreted as a quest for ontological security

through overcoming the alienation and division of self which is common to 'late' modernity.

Her pluralistic use of medical therapies underscores this need for intellectual, emotional,

somatic and ultimately spiritual connection with herself, body, family, community and

environment.

36

Finally in Chapter 26: Neo-Shamanism, I introduce the Neo-Shamanism of the shamanic

practitioner with whom Claire trained. The primary aim here is to introduce some

background information before the case history of Claire is presented. A fuller investigation

is not possible here.

13. The Ontological Hierarchies of Illness

A defining characteristic in Claire's illness is her rejection of the objectification common in

the biomedical sphere. She has instead preferred to consult so called alternative therapists. In

this chapter I will discuss the broad differences between biologically determined and socially

constituted healing methodologies to expose the objectification that Claire experiences when

confronted with medical practitioners.

Good (1994) says that the nature of illness leads persons to confront the material body as

well as the moral dimensions of life, this is so even in the modern world where overarching

moral orders have been fragmented, and so all medicine joins the rational with the deeply

irrational (Good 1994: 24). Confronting the moral dimensions of life is a quest for meaning,

which Good (1994) says is the ―central task of the 'work of culture' [, that is,] to transform

human misery into suffering, and to counter sickness with healing‖ (Ibid).

There is a fundamental dichotomy between Western medicine's and many of the so-called

traditional or alternative medicines' understanding of the ontologies of illness (Ibid).

Although the Biomedical view is a powerful and effective way of seeing reality, it is

contrasted to a view held by many traditional and alternative medicines; in which social

organization and social relations are the ontological source of the so-called ―great chain of

being‖ (Ibid)

Western Biomedicine

Looking first at Western Biomedicine, Good (1994) argues that the message of medical

training is that there are ―worlds within worlds, each subsumed by the other... [down to] ...the

molecular level‖ (Ibid: 75). In this hierarchy biology is at the center and social relations at

37

the periphery (Ibid: 76). Those diseases in which the mechanisms are clearly understood

provide the prototypes for all disease and suggest that all disease is of the same order or kind

and so the message is clear: ―we only need to fill in the missing structural links‖ to find the

cure (Ibid). Western Biomedical treatments tend to be ―mechanical and impersonal‖ and the

healers described as cool, distant and formal in their relations with their patients (Ibid: 24). In

accordance with this they use abstract concepts about 'the body' (Ibid).

The Medical Gaze:

With the emergence of the body as a site of medical knowledge, the body is newly

constituted as a medical body (Ibid: 72). The medical body is therefore quite distinct from

the bodies with which we interact in everyday life, and ―the intimacy with that body reflects

a distinct perspective, an organized set of perceptions and emotional responses that emerge‖

(Ibid). For example Good (1994) describes the anatomy laboratory as having a distinct set of

moral norms which changes their perception in those settings (Ibid).

This so-called ―whole other world‖ is a ―biological world, a physical world, a complex three

dimensional space‖ (Ibid: 73). ―Thinking anatomically‖ is central to the medical gaze (Ibid).

The training is very visual in that learning anatomy requires a training of the eye, ―to see

structure where none was obvious‖ to the untrained eye (Ibid). Three dimensional images

remain central to biology. The message of medical training is that there are ―worlds within

worlds, each subsumed by the other... [down to] ...the molecular level‖ (Ibid: 75). This kind

of view is what is posited to lead to biological determinism, for a polemical critique of

sociobiology see Sahlins 1976b.

In medical training Good (1994) says that in the intern phase of the training there is a real

sense of becoming a professional attached to writing up a diagnosis of the patient and a

conscious construction of what a patient is to the doctor (Ibid: 78). The following excerpt is

from a student at the Harvard Medical School when Good (1994) asked about 'editing out'

patient's stories:

―You're not there to just talk with people and learn about their lives

and nurture them. You're not there for that. You're a professional and

38

you're trained in interpreting phenomenological descriptions of

behavior into physiologic and pathphysiologic processes. ... [Telling

someone's] story ...is missing the point. That's indulgence, sort of...

What you need ...is stuff you are going to work on‖ (Ibid).

Good (1994) insists that writing opens up the methodology for constructing the interactions

with patients (Ibid).Conversations with patients are not stressed whereas presenting cases is a

crucial part of the training, and this has to follow a very restricted format (Ibid: 79). The

discourse permitted for presenting cases is very limited to the biological realm which is the

―important stuff‖ (Ibid). It is the through the presentation of cases that the student largely

gets the recognition and consequently the confidence to become a doctor and Good (1994)

argues that these performances are not simply a way of depicting reality but a very particular

way of constructing it (Ibid: 80).

Case presentations are constructive in the sense that they represent disease as the object of

medical practice. The ―story‖ presented is a story of disease processes, localized spatially in

disease tissue lesions and disordered physiology and temporally in abstract, medicalized time

([Frankenberg 1988c] paraphrased in Ibid). The person, the subject of suffering, is

represented as the site of disease rather than as a narrative agent‖ (Ibid). So with the strict

focus on the identification of pathologies and the application of medical therapies, the result

is that the 'lifeworld' of the patient is neglected as is now widely documented in the medical

social science literature (Ibid).

For the medical doctor, then, the ―medical construction of the body through various

interpretive practices‖ are what Autin (1962) calls ―speech acts‖ because they are powerful

ways of acting, leading to further actions which ―quite literally shape and reshape the body‖

(Ibid: 81). Although this depiction is a caricature because in a hospital setting these

interpretive practices are necessary to a large degree, it however opens up a general critique

of the formal medical institution. What it does reflect is that the psychosocial (and social)

dimensions of medicine are severely marginalized. Notwithstanding the positive aspects of

modern medicine, this criticism highlights the materialist and individualist vision of the

instantiation of the practice of medicine in Western or Modern settings (Ibid). These

39

shortcomings tend to become highlighted with syndromes which cannot easily be penetrated

by the medical gaze.

Traditional Medicine

In contrast to this the ―Zinacanteco System,‖ from Mexico (as an example of traditional

medicine), of curing uses ―emotionally charged symbols, and the treatment relationship is

characterized by closeness, shared meaning, warmth, informality, and everyday language‖

(Ibid: 26-7). The most obvious interpretation for the difference in these approaches is that

―Western curing is aimed at exclusively the mechanical body, while Ziacancento procedures

are directed at social relations and supernatural agents‖ (Ibid: 27).

It is common for many traditional healing rituals in Africa to incorporate the whole family or

support network of the sufferer into the healing ritual – which may be interpreted from a

sociological viewpoint as an active process of treating the ‗lifeworld‘ of the patient to assist

them to cope with their illness.

14. Anthropological Representations of Illness

In this chapter I explore how anthropologists have examined illness from a cultural

perspective.

Illness representations as culturally constituted realities: The “meaning

centered” tradition.

In the empiricist tradition many writers have externalized disease from culture and treated it

as a part of nature while in the cognitivist anthropologists have been largely indifferent to the

epistemological status of disease (Ibid: 52). It has been the interpretive anthropologists,

following Kleinman's work in the late seventies that has ―placed the relation of culture and

illness at the center of analytic interest‖ (Ibid).

The fundamental claim of this ―meaning centered tradition has been that disease is not an

entity but an explanatory model‖ (Ibid: 53 [emphasis in original]). Therefore ―disease

40

belongs to culture...[which] is not only a means of representing disease, but is essential to its

very constitution as a human reality (Kleiman 1973b; B. Good and M. Good 1981)‖ (Ibid).

―Disease thus has its ontological grounding in the order of meaning and human

understanding (A. Young 1976)‖ (Ibid).

It is, therefore, a ―category fallacy‖ according to Kleinman (1977) to believe that disease (as

a category) belongs to nature (Ibid). Any illness event has ―multiple interpretive frames and

discourses‖ brought to bear upon it and the interpretive approach in taking a ―strongly

interactionist and perspectivist position...rather than either reifying or denying the

significance of biology [instead seeks to analyze how] biology, social practices and meaning

interact in the organization of illness as a social object and lived experience‖ (Ibid: 53).

The meaning centered approach, then, highlights that the ―interpretations of the nature of an

illness always bear the history of the discourse that shapes its interpretation, and are always

contested in settings of local power relations‖ (Ibid). The empirical research in this field has

exposed surprising variations and diversity in the ―construction of clinical realities across

sub-specialties‖ even within given societies and has sought to show ―how cultural

interpretations interact with biology or psychophysiology and social relations to produce

distinctive forms of illness‖ (Ibid). According to Kleinman (1973b) the symbolic bridge

between intersubjective meanings and the human body is provided within the context of

culture (Ibid).

What the research in this tradition has suggested is that ―cultural 'idioms of distress' (Nichter

1981) organize illness experience and behavior quite differently across societies, that culture

may provide 'final common ethno-behavioral pathways' (Carr and Vitaliano 1985) and

construct unique disorders‖ (Ibid: 53-4). Good (1994) points out that the course and

prognosis of major chronic diseases can differ profoundly between individuals and cross-

culturally (Ibid). These differences ―have been shown to be produced by cultural meanings,

social response, and the social relations in which they are embedded‖ (Ibid).

Furthermore in the investigation into the ―role of therapeutic practices both in the 'clinical

construction of reality'‖ and in the production of healing efficacy, rhetorical practices, in

41

particular, have been shown to have ―powerful effects‖ in a number of empirical studies

(Ibid). Good (1994) cites Csordas (1983), (1988); Csordas and Kleiman (1990) among others

in this regard. Therefore it can be seen that instead of merely focusing on ―representation per

se, this tradition has investigated how meaning and interpretive practices interact with social,

psychological, and physiological processes to produce distinctive forms of illnesses and

illness trajectories‖ (Ibid).

Good (1994) says that research on the semantic networks associated with the core symbols

and symptoms in medical lexicons suggests that

―networks of associative meanings link illness to fundamental cultural

values of a civilization, that such networks have longevity and

resilience, and that new diseases (such as AIDS) or medical categories

acquire meaning in relation to existing semantic networks that are

often out of explicit conscious view of members of the society‖ (Ibid:

54-5).

Furthermore this research also suggests that these semantic networks are not only the simple

precipitates of social practices or explanatory models but are also ―deep cultural associations

(such as that between obesity and ―self control‖ in the U.S.) that appear to members of the

society simply as part of nature or an invariant of the social world and may therefore be part

of hegemonic structures (cf. B. Good and M. Good 1981)‖ (Ibid)

Of current concern within (circa 1994) this tradition is the difficulty, shared with sufferers, of

the representation of ―suffering and experience in our ethnographic accounts, the problematic

relation of experience to cultural forms such as narratives, and the efforts to understand the

grounding of such experience in local moral worlds‖ (Ibid). In these so-called ―experience

near‖ accounts the rendering of a present body has been important. A phenomenological

theoretical orientation has been used by some to study of the ―medium and structure of

experience, conceiving the body as subject of knowledge and experience and meaning as

prior to representation‖ (Ibid). Along with studies on embodiment (Csordas 1990),

phenomenology has become increasing important in ―investigating the relation of meaning

and experience as intersubjective phenomena‖ (Ibid).

42

Illness representations as mystification: views from “critical” medical

anthropology

A body of scholarship which has elaborated on Foucault‘s assertion that ―when there is

power, there is resistance‖ (Foucault 1978: 95-96) counters the tendency to see those who

suffer oppression as passive (Ibid: 58). Ong's (1987, 1988) study used the concept of

resistance to analyze how the young female Malaysian factory workers experienced violent

spirit possessions to express their reactions to ―changes in their identity and to demeaning

work conditions‖ (Ibid). Similarly Lock's (1990) study of the complaints of nevra by Greek

women in Montreal shows how this malaise ―give[s] voice to oppression‖ but simultaneously

―reinforce[s] differences‖ and situates them in a socially ―dangerous liminal position‖ (Ibid).

This tradition therefore shows that the language and action of illness or possession can

function to covertly articulate social and political meanings. This form of ―critical‖ medical

anthropology serves to advance Allan Young's (1982) challenge that medical anthropology

should develop ―a position which gives primacy to the social relations which produce the

forms and distribution of sickness in society‖ (Ibid). These ―thick descriptions‖ can ―reveal

how oppressive global and societal forces are present in small details of living and dying‖

(Ibid).

Despite the apparent hegemony of the doctor over the docile body of the patient, medical

treatment is ―also a conversation, a dance, a search for significance, the application of simple

techniques that save, lives and alleviate pain, [and] a complex technological imagination of

immortality‖ (Ibid). Medicine also mediates, in Good's (1994) view, between soteriology

(salvation) and physiology and he goes on to suggest that ―illness combines physical and

existential dimensions, bodily infirmity and human suffering‖ (Ibid: 70). Therefore medicine,

despite its materialist grounding in the natural sciences, when analyzed as an activity ―joins

the material to the moral domain‖ (Ibid). To this end, ―Weber (1946: 267-301) held that

civilizations are organized around soteriological vision – an understanding of the nature of

suffering, and means of transforming or transcending suffering and achieving salvation. In

43

contemporary Western civilization, medicine is at the core of our soteriological vision‖

(Ibid).

15. The Soteriological (salvation) Function of Medicines

Good (1994) suggests that medicine plays a very particular soteriological function in modern

societies, characterized as they are by materialist individualism (Ibid). Weber stressed the

pivotal role ―of ideas of redemption or salvation in the organization of civilizations‖ which is

dependent on the image of the world (Ibid). He wrote that before the onset of modernity,

―[o]ne could wish to be saved from political and social servitude and lifted into a Messianic

realm in the future of this world...One could wish to escape being incarcerated in an impure

body and hope for a purely spiritual existence (Weber 1946: 280)‖ (Ibid). Whereas in the

modern world, it is Medicine which frames to a large extent our ―contemporary image of

what constitutes suffering‖ and our culture's vision of redemption because it is the deep

commitment to biological individualism, where the spirit is an increasingly ―‗residual

category‘ (Comaroff 1985: 181)... that the maintenance of human life and the reduction of

physical suffering have become paramount‖ (Ibid). ―Sickness, death, and finitude are [now

therefore] found in the corpse, that is, in the human body itself‖ (Ibid). Salvation, or at least

some partial representation of it, is therefore present in the ―technical efficacy of medicine‖

(Ibid).

16. Lifeworlds as Worlds of Experience

The ―lifeworld,‖ the Lebenswelt, is the world of our common, immediate lived experiences.

For many this is the world of reality. Science is grounded in this lifeworld and assumes a

particular perspective and attitude toward reality thereby constituting particular forms of

knowledge (Ibid: 122). The Scientific world is however only one of several ―worlds‖ of

experience, such as religious, dream, music, art and common sense ―worlds‖ of experience

and knowledge (Ibid). Phenomenology attempts to give a direct account of these experiences

(Ibid). The rhythms and disruptions of experience presume a socially organized lifeworld

44

(Ibid). Therefore ―a description of the contours of the lifeworld, and a description of the

contours of the social world as experienced requires attention not only to the cognitive

shaping of experience, but to the sensual body as well‖ (Ibid).

―The self is constituted in relation to a world, and it is not only through direct description of

embodied experience but through the description of that lifeworld that we have access to the

selves of others‖ (Ibid). In some cases of illness the sense that the world we live in is

common to those around us gives way, and the significance of life shifts so that the world of

the sufferer - in Scary's (1985) expression: ―the world is transformed or 'unmade'‖ (Ibid).

Good (1994) discusses the narrative structures of chronic pain sufferers and concludes that

they ―follow patterns all too recognizable to those who study chronic pain in Western

culture‖ (Ibid: 120). That is, Soma is juxtaposed to Psyche (Ibid) The tendency is therefore

for

―the body [to be treated] as [the] object of treatment and source of

hope [which is then] juxtaposed [to the] life history as the source

of suffering and the psyche the object of therapy....All narratives

are... stories about lived experience... and so accounts [tend to] link

...lived experience to an underlying coherence, a story line, a

meaning‖ (Ibid).

These stories, as Paul Ricoeur (1981a: 278) says, ―extract a configuration from a succession‖

and the story line has a quality of ―'directness,' a teleology, a sense that the story is going

somewhere (Ibid). The narratives are aimed not only at ―describing the origins of suffering,

but at imagining its location and source and imagining a solution to the predicament‖ (Ibid:

121). However, when the healing of the two narratives fails to materialize neither narrative

(the psyche or the soma) gains authority ―and the self is threatened with dissolution‖ (Ibid).

Shutz's “Multiple Realities”

In ―On Multiple Realities,‖ Shutz (1971) argues that the common sense world, as opposed

the scientific, religious etc worlds, has the characteristic of taking objects for granted rather

45

than submitting them to critical attention and so is somewhat divorced from the worlds where

theory and imagination predominate. Good (1994) suggests that examining how illness

―unmakes‖ or ―systematically subverts‖ the common sense world could further social and

cultural analysis (Ibid).

Therefore knowing what constitutes this common sense reality would be a useful starting

point, and Shutz (1971) indicates six of these features (Ibid).

1. The specific mode of experiencing the self, in this common-sense reality, is that the

―author‖ of activities (and the ―originator‖ of on-going actions) is an ―undivided total

self‖ (Ibid). In contrast to this ―undivided total self,‖ the experience of chronic pain

and illness can turn the body into an object, that is, a ―distinct and alien from or even

alien to the experiencing and acting self‖ (Ibid). This can shape not only the

experience but also the experienced world of the sufferer (Ibid: 125).

2. Shutz (1971) argues that there is a ―form of sociality‖ typical of common-sense

reality and that it is one of the common assumptions in common-sense reality that

the world we experience is inhabited by others who share that world with us (Ibid).

When this assumption is called into doubt they can feel alienated from the everyday

world of work and accomplishment (Ibid). Now when you have a chronic condition

that essentially undermines the close link between the visual and the real in the

clinical practices of medicine, the failure to classify and bring the illness into the

social realm of cause and effect causes the sufferer to doubt their own suffering

because of the lack of social validation (Ibid). If the words of the sufferer are

doubted then their world is called into doubt along with its author and so the world

and the self of the author become threatened with dissolution (Ibid).

3. Shutz (1971: 214-18) argued that the experience of a ―common time perspective‖ is a

subtle assumption in common-sense reality and is sometimes called into question in

the experiences sufferers of chronic conditions (Ibid). ―Time caves in. Past and

present lose their order‖ and thereby the private world of the sufferer ―not only loses

its relation to the world in which others live, [but] its very organizing dimensions

46

begin to break down. Pain [and suffering] threatens to unmake the world and in turn

to subvert the self‖ (Ibid).

4. There is the order of consciousness in the common-sense world which is

characterized by ―wide awakeness‖ and full active attention.

5. There is a natural attitude in common-sense reality which is to suspend doubt in

appearances, as Shutz (1971: 288) says we ―take the world and its objects for granted

until counterproof imposes itself‖ and we ―live as though the present extends itself

indefinitely‖ (Ibid: 127). When this natural attitude fails the sufferer then there is

often a sense of betrayal that the taken for granted world has been somehow stolen

from them.

6. The everyday world is made up of intentional projects, this is lost to many suffers of

chronic illness.

17. Symbolization; the Struggle for a Name

The systematic dissolution of the lifeworld is countered in chronic illness sufferers by ―a

human response to find or fashion meaning, to reconstitute the world or as Scary (1985: 6)

says, ―to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain itself into avenues of objectification‖ (Ibid:

128). In this way many healing activities, including medical activities, can be interpreted as

devoted to reconstituting the threatened lifeworld (Ibid).

These take shape in the form of diagnostic, therapeutic, the construction of meaningful

narratives and occupational therapies which all can be seen as seeking to reconstitute the

lifeworld of the ill (Ibid). Diagnosis is an effort to construct an ontological source for the

symptoms and locate it an objectifiable and localizable order in which the cause is ―known‖

(Ibid).

Similarly ―narrativization is a process of locating suffering in history, of placing events in a

meaningful order in time‖ (Ibid). Also, because history is implicitly the study of change it

opens up an imaginable future in which the illness is overcome and a positive ending to the

story is held in the present time which encourages hope, even in the deepest moments of

adversity (Ibid). Therefore, as Good (1994) asserts, one of the central aspects of healing is

47

the ―symbolization of the source of suffering, to find an image around which a narrative can

take shape‖ (Ibid).

Unfortunately sometimes the source of the suffering, particularly for those with chronic

illnesses, ―refuses to speak... and resist[s]... symbolization‖ and refuses to 'answer' to a name,

though many names have been proposed (Ibid: 129). Examples of the names which have

been posited are ―childhood trauma‖ (for a generation of therapists), localization by

biomedical diagnoses – but when these fail the search does not stop, this is because the

naming of the origin of the pain or suffering is a ―critical step in the remaking of the world,

in the authoring of an integrated self‖ (Ibid).

The role of symbolization in healing, as discussed by Leihardt's (1961) study of the Dinka

experience of possessing spirits (demons), suggests that this form of symbolization ―may be

understood to represent complexes of Dinka experience... which they understand to be the

grounds of their experience‖ (Ibid). He writes that:

―Without these powers or images or an alternative to them there

would be for the Dinka no differentiation between experience of the

self and of the world which acts upon it. Suffering, for example, could

be merely ―lived‖ or endured. With the imaging of the grounds of

suffering in a particular Power, the Dinka can grasp its nature

intellectually in a way that satisfies them, and to some extent

transcend and dominate in this act of knowledge. With this

knowledge, this separation of a subject and an object in experience,

there arises for them also the possibility of creating a form of

experience they desire, and of freeing themselves symbolically from

what they must otherwise passively endure ([Leihardt 1961: 170]

cited in Good 1994: 130).

In the modern world these so-called demons ―remain latent sources of objectification. Unlike

the experience of the Dinka, in the modern world demons are not fully integrated into the

intersubjective world. Demons are therefore not ―social beings which serve to join

consciousness to the social world, subject to ritual action and thus forces for healing‖ (Ibid).

More commonly, in the Western orientation, relief is sought in the dominant identifications

of illness with a physical lesion or psychological trauma (Ibid). Good's (1994) example, of

Brian, a patient suffering from chronic pain, for whom the medical and psychological

48

explanations have failed shows that there are alternative, creative responses. For Brian, in the

absence of a shared cultural myth such as the Dinka, it is a clinging to the expression

afforded by his ―art work as a form of imaginative self-extension, of projecting

consciousness into the world... which maintains his relation to the social order [and] enabled

him to cling tenuously to the everyday world‖ (Ibid).

18. The Making and Unmaking of Worlds

In discussing the nature of grief and mourning as a way of being in the world Good (1994)

suggests that ―[f]or the mourner, the world... appears unfamiliar; people are strange, the

landscape unnatural, movement stops midstream...nature appears alien‖ (Ibid: 130-1). When

healing has taken place the world is reconstituted or put back together and the conversation

with 'the environment' resumes (Ibid).

The resumption of this conversation with 'the world' is often a long and tortuous process and

Good (1994) posits that ritual work is often aimed precisely at rebuilding the ―conventional

world, returning solidity to the social order of the survivors, returning the ―houseness‖ to our

houses, the ―streetness‖ to our streets, masking the absolute change that has occurred‖ (Ibid).

―Sickness subjects man to the vital rhythms of his body,‖ wrote Merleau-Ponty wrote (1964:

172) and therefore interrupts the normal rhythms of social life (Ibid). These normal rhythms

of lived experience include ―moving from activity to rest, from work to play, concentration

to relaxation (Ibid). Exclusive involvement in one or the other is a sign of pathology, or a

moral flaw (Ibid). With the focus on the vital rhythms of the body penetrating uncontrollably

in the social rhythms of social experience this distorting presence causes the body to be

objectified and alienated from the (normal) experiencing self (Ibid: 132). When medical

practices fail to successfully localize the source of suffering objectification is unsuccessful.

The experience ―is thus proclaimed subjective, a functional disorder of the subjective self.

The sufferer is then held responsible for producing their own suffering (Ibid).

Good (1994) goes on to argue that ―symbolization‖ and narrative can be understood better as

―invoking‖ the origins of suffering rather than a ―depiction‖ of them (Ibid). This is because

49

language, outside of the empiricist, referential view of language depicting an objective world

'out there', is also metaphorical and subjective (Ibid: 132-3). Charles Taylor (1985a, 1985b)

argues that this ―invocative function is often more primary than the describing or depictive

functions of language‖ (Ibid). Metaphors become then a way of ―invoking and formulating

reality‖ (Ibid). Placebo drug research (for example Moerman 1983) has made this invoking

of reality in the process of diagnosis and medicinal and therapeutic treatment patently

obvious (Ibid). The representation of the complex causes of illnesses is certainly partial at

best in most cases in any case (Ibid).

Disease occurs not in the body but of course in life. That is, it is ―not only in the body – in

the sense of the ontological order of the great chain of being – but in time, in place, in

history, and in the context of lived experience and the social world (Ibid). Therefore

narratives are central to the understanding of illness for sufferers because in the spaces

opened up by the narratives these experiences are not divorced from other aspects of life and

experience (Ibid). Hayden White (1981) writes,

―if we view narration and narrativity as the instruments by which the

conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated,

arbitrated, or resolved in discourse, we begin to comprehend both the

appeal of narrative and the grounds for refusing it (1981: 4-5)‖ (Ibid).

Narratives, as such, are the basis for ―moralizing judgments‖ (White 1981: 2-3) and to the

―why me?‖ type of questioning (Ibid). In this sense it is crucial for making sense of suffering

in the moral order and is the pathway to hope (Ibid).

The Narrative Representation of Illnesses

Early (1982; cf 1985, 1988) suggests that, from the listening to everyday stories of illness in

Cairo that, these narratives ―develop an interpretation of illness in relation to a local

explanatory logic and the biographic context of the illness, to negotiate right action in the

face of uncertainty, and to justify actions taken, thus embedding the illness and therapeutic

efforts within local moral norms‖ (Ibid: 140-2).

50

Kleinman (1988b) argues that ―the study of the experience of illness has something

fundamental to teach each of us about the human condition‖ ([Kleinman 1988b: xiii] cited in

Ibid), and demonstrates how current practices in medicine have alienated the chronically ill

from their care providers and led practitioners to relinquish ―that aspect of the healer's art

that is most ancient, most powerful, and most existentially rewarding‖ (p. xiv) (Ibid).

Good (1994) discusses the ―virtual plot‖ which he says is when the story or rather the ―plot‖

is incomplete, not only because the illness is ongoing, but because the suffer/story teller is

continually trying to find out what is really happening, ―what the real story is, what story has

the potential to invoke a cure‖ (Ibid:145). The narrative being told from ―the blind

complexity of the present as it is experienced‖ ([Ricoeur 1981a: 278] cited in Ibid) is then

still actively engaged in what Good (1994) calls ―emplotting‖ the condition from which they

suffer and in seeking a plot which opens the way to the desired outcome they seek (Ibid:

146).

Disease as represented in biomedicine is localized in the body, in discrete sites or

physiological processes, whereas the narratives of those who are subjects of suffering

represent illness, by contrast, represent it as present in life (Ibid). Illness, in the emic

perspective, is grounded in human historicity, in the temporality of individuals and families

and communities (Ibid). It is present as potent memories and as desire (Ibid). It embodies

contradictions and multiplicity (Ibid: 157-8). It cannot be represented from a single vantage

but in Iser's (1978) words it is constituted, rather, as a

―network of perspectives... As the readers wandering viewpoint travels

between the segments, its constant switching during the time-flow of

reading intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of

perspectives, within which each perspective opens up a view not only

of others but also of the intended imaginary object [1978: 197]‖ (Ibid).

Good (1994) goes on to assert that ―illness, present in imagination and experience, is

constituted with an openness to change and healing‖ (Ibid).

51

The Narrative Positioning of Suffering

The illness belongs not to the individual but to the whole family (Ibid: 160). This is very

evident in Claire's construction of the ontological source of her illness.

The Narrative Shaping of Illnesses

An obvious reason for the rejection of illness narratives as interpreted as fiction is that

―illness is all too real, and its attendant fears and misery ―cannot be wished away‖ (Ibid:

163). Any analogy of such experience to ―fiction‖ has the potential to devalue suffering and

misrepresent the very essence of the experience (Ibid). However, disease as embedded in life

can only be represented through a creative conceptual response (Ibid). Its ―thereness‖ in the

body must be rendered ―there‖ in life (Ibid). And this process, even more than the referential

or ―locutionary‖ processes of biomedical representation, requires an aesthetic response, an

active, synthetic process of constituting in an effort to grasp what is certainly there but is

indeterminable in form (Ibid).

19. Aesthetics, Rationality, and Medical Anthropology

Illness as an ―aesthetic object‖ refers to how we analyze the disjunction between disease as

an object (or condition of a physical body), as it is popularly (and medically) conceived, and

disease as a presence in a life or in a social world (Ibid: 166). The proclivity for naturalism

and biological reductionism is thus challenged. ―The aesthetic object is a particularly

complex and dynamic form of relationship [it is] a relationship which depends upon and yet

transcends performance and audience, reader and text, the material object and a reflexive,

sensuous response‖ (Ibid: 167). Thus Good (1994) asserts that

―any cross-cultural study thus faces the methodological and

theoretical challenge of investigating illness and healing with full

awareness of this multiplicity and with methods the synthesizing

activities by which disease is made an object of personal, social,

political, and medical significance‖ (Ibid).

52

For individual sufferers their acquaintance with their chronic illness involves a process which

Good (1994) describes as similar to that of the experience of a reader reading a text (Ibid:

170). He quotes Iser (1978) who argued that the characters of a literary or dramatic text and

imaginary worlds which they inhabit are not entirely fixed by the text but instead the partially

indeterminate text provokes the imagination of the reader and so the characters in the text are

―constituted through a complex relation among text, reader, and the

social and historical moment of each, at once dependent on and

transcending these. The synthesis is not a single, final act of the

reader, but an on-going process, joining memory and anticipation, a

process imaged by Iser as a ―moving viewpoint‖‖ (Ibid).

This is reiterated in Iser's (1978: 197) remarks which highlight that this form of ―knowing‖

requires a synthesis which transcends particularity:

―As the reader's wandering viewpoint travels between all these

segments, its constant switching during the time-flow of reading

intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of

perspectives, within which each perspective opens up a view not

only of others but also of the intended imaginary object, of which it

only forms one aspect. The object itself is a product of

interconnections”” (Ibid [emphasis by Good (1994)]).

So Good infers that in becoming acquainted with a chronic illness, an individual's

understanding is informed form a variety of sources and held in a kind of narrative tension as

discussed by Iser (1978) above (Ibid). In this tension, then, no synthesis is ever complete

(Ibid).

The term ―heteroglossia‖, introduced by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his analysis

of the dialogical quality of texts and their interpretation, serves to highlight that ―illness is

not only constituted in the ―wandering viewpoint‖ of the individual – the sufferer, a family

member, a care provider (Ibid). It is also multiply constituted in ways that are often

conflicting (Ibid). In this sense

―illness is essentially dialogical...Thus, while core symbols in a

medical lexicon may indeed condense or hold in tension a powerful

53

network of meanings, the process of synthesis is not only semiotic,

but social, dialogical, imaginative and political. And so too should be

our analyses‖ (Ibid: 173).

―The problem we face is not whether there is a correspondence between language and the

empirical world, but that there are too many correspondences‖ (Ibid:177) ―Meaning and

knowledge are always constituted in human experience, formulated and apprehended through

symbolic forms and distinctive interpretive practices‖ (Ibid)

―Symbolic practices and our technologies mediate knowledge. They

open worlds to exploration; they open to understanding aspects of

the natural world and world of human experience. And meaning and

knowledge are always constituted in relation to such worlds of

experience‖ (Ibid).

Therefore reality cannot be observed except from the point of view to which each of us has

been inescapably assigned in the universe (Ibid). ―That reality and this point of view are

correlative, and just as reality cannot be invented, so the point cannot be feigned either‖

(Ibid).

In conclusion, then, I am convinced, along with Good (1994),

―of the threat of the dominance of instrumental rationality [of

biomedicine] to human freedom and to our experience of the

meaningful, mythological, and transcendent dimensions of illness,

healing, and human existence‖ (Ibid: 181).

A Medical Anthropology which is formulated ―in the language of belief and rational

behavior [of formal or modern medical institutions] contributes...to the advancement of

―cognitive rationality‖ in matters of health and healing, and thus helps reproduce a narrow

vision of medicine as the domain of instrumental rationality‖ (Ibid). Therefore in making

―making explicit the narrative and moral dimensions of routine clinical practice,

investigating illness in the context of local moral worlds, and rethinking medicine's common-

sense epistemological claims‖ in the practice of Medical Anthropology is vital in any

―attempt to resist the encroachment of instrumental rationality into this domain of the

lifeworld‖ (Ibid: 181).

54

20. Soul Loss

This chapter will look at how this view of the experience of illness has been articulated

within through ethnographies concerning the phenomenon of ―Soul Loss‖ or ―Spirit Loss,‖

and anthropological explanations of the experience of illness.

―Soul Loss‖ or ―Spirit Loss‖ is a very interesting constitution of illness and the form of

healing associated with it, with regard to chronic fatigue in general and especially with

regards to Claire's story, is illuminating. Although I have already detailed, citing Good

(1994), that it is very difficult to translate the understanding of illnesses across cultures,

notwithstanding this, there are however remarkable similarities between the cases that I

explore in this chapter and the experiences that Claire has been through.

It is however necessary to understand that Claire is a University educated modern, western

person. For this reason the factors detailing what could contribute to so called 'soul loss' for

Claire are very different. I would however like to postulate that the experience of the

Cartesian Self, a virus called (Epstein Bar virus) glandular fever, very painful and difficult

relations with her mother, isolation, social anxiety, alienation anxiety linked to

objectification through the capitalist rationale and is related to the perceived material

reductionism of the medicalization discourse, and an internal logos of controlling behaviour

may all contribute to an 'existential fright' (Burkitt 1999: 141) which could cause in a

western sense a broken heart, or depression that all contribute to so called ―soul loss.‖

Before detailing the anthropological comparison's I would like to also offer an explanation

for the healing that Claire has experienced through Neo-shamanic work. This has included

breaking through the social barriers concerning the body, rituals, connecting to other people,

the environment, her own body (through breathwork etc.) as well as somatic experiences

(touch, smell, etc) which I believe correlate very well to Desjarleis's explanations of how the

soul is 'hooked' back into the body. From Good's (1994) view point it could be interpreted as

remaking Claire's lifeworld.

55

I will undertake a chronological look at this phenomenon so as to foreground why I believe

theories of embodiment are so important for my theoretical orientation with regards to

chronic fatigue. These theories will then be taken up later to expand the analytical

understanding of this illness as it is represented in Claire's story by introducing a rendering of

Connolly and Craig's (2002) insights from their article Stressed Embodiment: Doing

Phenomenology in the Wild and lastly Burkitt's (1999) relational embodiment theory as

outlined in his book, Bodies of Thought will be comprehensively examined.

Anthropological Explanations for Soul Loss

One of the pioneers in the study of the experience of illness was John Gillin, who by 1939

had already taken a psychological stance on the phenomenon of culture (Reina 1976:

82). He posited that culture ―existed in the minds of the individuals who compose …society‖

(Reina 1976: 82). Drawing on this theoretical model of culture he published the first

sustained account of a ritual healing ceremony for ―Soul Loss‖ as performed by the

Pokomam Indians in the highlands of Guatemala. His well known article ―Magical Fright,‖

first published in Psychiatry (1948) and reprinted in Lessa and Vogt's Reader in Comparative

Religion (1958, 1965), has played a foundational role for later work in ethnomedicine and

the anthropology of religion (Ibid).

In his ethnographic essay, ―Magical Fright,‖ Gillin dramatically presents a case to suggest

parallels between native treatment through a ritual healing ceremony and modern therapeutic

measures (Ibid). ―Magical Fright‖ (espantos or ―Soul Loss‖), he stated,

―exists in the thinkings of people and in the culture of the group

and produces elements which for all practical purposes are quite

real. A man‘s anxiety does not have to be based on the germ theory

of disease to make him ill,‖ he concludes in his original essay. This

straight forward approach to ultra-psychic processes and culture

was considered quite unique at the time‖ (Ibid).

The main point being made is that the subjective experience of traditional illnesses is shaped

both by the cultural background of individuals, and by the sociological features of the setting

where these individuals live.

56

Gillin‘s approach to the loss or theft of one's soul or ―Magical Fright,‖ which is said to

dislodge a victim‘s soul, was however still coached within an essentially functionalist

theoretical model. His explanation of the curative rite was that it was enacted to make certain

communal trouble - which was somatised (or embodied) in the body of the afflicted person -

public. Gillin's analysis therefore centred on the way relations between Indian and Ladino

[The Ladino population can for the purposes of this discussion be glossed as the descendants

of European settlers] populations were renegotiated by imagery articulated within the ―soul

loss‖ healing ritual (Lincoln 2001: 778).

In his ethnography he describes the ritual healing ―of an elderly woman [who‘s life] hung by

the proverbial thread‖ (Ibid). Through this example he ―attempts to demonstrate how the

sociocultural system created specific kinds of insecurity and disquiet, along with equally

specific mechanisms for their relief‖ (Ibid). This was premised upon

―a proverb he heard in San Luis that constituted fear as an index of

culture: Los temores que un hombre tenga hablan delpais de lo que

venga (the fears a man harbours speak of the country he comes

from)‖ (Ibid: 779).

The treatment of this malaise is carried out by a healer by practicing a gruelling night-long

ceremony along with other expeditions which enact the recovery of the lost soul (Ibid: 779).

It is the relations with their Ladino neighbours that Gillin emphasizes as source of the illness.

The soul stealing spirits, he recounts, are repeatedly marked as Ladinos (Ibid). Healing is

effected by the performance of rituals by the healer, along with the entire social network of

the afflicted person.

It is important to note that the healer inhabits an ambivalent space in the community. As

such, he deals with the spirits calmly and in his repertoire refers to them as compadres (i.e.

the god parents of one's children: a very important institution in the local cultural milieu) or

―virtual kin‖ (Ibid). It is through the healer‘s mediation and the collective performance of the

rituals that the soul of the afflicted individual is said to be returned and the cure effected.

57

Lincoln‘s (2001) critique of Gillin‘s account of soul loss among the Pokomam focuses upon

what he sees as an over determination of inter cultural conflict at the expense of intra cultural

conflicts. He states that:

―Gillin's portrait of the patient emphasizes her debilitating fear, her

extreme vulnerability, and her ultimate resilience. In this, he made

her a trope, more precisely a synecdoche, for the Pokomam

community and, what is more, to all subaltern populations who face

the loss of their land and, with it, their way of life, their dignity, self

confidence, sense of purpose, and their capacity (even desire) to

survive—in a word, the loss of their souls‖ (Ibid: 787).

Lincoln first criticises the way Gillin‘s account ―reflects the healer's perspective more than

that of the other Pokomam‖ (Ibid). In so doing he emphasises how the healer imaginatively

or ritually creates a space in which fears and anxieties attributed to the Other (i.e. the

Ladinos) can be negotiated and overcome and neglects the sometimes contrary sentiments of

the rest of the villagers (Ibid).

Lincoln (2001) here states that the

―faith in such processes [of ritual negotiation] demands a minimal

sentiment of affinity: an understanding that the Other is not innately

and incontrovertibly evil, but a being like oneself, with whom one

can establish meaningful dialogue and productive relations‖ (Ibid).

In doing so Gillen, in accordance with his functionalist orientation, does not

account for the substance of the phenomena and therefore fails to stress how ―the

demonic nature of these spirits normalizes the terror experienced by the Indian

population, who represented their Ladino Others as the very incarnation of evil‖

(Ibid: 788).

Theorising the soul loss primarily in terms of the Indian-Ladino cleavage, with relatively

little explicit attention to the specifics of gendered status of the afflicted person along with

the attendant intra cultural problems, is, in Lincoln‘s (2001) analysis, an omission which

makes Gillen‘s assessment of the ritual incomplete (and biased).

58

Gillen did however introduce a reading of the sick human body as ―site where social

pressures and tensions are experienced most acutely‖ (Ibid: 791). He also treated fear as a

social product and postulated that an analysis of this fear, as manifested through illness, can

broaden the understanding of ―contradictions and lacerations that divide a community‖

(Ibid). The body is also situated in the analysis as site of ―suffering and resistance for

embattled populations‖ (Ibid). Finally, Lincoln (2001) concludes, Gillin showed how through

the minute description of a single ritual performance the larger socio-cultural issues afflicting

the society can be explored through ethnographic research.

Robert Desjarleis's (1989;1992;1996) treatment of soul loss and the healing methods

employed focuses on the aesthetics of the act of divination performed by the shamans of the

Yolmo people, who live in the Nepalese Himalayas. Soul loss here is presented is such a way

so as to lay ―out the somatic, geographic, emotional, and social landscapes of pain through

which lost souls and healers travel in the universe of the Yolmo‖ (Aggarwal 1997: 497).

In Presence (1996), Desjarleis discusses ―spirit loss‖, ―a sensibility bound by loss, fatigue,

and listlessness,‖ and how the Yolmo Shamans heal and ―create a new ...vitality, presence

and attentiveness in those who are healed by their ministerings‖ (Desjareis 1996: 143). He

describes this 'spirit' which is lost as a ―spiritual force that courses through the entire body

and upon which rest other psychological functions (volition, motivation, energy)‖ (Ibid:

144). In the local idiom the understanding of what a spirit is, briefly stated, the ―heartmind –

[which is] the locus of personal knowledge, desire and imagination‖ (Ibid).

―Spirit Loss‖ is described as when the spirit is said to leave the body when frightened or

startled and then be carried by witches or ghosts to the ―land of the dead‖ (Ibid). A certain

―dullness‖ wells up in the ―heartmind‖, dimming the afflicted persons ―thoughts, memory,

and sense of alertness‖ (Ibid). ―Spirit Loss‖ is also an illness which manifests somatically

(i.e. in the body): for example with regard to the heart, the pulse slows and becomes irregular

―like a watch that is not ticking properly,‖ as one woman put it (Ibid). ―Spirit Loss‖ in short

is a loss of an aesthetic ―sense of presence‖ (Ibid).

59

The ritual act of healing employed by the Shaman, he says, ―changes how a body feels by

altering what it feels‖ (Ibid). This is achieved through a ―cacophony of music, taste, sight,

touch, and [a] kinesthic‖ activation of the senses (Ibid). Focusing on the sensate, the core

phenomena which are experienced in the healing is that ―bodies become ‗lighter,‘ heartminds

become ‗brighter,‘ and the sense of fatigue and listlessness that troubles a spiritless person is

‗cut‘ from the body‖ (Ibid: 149).

Explanations for the efficacy of the healing rite can be couched in various theoretical

orientations. From the intellectualist perspective, Desjarleis says, it could be attributed to the

faith or belief in the patients mind that this ritual can ameliorate the illness – this in turn is

premised on the efficacy of the ritual in previous instances (Ibid: 150). This follows

Malinsowki (1945) who stated that ―ritual acts are geared not to mean something, but to

enact something.‖ In other words, in this view, partaking in the ritual enacts the belief or

faith in the ‗cure‘ and makes it ‗real‘.

Similarly the symbolist position would explain the efficacy of the ritual by emphasising the

transformations in the worldview or symbolic categories of the afflicted patient (Ibid).

Desjarleis therefore says that according to this stance, the

―shaman …evokes symbols or metaphors that provide a tangible

―language‖ through which patients can express, understand, or

transform the personal or interpersonal conflicts underlying their

illness" (ibid).

Although both theoretical orientations go some way to explaining the structural logic of the

healing rite, they fail in explaining how or why the Yolmo shamans heal (Ibid). This is

because the structure of the Yolmo shaman‘s mythic narrative is less like

―a mythic narrative, progressing from one stage to another, than an

imagistic poem, evoking an array of tactile images which, through

their cumulative effect evoke a change of sensibility in the bodies of

its participants – a change, that is, in the lasting mood or disposition

that contribute to the sensory grounds of a person‘s existence‖

(Ibid).

60

Desjarleis argues that taking into to consideration the ―visceral impact‖ rather than the

―metaphorical structure‖ shifts the focus from Yolmo epistemologies of illness and healing,

which exist as abstract categories, to incorporate sensorial criteria and changes in how the

patient feels (Ibid).

The importance of stressing the visceral is stressed because, in the local parlance, it is the

through feeling that patients know themselves to be healed (Ibid). To this end Desjarleis

states that the

―healing transformations take place not within some cognitive

domain of the brain or heartmind, but within the visceral reaches of

the eyes, the ears, the skin, and the tongue. Indeed the feeling of

rejuvenation (rather than just its idea or symbolic expression) is

essential‖ (Ibid).

Desjarleis's research (which is presented in book length form in ―Body and Emotion:

The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing‖ (1992)) if viewed from the perspective of theories of

'embodiment', is about another kind of rehabilitation - the healing of anthropology itself

(Aggarwal 1997: 497). Viewed in this way,

―it is Desjarlais who is the medium, the hybrid interpreter who

straddles dual worlds, the diviner with "an accent on the

sensory" (p. 14) who journeys to Nepal and apprentices himself

to a local healer, the exorcist who drives out the demon theories

that afflict the anthropological order. What the author seeks to

recover is an embodied knowledge, an aesthetic of experience

that has, in his view, been ignored by generations of

anthropologists who privilege discursive, cognitive, symbolic,

or social forms of analysis‖ (Ibid).

The 'cure' that Desjarlais prescribes requires a "sensate treatment" where stories, sentiments,

and memories are conveyed through cartographic (i.e. geographical) images, where valuable

anthropological insights are obtained from the ethnographic encounter and the resulting

"tension between symbolic systems (how reality is defined, the body held or experience

articulated)" (Ibid).

61

In conclusion this brief survey of how ―soul loss,‖ and its amelioration, has been understood

by anthropologists, using the aforementioned examples, charts a course of theoretical

development in which the

―traditional analysis of the body as cultural artefact and

template of meaning ([other iconical examples would include

Mary] Douglas, 1966, 1970; [Victor] Turner, 1967) has been

remobilised within such contexts as postcoloniality, post-

modern discourse, gender theory and discourses of

medicalization‖ (Lester 2004: 414).

For the most part, however, 'embodiment' as conceptualised in these approaches, which

ranges from Gillin's 'psychological functionalism,' through the Structuralist, Semiotic to Post

Structuralist explanations, tend to replicate the Cartesian (Material vs. Symbolic)

distinctions, with the body presented either as an essential source of meaning ...[or] as an

object of cultural inscription‖ (Ibid: 515). In short, following Desjarleis 1996, it is now

important, theoretically, to aim at ―'rematerialis[ing]' the body while simultaneously

analyzing this process of materialisation itself as one of social construction within

relationships of power‖ (Ibid).

21. Illness conceived as the wild body

In Stressed Embodiment: Doing Phenomenology in the Wild Maureen Connolly and Tom

Craig (2002) seek to addresses a ―curiously taken-for-granted dimension of 'lifeworlds', that

is, the so- called undeniable 'givenness' of internal processes of ongoing concordance which

take bodies as primarily stable, healthy, productive entities in the world‖ (Connolly and

Craig 2002: 451). They examine the radical implications of what they call ―the politics of

sensory integration and ask what invisible structures are exposed when sensory integration is

not presumed from the outset‖ (Ibid: 451-2[emphasis in original). They argue that sensory

integration forms part of the pre-reflexive lifeworlds for normal and productive persons

(Ibid). Therefore by examining the experiences of these so-called wild bodies they expose

these taken for granted assumptions and constitutions which for healthy people are taken for

granted.

62

They use as their contexts of investigation ―the enigmatic lived experiences of Autism/PDD

and of the autoimmune disease referred to most widely today as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

(ME/CFIDS/FM)‖ (Ibid). It is ―the lived experience of dys-integrated sensory

perception‖ they discuss because, as they say, they ―take seriously the role of the actually

embodied, involved, and pathic subject‖ (Ibid). They argue that the wild body transgresses

―the ongoing stases of ―ablist‖ and ―normalizing‖ boundary maintenance‖ (Ibid: 453).

In their outline they contend that Autism/PDD and adult-onset ruptures such as ME

―can manifest profound disruptions in sensory integration and

perceptual-motor functioning, especially executive

control/central processing challenges, amplified responses to

sensory input, and the dys-integration of sensory and

perceptual-motor functioning itself‖ (Ibid: 454).

They argue, through two examples which I will include below, that attempts to heal the

rupture experienced by Autism/PDD and M.E. sufferers are an ―ingenious (and somatically

honorable) ways of dwelling in these worlds of embodied discordance‖ (Ibid).

Example 1: Autism and Nudity

―Children and adults who live with autism/PDD may engage in what others perceive as

inappropriate nudity. Typical examples include going outside in cold weather wearing only

underwear or nothing at all, or removing clothing and pressing the naked body against a hard

or definitive surface, such as a wall or floor. Such behavior arises in response to a tactile

integration dysfunction around body image and object awareness problems related to bodily

boundaries – feeling the difference between self and not-self – and processing information

that comes from touch.

If we imagine that a person with autism/PDD does not sense his/her own body-self as distinct

from the world, then ―getting a feel‖ for the body-in-the-world by presenting the skin (as a

boundary) to an intense sensation such as cold air or a hard surface can be seen as an

ingenious experiment in sensory awareness. Such encounters with the world can then be seen

to ―ground‖ the body-subject as an individual contained and distinct from the world rather

63

than a porous entity through which sensations of the world flow indiscriminately (as if the

person were not there, i.e., amorphous or absent).

Example 2: ME and Odours

Connolly and Craig (2002) describe a person living with ME as inhabiting a body which is

―profoundly [and] intensely susceptible to sensory input that manifests itself across several

continua of discomfort and affect‖ (Ibid). For some ME sufferers, scents (perfumes, after-

shave, etc.) or chemicals etc. can be ―experienced as substantive invasions of the body‖

(Ibid). These ―bodily responses‖ can be so invasive so as to cause can be ―nausea, dizziness,

disorientation, headache, severe eye irritation, breathing difficulties, or otherwise

unexplained body aches, to name a few‖ (Ibid).

These sensory reactions have social ramifications upon individuals with ME. When they are

in public spaces, for example:

―that person faces competing bodily tolerable and culturally

acceptable choices – to move away quickly and abruptly or stay

and become increasingly ill/nauseous/congested while directing

the requisite mass of energy to attempting to endure – in the

moment – this sensory onslaught‖(Ibid).

Such overwhelming susceptibility to ―normal‖ sensory input, as can be imagined, has

significant consequences because the lived relation with others, objects, and places (their

lifeworld) is drastically unsettled (Ibid).

Connolly and Craig (2002) set out their manifesto on what research into the lived worlds of

discordant bodies in terms of ―lived textures of stressed embodiment as manifest in the over-

aroused nervous systems of persons with Autism and ME‖ reveals about ―the social world of

the stable, healthy, and productive body taken for granted in so many of our own – largely

normalized – cultural expectations‖ (Ibid).

This research then suggests offers an emic view in that ―pain, gesture, gait, posture,

sensation, and perception are bodily modes which are expected to be managed in socially

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appropriate ways if the social and political agendas of stability and productivity are to be

maintained‖ (Ibid).

22. Introduction to Burkitt’s (1999) Relational Theory of

Embodiment

The metaphor of the productive body is especially useful for the purposes of understanding

the issues that this research exposes about the experience of living with (and to some extent

through) chronic fatigue illness. This is a term advocated by Ian Burkitt (1999) in his book

entitled Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity and is meant to present the

corporeal presence as both ―trapped within relations of power but [also] as possessing the

capacities to change them‖ Burkitt 1999: 3). I was initially very interest in the notions of the

―wild body‖ (Connolly and Craig 2002: 451) because it unsettles the taken for granted norms

applied to healthy and productive bodies (compared to which illness is a pathology) which

the experience of a chronic fatigue sufferer aptly represents in the frustration of not being

able to control the body so as to 'fit in' to the norms and standards dictated by so-called

modern society.

The wild body also introduces the ―notion of the pre-social, irrational, emotional body that

must be contained and disciplined by a rational and orderly society‖ (Burkitt 1999: 3).

Burkitt's (1999) insightful theoretical proclamations on embodiment, by focusing on

relations, however encourage a view which is transcendent of the Cartesian paradigm which

juxtaposes 'Nature' and 'Society.' He therefore sees (as will be elaborated on in due course) a

reading of the body and emotions ―as having pattern and form because they are part of social

relations‖ (Ibid).

The so-called wild body, then, which seems to have a will of its own and does not conform to

the norms of 'modernity', can be seen as being re-formed by these relations in an

intersubjective fashion (Ibid). The so-called wildness of the body can then be repositioned as

the subject not conforming to the prevailing relations of power in society – in this case the

body (and its habitants) may appear opposed to the (perceived) social order but not

necessarily as therefore part of 'nature' (Ibid).

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Burkitt's (1999) productive body therefore does not have to take the view that this non-

conforming body is irrational or pre-social (Ibid). His thesis sets up a ―clash‖ between the

powerful and dominant social forces and the body, which is formed over longer time scales

than contemporary society, in which society does not always win (Ibid). This opens up a

space for the so-called 'wild body' to be 'productive' for the individual (in terms of a spiritual

path opening up as is common in the shamanic tradition when illness is a form of calling),

but not necessarily the society at large.

This is an interesting vantage for the analysis of the experience of chronic fatigue in Claire's

instance because in her search for healing and meaning she came to see her illness in a

spiritual fashion. Through the process work of Arnold Mindell, writings on eco-psychology,

like Derrick Jensen, she was lead toward a Neo-Shamanic way of dealing with the chronic

dissociation of self. She attended two Neo-Shamanic workshops which focused on

'connection'. That is connection to the environment, to the self, to spirituality and ultimately

to a healing path, the meaning of the illness and a community of fellow 'travelers'. Although I

cannot elaborate on this at this juncture, the theoretical insights that introduce below are, I

believe, very insightful for conceptualizing and contextualizing this overall process of living

and transcending chronic fatigue. What I intend by a thorough examination of this theory and

the following discussion is the not only expose the so-called norms common to western

modernity but also to trace their historical origins.

This is important because later I will attempt to use this discussion to frame the ethnography

and suggest that this particular response to the illness, as experienced by Claire, is directly

related to these issues in that her the healing methods used are attempts to counter hegemonic

threats to ontological anxiety, made worse by illness, but, common to Gidden's (1991) so-

called late modernity.

23. Cartesianism as a 'Lifeworld.'

The theory of the Cartesian dualism is so ingrained in Western thought that many

individuals, including (I believe) Claire, have grown accustomed to a way of understanding

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themselves as ―which divides their existence between mind and the body‖ (Ibid). This is

particularly so in the cognitivism which so popular in psychology, and to which Claire has

spent the last eight years attending psychotherapy at least two time per week 'religiously'

(Ibid: 7).

By refocusing the study away from the mind as a static entity, as it exists as such, and instead

focusing upon ―social relations, activity and human embodiment‖ the mind can be seen as

existing in the world instead as a disembodied entity as it does in the Cartesian paradigm

(Ibid). Similarly to undermine the biological reductionism, inherent in (most) western

thought, of the 'body as a machine' metaphor which limits the operations of the body to fixed

biological processes; the body is reconceived ―as a social and natural construction, as a

malleable organism which is open to re-formation through its location within networks of

historically variable social relations‖ (Ibid). This foregrounds the notion of the body as being

activated by social relations ―because it is brought into being and mobilized by its

positioning in the interweaving networks of human interdependence‖ (Ibid).

The body is therefore not merely affected by social relations ―but forms the basis for and

enters into the construction of social relations‖ ([Shilling 1993: 199] cited in Ibid). It follows

from this understanding that human attributes are neither natural (as biological reductionists

would have it) nor social (as constructionists would argue) – they are, although decisively

influenced by social relations, socio-natural because the body (in a material sense) is integral

to the construction of social relations (Ibid). Burkitt (1999) goes on to suggest that the

diversity of bodily dispositions and capacities (both intra and inter culturally) is due to the

fragmentary and disparate nature of human relations and the varied influence of social

relations upon individual subjects (Ibid).

Burkitt (1999), unlike most other critics of Cartesianism, develops a new explanatory model

with his ―notions of the productive, communicative, powerful and thinking body‖ as

metaphors to enable the presentation of our ―corporeal presence as not just trapped and

constrained within social relations, but as possessing the capacities to change such relations

and also to transform different aspect of the physical world‖ (Ibid). This transformation of

the physical or material world is achieved through the creation of artifacts which can be

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understood as ―prosthetic extensions of the body‖ because they are used to ―rework the

conditions of our existence‖ (Ibid).

Therefore he rejects the Cartesian legacy which has produced the conception of two

different realms of substances (mind and matter), replacing this with the notion of ―one,

complex reality‖ which conjoins thoughtful activity to the ―social and material contexts in

which activity takes place, including the means by which such activity is accomplished‖

(Ibid). This complex reality he argues ―includes the symbolic dimension..., but is irreducible

to the other dimensions of space and time‖ (Ibid).

The Cartesian dualism is however a distinct 'lifeworld' which is largely lived by individuals

in the western world as a historical experience of being divided between mind and body

(Ibid: 8). This much is evident from the interviews with Claire as well as the extracts from

her diary, yet it is also evident that in the search for meaning and a resolution to her suffering

that she has been trying to reconstitute this 'lifeworld' by healing this division (which at this

stage can be glossed as an effort to make herself whole or integrating her 'mind' with 'body').

Pursuing the Mind Body Connection:

A gloss of the Cartesian theory is that ―who we are" is not associated with our bodies, but

with our thought processes‖ (Ibid). In modernity then a person considered ―brain dead,‖ that

is if they can no longer think of their own existence, act or exercise free will – they are

considered dead (Ibid: 9). However by pursuing the mind body connection ―we find that

being embodied and located in the extended world of time and space is not only a necessary

precondition for thought, it is, rather, it‘s very basis‖ (Ibid).

The Cartesian theory is premised by beginning ―with the smallest indivisible entity and to

build, through reason, one's knowledge of larger complexes by working up to a picture of the

whole as constituted by its individual parts‖ (Ibid: 11). ―Such objects are ontologically prior

to the whole, which in turn can only be understood as a sum of their parts‖ (Ibid). Here we

can see how this is a mechanical metaphor for all material objects and their interrelationships

(Ibid).

68

Burkitt's (1999) model however begins at a systemic level, that is, ―with relationships

between bodies and individuals within and ecosystem‖ (Ibid [emphasis added).

―Furthermore,[he adds,] time and space is not to be conceived of as externally given and

absolute, but is itself immanent in the socio-natural system and, as such, is variable and

multi- layered‖ (Ibid). This is because the point of departure is the system [Bateson's (1973)

―Steps to an Ecology of the Mind‖ and Einstein's notion of the space-time continuum for me

aptly demonstrate how different levels of systems entail very different conceptions of 'time'

and 'space.'].

The Cartesian dualism is, however, correct in asserting that the self or person does not reside

entirely within the body and cannot be identified with any of its parts. But in setting up a

dualism between the mind and the body Cartesianism does not recognize that active sensate

bodies located in a particular time and space, and in relation to persons and things, is a

precondition for what we call 'mind' (Ibid). I therefore rather, for these purposes, conceive

the 'mind' in a systemic fashion, as Burkitt (1999) suggests, that is, as ―an effect of bodily

action in the world and of becoming a person from the recognition of one's position in a

diverse network of social relations‖ (Ibid). In this view, then, it is not individuals or things

that are pre-given in the form of identity because the view espoused here is fundamentally

different because, as Levims and Lewontin (1985) have argued,

―human individuals (embodied persons) become identified within

multiple relations in which they are located and which, as agents, they

change through their mutual relationships meaning that these are

properties of things that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist

without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the

other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their

interpenetration‖ ([Levims and Lewontin 1985: 3] cited in Ibid).

Therefore in this view the heterogeneity is assumed from the beginning (and at every level of

abstraction) and the whole system is therefore heterogeneous making it difficult to draw

boundaries between identities developing within this system of interrelationships (Ibid).

Analytically persons hold, and negotiate, multiple identities and these identities 'leak' into

each other and make it impossible to draw fixed boundaries around the so-called self (Ibid:

12-3). Thus Burkitt (1999) argues that

69

―without the notion of fixed and given individuals with which

we can begin an inquiry in absolute certainty, we must focus on

the series of interrelated systems in which parts make wholes

and wholes make parts, and neither can be seen as having

ontological priority‖ (Ibid: 13).

An Ecological View has Drastic Implications for Time and Space:

It is most interesting that at this point that Burkitt (1999) says that this has ―drastic

implications for Descarte's view of time and space as given, unchanging dimensions‖ (Ibid)

in that ―there are multiple spaces of times (and space-times) implicated in different physical,

biological and social processes‖ ([Harvey 1993: 31] cited in Ibid). These processes, then, all

produce their own forms of time and space because these processes do not ―operate in but

actively construct space and time and in so doing distinctive scales for their development‖

(Ibid [emphasis in original). Pre-given entities as the basic units of analysis therefore cannot

exist because the constitution of scales of space and time in one particular ecological niche

are dependent upon the relations within it, and will vary according to ecosystems of [a]

different scale (Ibid).

Burkitt (1999) compels a rendering of the 'thinking body' as ―acting in different dimensions

of time and space‖ which is important for ―any consideration of contemporary societies

because, as Giddens (1990, 1991) illustrates, so called 'late modernity' disembeds humans

from the traditional experiences of space and time, reconstituting them at the global and local

levels‖ (Ibid). The mind is then in this view ―is only present in the various socio-natural

systems and space-time contexts inhabited by humans‖ (Ibid).

Reconceptualizing the Mind:

Following Foucault's (1982) reading that the basic coordinates or relations of human life

delineate into ―relations of communication, relations of power and relations that transform

the real‖ (Ibid: 14). The human body is then located

―within these relations and draws its various powers and

capacities from them – it‘s varying degrees of ability to transform

the environment, its skills of communication and the power to

70

affect the actions of others and to determine its own field of

activity. From this positioning of the body in relations there is

also created the identity of the person, along with his or her

abilities and capacities, knowledge and beliefs, none of which can

be separated from the creation of 'mind' (Ibid: 14-5).

The mind is therefore ―reconceptualised as an emergent effect of a body active within social,

historical and biological dimensions of space and time‖ (Ibid). This necessitates a conception

of historical time as multi-leveled in which (for analytical purposes) ―biohistory represents

the time of longest duration, while socio-historical relations and practices is equivalent to

intermediate time, and everyday life is of the same order as micro-history (Ibid). The concept

of biohistory illustrates the duality of human nature because the body is open to re-formation

at the point where biohistory and social history meet; it has adaptive capacities with regard to

social conditions but only within naturally imposed limits (Ibid).

24. Emergence of the Cartesian Self Following Foucault and Ellias the experience of Cartesian dualism (the notion of humans as

divided between body and mind, thought and emotion) can be understood here as having its

origin in the changes in power relations in the structure of society during the seventeenth

century in Europe (Ibid: 18). While Foucault has dealt with social forms of political control

of the body and importance of the notion of the machine metaphor in this, Elias has

commented on the emergence of the Cartesian experience and its implications of self-

regulation (Ibid).

For Elias this experience is framed by the ―decline in the authority of the church and the

waning of the religious understanding of the world, corresponding with the rise of secular

authorities and styles of knowledge‖ (Ibid). The loss of the religious authorities‘ ability to

―interpret [a] sensate experience‖ of the world for individual led a new interpretation of the

senses through the power of reason – as can be seen for Descartes (Ibid). This transition from

an authoritarian to an autonomous mode of perception of the bodily senses and emotions as

―objects that were to be scrutinized, categorized, regulated, controlled and tested by doubt

...are the origins of the experience in which the body becomes the object of a mind that is felt

to be separate from it‖ (Ibid).

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Thought therefore becomes regarded as like a 'thing', an intangible organ separated from the

other organs of the body ―setting up an invisible barrier between ourselves and others‖ in

which intensification of control of impulses and emotions in social situation leads to an

intensification of the feeling of the self as trapped in a bodily shell‖ (Ibid). These defense

mechanisms, described by Reich (1950) as bodily armour, are ―felt to be a 'presented self' or

a 'false self', displayed to others yet hiding the 'real' 'I' inside‖ (Ibid).

It is then the changing in the mode of social relations in which increased self-restraint is

imposed upon feelings that have led to an increased sense of isolation and alienation (Ibid).

So this 'lifeworld' is partly self imposed but not however always present within everyday life

because

―we are located in everyday relations as embodied beings, with

connections to other people, and with our own experiences

which cannot be neatly compartmentalized ...and when

we realize our relations to the others with whom we are

interdependent, then something of this experience cuts across

the forces of dualism‖ (Ibid: 20 [emphasis in original).

Therefore, seen dialectically, the body is not only ―constrained by relations of power, but

finds within them spaces of resistance in which it can formulate, with others in a similar

position, its own personal viewpoint on the forms of government [or hegemonic powers] that

seek to shape it‖ (Ibid). Thus understanding the body and its experience as multi-dimensional

opens up a space for people jointly to create alternative forms of understanding (Ibid:

21). This is because the symbolic is not the only dimension, in which experience is

constituted, and there are many spatial and temporal points in which relations of

communication are conducted (Ibid)

Therefore thinking of five dimensions of experience: the three dimensions of space (breadth,

depth and height), time and the symbolic (which includes language and other signs), allows

us to ―think of the different dimensions of human life which are distinct and cannot be

reduced to each other, yet at the same time cannot in any way be separated‖ (Ibid). Two

examples can illustrate this: a hologram incorporates three dimensions of space but the

location of the ending or merging of one dimension is impossible to determine – similarly

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Einstein demonstrated how space and time are inextricably linked (even though they are

experienced as distinct) (Ibid).

The Artifact2

A conception of 'memes' or artifacts, in terms of human evolution, refocuses the analysis

natural selection towards the transmission of information, in which humans ―were gaining

proficiency at extrasomatic transmission of information‖ (Ibid: 32). Meme's should be

considered as artifacts because they extend the capacities of the body and they are therefore

used to transform ―the environment and the actions of others through their employment in

relations that transform the real and in the relations of communication‖ (Ibid: 33). ―This is

not a question of 'memes' leaping form brain to brain, but of artifacts employed in the multi-

leveled relations of humans and their ecological niches‖ (Ibid). The concept of transmission

and the artifact extends the vision of the active rather than the passive subject because it

―means we can change some aspect of the world by working on it, or we can change the

behavior of another person by communicating with them (Ibid).

Hence there arises the two forms of power that Foucault talked of: the power exerted over

things and that which is exerted by individuals or groups upon one another (Ibid). Central to

both of these is the artifact (Ibid). The term 'artifact' refers to a created object in which

human activity is embodied because it has been fashioned for some use within human

practices (Ibid: 35). ―Our way of being-in-the-world, of acting, knowing and thinking, is

largely dependent on artifacts and how they re-form embodiment‖ (Ibid: 36). ―They are not

dumb objects like those found in the natural world; they speak to us and take on significance

because we see reflected in them our own activity and strivings... social meaning [is]

embedded in them and they invite not only use but interpretation‖ (Ibid).

―Words are also artifacts because they are physical entities which have human activity

embodied in them, thus having meaning due to their use in social practice‖ (Ibid). ―Even

those objects not created by humans are given a meaning, so that we no longer live in a

2 Note in UK English, artefact and artifact are interchangeable.

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purely physical environment, but one saturated with meaning in which people can recognize

their humanity, purposes and needs in even the most inert, non-human objects‖ (Ibid).

―We do perceive elements of the socio-natural world in it‘s various times and spaces, but the

artifact 'diffracts' (Harraway 1991) them so they are never perceived directly‖ (Ibid). The

artifactual dimension, with its meaning-giving properties, is ―always fundamental to

conscious perception, blending with the reality it diffracts‖ (Ibid: 37).

The sensuous mind:

This multi-dimensional perspective allows movement past the pitfalls of discursive social

constructionism which only conceives of knowledge as lingocentric. This style of social

constructionism

―preserves the Cartesian doubt and an element of dualism, for while it has

transcended Descartes‘ individualism, it keeps intact radical doubt about

the relation of knowing and thinking to any 'objective' world. Physical

reality is either bracketed out as unknowable (Edwards et al. 1995) or a

split is effected between the physical and the social‖ (Ibid).

Leontyev (1981) ―believes that what we call the mind – defined more precisely as thinking

and consciousness – is a property of matter in motion, of activity and the increasing

complexity in the many relations composing life (Ibid). ―In the active interrelation of

organism and environment, all life forms develop a 'sensitivity' to the ecology which orients

their activities within it‖ (Ibid: 37). Therefore the mind evolves from bodily sensation. ―Body

and mind are united at the very point of origin‖ (Ibid).

Because in human consciousness the process is governed by social laws rather than the

purely natural relation between organism and environment, ―consciousness, then, is a

product of these social relations and the artifacts that mediate them‖ (Ibid). However,

conscious thought always retains a sensory basis, even though sensation no longer defines

the entire experience of conscious thinking (Ibid). In this formulation, then, ―conscious

perception of an object reflects not only its material physicality, its form, color, mass or

material composition, but, also its meaning and function – a book, a table or food...Human

consciousness is, for Leontyev (1981), multidimensional‖ (Ibid).

74

The Body as Object: from the Grotesque to the Closed Body

In the Western world the way that individuals have experienced their embodied selves has

changed drastically in recent history. Since the 17th century westerners have begun to feel

that they are living in a dual existence in which the ―self is essentially disembodied and the

self caste into a shadowy and troublesome existence‖ (Ibid: 45).

Foucault analyzed this as the extension of bio-power, ―which is a form of power exerted over

the population and over the bodies of individuals, disciplining them and regulating them, and

turning them into rational and calculating machines‖ (Ibid). Bio-power brings life into the

―field of political calculation and manipulation‖ so that a bio-politics of the population

develops in which politics now begins to ―intervene in the very reproduction and regulation

of life itself‖ (Ibid). This view needs supplementing and Burkitt (1999) introduces the notion

of the medieval, 'grotesque body', and how it ―became transmuted into the disciplined and

concealed modern body‖ (Ibid).

Drawing on Bakhtin's (1984) reading of Rabelais (c.1494-1553) language and imagery

depicting the unofficial language of the people, Burkitt (1999) argues that the 'grotesque

realism' of markets and carnivals of that time imagined the body in an exaggerated form and

―can be linked to the festive world of giants, monsters, dwarfs and fools‖ (Ibid: 46). In this

time then a

―...direct and unmediated sensuous involvement with the world

[was still available to people in certain occasions -] …where the

boundaries between the inside and outside of the body, and the

dividing line between the individual and the collective, were not

drawn as sharply as they are drawn today.‖ (Ibid)

This was most evident during the ―strictly delimited time of the carnival‖ which allowed a

real and present experience of the sensuous body to be part of life (Ibid). Carnivals were

about participation, not an event to be watched. Furthermore it temporarily turned the world

on its head and mocked the upper classes and were linked to the natural cycles the

environment which allowed people to enter into a ―utopian realm of unbroken continuity

with their ancestors, and experience feelings of community, freedom, equality and

75

abundance‖ (Ibid). ―In this 'grotesque realism', the image of the body is a positive one; like

the carnival itself, the body is not seen as a private possession, but a universal, lived

phenomenon, represented in everyone‖ (Ibid).

In the grotesque image of the body, emphasis is placed on orifices and protuberances,

especially in the lower bodily strata – bowels, buttocks and genitals – which are linked to the

earth and its reproductive power‖ (Ibid). ―Grotesque bodies are not closed, but are open to

the world, and emphasis is placed on the body parts that stretch out into it, such as the nose,

pot belly, phallus, breasts, and those open to it, such as the mouth, genitals and anus, all of

which connect us to the earth and to other people‖ (Ibid).

During the early Renaissance then the body could be ambiguous ―reflecting at one and the

same time life and death, youth and age, reproduction and degeneration‖ (Ibid). In modern

society ―the emphasis on lower bodily strata, the images of excrement and birth, of fertilizing

and generating, appear vulgar or coarse and the complex meaning within them are lost‖

(Ibid). The images of bringing someone down to earth such as ―I shit on you‖ (Bakhtin 1984:

148) are ―linked to the carnivalesque aims of leveling and reducing the social

hierarchy...Curses always indicated a downward motion‖ (Ibid).

The carnivalesque because it constituted in its own time is linked to generating a new social

order (Ibid). When it is over social life continues but has been invigorated (Ibid). The main

functions of the carnival ―are to connect people to the collective and to the earth..., as well as

dispel fears through collective laughter‖ (Ibid). ―Food and wine, then, are seen in

philosophical terms as having their own truth, which is a tendency to superabundance,

victory and merriment, opposing the serious world of fear and oppression‖ (Ibid).

As the Renaissance progressed the body ―began to acquire a private, individual nature, one

that was closed off to the world and complete within itself (Ibid). Thus, rather than the open

and unfinished body, accent was placed on its sealed and finished nature... [here] attention

shifts ...to [the body's] closures – its skin, smooth surfaces, musculature and, in particular, to

the face and the eyes‖ (Ibid: 48). ―Sexual life, giving birth, death, eating and drinking turned

into private acts and lost their public, symbolic content‖ (Ibid). In this they became bodily

76

functions and ―the by-products of the bodily machine, and as such lost their meaningful place

in the cycles and rituals of public life‖ (Ibid).

The new body was the private, greedy body of bourgeois society, ―whose aim was not so

much to be satiated and satisfied, as to hide away, sequester and guiltily indulge‖ (Ibid). One

could say that this body no longer aimed to satisfy need, but followed the dictates of the law

of desire (Ibid). Sex, urination and defecation were also bodily acts consigned to specific

private areas – chambers or rooms – and regarded as functions one did not speak of in polite

society‖ (Ibid). The grotesque still lives to a degree in popular culture and comedy theatre

but the emphasis is upon private consumption and it has ―lost its rambunctious and

threatening element of full public participation‖ (Ibid).

The Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be seen as an attempt to

revive the grotesque genre but with a radically transformed meaning - ―it became the

expression of a subjective, individualistic world outlook‖ (Ibid). It was a backlash against the

classicism of the Enlightenment and the rational disembodied beings of Cartesianism (Ibid:

49). ―Romanticism created its own figure of the 'interior man', who is deep, complex and has

inexhaustible internal resources...[and] now the elements of the grotesque are reflected in an

inner life rather than a public one (Ibid). Here we find ―Romanticism's contribution to

modernity, in the view of humans with hidden and unfathomable inner depths, like the

unconscious 'inner universe' investigated by Freud‖ (Ibid).

Romanticism faded by the late 19th

century and the overwhelming influence upon the modern

perspective has been the classical cannon of the enlightenment in which the ―closed and

rational Cartesian body is ...severed from its sensuous connects with the world and its

collective associations with other beings. ―Alone and in perpetual doubt of sensate

experience and the uncertainty of any knowledge, the self is plagued with that ontological

insecurity so redolent of modernity (Giddens, 1990, 1991)‖ (Ibid). ―The person of

rationalism and classicism is firmly encased in his or her closed bodily shell, alone with his

or her doubt, uncertainty and fear. This is not to say that all of human life has at its base these

existential fears and dreads, but that they have become a chronic condition for modern

humans in the West‖ (Ibid).

77

Accompanying these changes was a change in the perception of time from carnival time,

which was cyclical, to an experience of time which emerged towards the end of the

Renaissance, which was linear (Ibid). While an awareness of history and historical change

emerged at this time, it also ―severed the cyclical linkage of death and birth, of decline and

renewal‖ so integral in cyclical carnival time (Ibid).

Thus in the new ―linear frame of time, death is antithetical to life, marking its ending rather

than its renewal‖ (Ibid: 50). Death no longer marks the point when the individual is taken

back into the ―body of the ancestral people; rather, death is the annihilation of their being‖

(Ibid). The medieval hierarchical order of the Universe was dismantled ―and its elements

were transferred to a single, linear plane‖ (Ibid). Therefore the spatial-temporal emphasis

was transferred from the 'higher and lower' to the 'forwards and backwards' and death is

conceptualized and an individual phenomenon.

The Civilised, Armoured Body

During the Renaissance the civilising restraints that where placed upon the body were largely

emotional ones ―aimed at the more basic responses to other people and their actions‖ (Ibid).

The notion of curbing volatile emotions originated in aristocratic society and the notion of

'civilized' or polite society emphasized thinking before expressing feelings and that ―one

always had to be sensitive to the effects of an action or expression upon another person‖

(Ibid). Burkitt (1999) stresses that this ―is not simply a suppression of emotion; rather, it is

more of a deferral and differentiation of feelings‖ (Ibid). This means that emotions of the

Middle Ages were less nuanced and more polar with ―little scope for ambivalence in them‖

(Ibid).

―This increased differentiation increased with the modulation of

emotional control, which worked at the level of the body in two

ways‖ (Ibid). Firstly, due to the ―finer modulation of emotion‖,

people had to be constantly conscious of their bodily gestures

and facial expressions so as not to offend others sensibilities‖

(Ibid).

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Elias (1978) argues that here we find the emergence of the psychological attitude within

people which is due to the necessity to gauge the 'inner' feelings of others through responses

veiled in sentiments of politeness or demure (Ibid: 50-1). ―Emotions therefore become

psychologised and move to an 'inner' plane‖ (Ibid). Instead of remaining part of the

responsive aspects of peoples' interactions, they become something to be felt but not always

to be shown (Ibid). Secondly, there is also increased control over the bodily functions, such

as spitting, farting, sex acts, urination etc. which are confined to private spaces (Ibid). The

emerging norms of conduct extend to birth and death, and demand that ―individuals should

not give off any signs of their bodily needs in case this might offend others‖ leading to the

creation of private and public spaces, ―which corresponded to a psychological topography of

the conscious and the unconscious, the admitted and the hidden‖ (Ibid).

The closing of the human body, according to Bakhtin, occurred around the height of the

Renaissance period and was expressed, for example, in the formalizing of table manners

where ―suddenly, people become more sensitive to the exchange of bodily fluids which

raises fears of contamination‖ (Ibid). Thus taboos placed around bodies and the substances

that pass between them are seen as a closing or armoring of the body (Ibid). The rise of

seeing people in psychological fashion is also evident in the increased focus upon eyes and

faces, while simultaneously the body itself is more elaborately clothed and decorated

(concealed) and ―becomes a danger zone‖ (Ibid).

The sexualization of the body is due to nakedness being less commonplace resulting in ―the

body [becoming] the subject ...of a greater erotic investment as an object of fantasy and

wishfulfilment‖ (Ibid). This correlates with focus on the more distant senses of sight and

hearing and a decrease in the importance of smell, touch and taste, which are associated with

closer contact (Ibid). ―Because psychological understanding is linked closely to the

psychological understanding of others, vision came under the control of cognitive

apprehension (Mellor and Shilling, 1997)‖ (Ibid).

Therefore because as the body becomes more closed there is an increase in the fineness and

differentiation of feelings, there is also an intensification of bodily experience (Ibid). Burkitt

(1999) argues that this ―creation of inner longings and desires... become[s] the basis for the

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Romantic movement in the arts and the object for psychoanalysis in the sciences‖ (Ibid).

However intensified these emotions are concealed and private and the ―barriers of reserve

and restraint on feelings become a body armor, frozen into movements, gestures, posture and

musculature (Ibid). This intensifies the body's surface only at the cost of petrifying it in terms

of spontaneous expression (Ibid). ―The body becomes more a communicative body rather

than an assimilative one (Falk, 1994; O'Neill 1985), a signifying surface that both expresses

and yet conceals‖ (Ibid). The court society is a place of masks that hide as much as they

show (Ibid).

Although the body becomes more intensified in terms of experience, ―this occurs only

through it becoming an 'object' of the mind, viewed at a relative distance‖ (Ibid). Therefore

not only are the bodies of others the objects for psychological observation, but so is our own

(Ibid). The act of thinking became ―crystallized into the idea of 'intelligence', 'reason' or

'spirit' which was now somehow distinct from the rest of the body‖ (Ibid). Therefore

―the relation between mind and body, thought and emotion,

became conceived in spatial terms. Moreover, the mind was

seen as trapped inside the body because of the increased barriers

of restraint between people and the doubt about the actual

existence of things beyond their comprehension in reason‖

(Ibid).

Humans felt that they were looking out on the world from inside a casing, or at worst a

prison. Elias (1999a:13) refers to the metaphor of 'thinking statues', ―each one standing in

isolation and silent, inanimate in contemplation of the 'external' world with which we feel we

have lost direct contact (Ibid). Thinking itself is now experienced in a new way, as something

solitary, still and silent (Ibid). This distant and inanimate way of thinking comes to dominate

other bodily forms of knowing (other than thinking itself) which involve all the human

senses - ―of communication and dialogue, action and movement, touch, sight, sound and

smell‖ (Ibid). It is

―visual perception and its links to a form of cognitive

apprehension – which is to say, purely 'mental' as opposed to

sensual – that take precedence. The outwardly projection of

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persona then becomes like a shell or a wall that stands between us

and all that is beyond our bodily limits (Barker 1995)‖ (Ibid).

So by the start of the eighteenth century in Europe this experience is entrenched in the court

and bourgeoisie (Ibid). It spreads via 'civilized' forms of manners and other norms started in

the court into the 'lower' via bourgeois educators and administrators, and the teachings of the

church (Ibid).

Today the experience of the grotesque body has long since disappeared and is only

―approached through the depths of inner experience, which is a legacy of Romanticism‖...

which has not been able to ―dispel the Cartesian understanding of the body as a closed

machine, so that the life of humans has largely moved 'inward' to a psychic plane, creating

the deep subjectivity that we experience as a private possession, removed and distanced from

others‖ (Ibid). Social life is regulated and emotion and fantasy is deepened.

As Mead (1964) said, emotion is delayed impulse, and the inner - delaying agency is the

conscience or superego. This inner psychic censor is nothing more than the internalized

social norms that govern and regulate social relations, so that, in contemporary life, conflict

is also internalized and expressed as the battle between conscience and temptation (Barker

19995: 43)‖ (Ibid). These norms as has been shown stem from social changes taking place

during the period of the Renaissance (Ibid).

State Formation, Ideological and Normative Control: a Divided World

All of the aforementioned changes in the social formations, which caused the 'closing' and

'armoring' the body, were ―dependent on wider social changes, which many commentators

agree is related to the centralization of the state during the Renaissance and its

monopolization of the means of violence (Bakhtin 1984; Barker 1995; Elias 1978, 1982)‖

(Ibid: 53). This monopolization meant that ―many spaces of everyday life within society

became pacified‖ (Ibid). People no longer able to resort to violence had to find new ways to

influence the conduct of others (Ibid). Nation states also became more pacified in the

treatment of their own citizens and so a form of ideological control developed so that

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individuals began to self-discipline themselves through various ideologies which were able to

work on the unwritten laws and norms controlling subjectivity (Ibid).

The rule of the monarch is symbolized by the sword because violence was integral to

governance but in the later formation with the disinclination toward violence (which

increased with the monopolization of power by the state) there is a new ―continuous

regulatory and corrective system‖ came about as the law came to operate more as norms

(Ibid).

―A normalizing of society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life

(Foucault 1979: 144)‖ (Ibid). Thus normalizing took place through institutions such as the

hospital, prison, and other forms of administrative organization which aimed at producing

―docile bodies that are disciplined and ready to be used as labour power (Ibid). Burkitt

(1999) says that here we see

―the two-pronged movements of bio-power: on the one hand,

working at the level of populations, adjusting them to economic

processes; and, on the other, disciplining and yet intensifying

individual bodies, creating in them new aptitudes and capacities

as free citizens and laborers, without at the same time making

them more difficult to govern‖ (Ibid).

By focusing mainly on the techniques and strategies of power, Foucault had ignored ―'the

techniques of the self' through which individuals constitute themselves as disciplined

subjects‖ (Ibid).

His later work focused on these 'techniques of the self' by looking at how individuals enter

into an ethical relationship with themselves – that is he studied how ―individuals turn the

body and the self into an object, making it the target for the application of regimes, diets or

moral precepts‖ (Ibid). What is ignored in this view is how the norms of the moral world of

selves interacting are achieved (Ibid).

Burkitt (1999) says that ―moral norms are both the medium and outcome of moral

interactions, borrowing the language of structuration, because, as moral precepts are largely

unwritten, they are open to reformulation and re-negotiation in their practical use‖ (Ibid). So

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although Foucault emphasized the individuals and not interaction between them, he was, in

the sense of this interaction, right when he claimed that the ―'modern state', as it began to

develop around the eighteenth century, is one that did not form above the people, but

integrated them into its very structure, being concerned with individualizing people as much

as totalizing the state formation‖ (Ibid).

This means that the ―modern form of regulating behaviour through norms is one that

individuals practice upon one another as well as upon themselves‖ (Ibid). Of course between

the normalization practices of the state (in the form of institutions) and the individual, are the

everyday practices of individuals applying norms onto others through their joint practices

(Ibid).

Foucault's notion of ethical self formation implicitly implies that in this process individuals

become the subjects of discourses (Ibid). To this end Burkitt (1999) suggests that this is why

the type of discourse which claimed to reveal the truth about the self, as can be seen in the

popularity of diaries and biographies among the bourgeoisie of the 18th and 19

th centuries,

was because of the ascendancy of writing and speech as primary modes of communication of

the embodied self (Ibid). Here we can see

―the bodily aspects and processes associated with the grotesque

body have now become functions, largely stripped of their

symbolic content, and language is the primary means through

which the self finds expression. The subject becomes an author

in discourse and the body sinks beneath the discursivity of the

subject (Barker, 1995: 57)‖ (Ibid).

―The Bourgeois subject, then, narrates both the self and world from a private place, and the

certainty of that narration beyond the private place of the study, or the psyche, is called into

doubt‖ (Ibid). From this position there opens up all the divisions which still mark the

contemporary Western world: the division between private and public, subject and object,

spiritual and material, mind and body, individual and society, and self and others (Ibid: 55-

6).

The armoring and division of bodies then connects to all of these dichotomies and is

experienced both within and between individuals (Ibid). ―As the individual becomes solitary

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and private, and his or her own self is understood as a textual narration composed in a private

place, the world of materiality and sociality 'outside' that space is felt to be radically distant,

as is the materiality of the body (Ibid). ―Even the ties between words and things become

broken so that language itself is experienced as autonomized‖ (Ibid).

This can be seen with Descartes‘ grounding of all truth in the certainty of his own cogito

(Ibid). As Heidegger (1977: 128) says, this is when ―man becomes the relational center of

that which is as such‖ (Ibid). Therefore in contrast to ancient and medieval humans (for

Heidegger) the world for modern humans appears as a picture – therefore as in 'I get the

picture' the self is the beholder of knowledge whereas in the medieval and ancient view this

picture (for Heidegger) didn't exist because humans belong to the rank of that which is

divinely created by God, so never being at the centre of the hierarchy ―the being of all that

exists is not placed before humans as the objective, in the realm of human knowledge and

disposal‖ (Ibid).

―Thus the world becomes something represented by humans in

pictorial fashion, an objectifying act which also inspires people

to go forward and master it (Ibid). So not only does time get

stretched on to a linear and flat plane, as Bakhtin (1984)

suggested, but space also opens up to modern humans as

objective and separate dimensions, to be seen known and

mastered (Ibid). What is being accentuated here is the

importance of vision in modern forms of understanding and the

close link that is established between sight and cognitive

apprehension, or seeing and knowing‖ (Ibid).

In the modern mind therefore the metaphor of sight is primary (Ibid). The Foucauldian notion

of surveillance ties into the emergence of vision's saliency to the modern self that ―power

relations and normative controls working on the body, restricting sensate experience mainly

to vision, and linking this to forms of cognitive apprehension – the only sure root to the

truth‖ (Ibid). This general trend towards ―the cognitive representation of a picture of the

world what Barker (1995: 86) calls 'the positivism of the object‖, or Heidegger refers to as

the position of realism; that is, of thought being in the position of having to prove the reality

of the outer world, of having to save that which is‖ (Ibid).

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For Heidegger, this Cartesian doubt can only be overcome by questioning the truth of being,

the notion of the human cognito as the foundation point and guarantor of all truth (Ibid).

However such questioning of being turns into the project of overcoming Cartesianism into a

philosophical, and perhaps ultimately a metaphysical, journey, where here I want to,

following Burkitt (1999), suggest a relational approach to the problem (Ibid). That is, instead

of understanding humans as the relational centre of all that exists, we replace this with the

understanding of humans as non-central points in the networks of various relations, which

encompass relations between people and also with the non-human (Ibid).

Upon the emergence of the 'I' of thought processes or the Cartesian subjectivity, there is a

simultaneous emergence of reason as the guide to truth and a Protestant led secularization in

the religious sphere (Ibid). This causes a ―loss of religious practice as a guarantor of truth and

certainty in the world‖ (Ibid) and further undermines the religious conception of the

hierarchy of the great order of being (Ibid).

―According to Barker (1995), while the self becomes expressed in discourse, the body is

excluded as an expressive being, [and] instead... it becomes the object rather than the subject

of discourse (Ibid). Through the discourses, as Foucault suggested, ―of medicine, of wealth

and populations, economics and sexuality – the body becomes regulated and disciplined, the

subject of various relations of power‖ (Ibid: 58).

Ethical Self Relation

―In ethical self relation, something else emerges – another aspect of selfhood – which is the

internal witness and judge, the part of the self that stands above all the others and evaluates

them. This forms out of the paradox that Benjamin (1990) has pointed to when she claims

that, to be a free and autonomous agent, the Western self must first be recognized as such by

another. In so doing, the independent agent must cede agency to another. Put another way,

we can only make ourselves free and autonomous agents through the political and moral

precepts of Enlightenment culture, which holds independent agency as the highest value to

be attained. These are the values of the general culture and not our own making. To be

recognized as an independent agent, then, we must always form ourselves in the values and

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the 'eyes' of the Other, and take that Other into ourselves in the process of ethical-self

formation. There is always, then, an aspect of the self which is not-I or Other. It has been

referred to previously as the 'upper-I‘ (Burkitt 1991), but Bakhtin refers to this, perhaps more

accurately, as the 'supra-I'. 'Something absolutely new appears here: the supraperson,

the supra- I, that is, the witness and the judge of the whole human being, of the

whole I, and consequently someone who is no longer the person, no longer the I, but

the other. The reflection of the self in the empirical other through whom one must pass in

order to reach ‘I-for-myself’ '([Bakhtin 1986: 137] cited in Ibid).

Furthermore Psychology, Burkitt (1999) says, also corresponds to the emergence of these

two aspects of the modern self too: ―the self as a textual being that narrates its own existence

and identity and, behind this, the self as a cognitive and rational being which speaks the truth

about itself and the world‖ (Ibid).

Notwithstanding these factors Burkitt (1999) claims ―that at the root of this Cartesian

division are wider social changes, which intersect the individual and his or her relation to

others and to the world‖ (Ibid).

First of all there is the centralization of the nation state, its monopolizing of the means of

violence, and the switch from physical coercion to ideological or normative control. These

controls, practiced by individuals on one another and upon their own selves, produce a

greater emotional distance between people and the feeling that the self is encased inside the

bodily armor‖ (Ibid).

The notion of closed versus the grotesque body implies a ―wedge [being]...driven between

the immediate sensual experience of individuals in their interaction with each other and with

the objects of the physical world, and this divide extends into the body with the division

between the body and the mind‖ (Ibid).

The notion of personal freedom rises along with the shift of control from feudal and

ecclesiastical to social power centered more on norms and self-discipline is only partly true

because ―while this created the view of individuals as free and autonomous agents, it was at

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the expense of people acting as agents of social control upon each other and upon

themselves‖ (Ibid). Human agency became shaped by the ideologies of the day (Ibid).

While the hierarchies of the modern state are not temporarily subverted as in the carnivals of

the Renaissance there have been unofficial sites of resistance which have emerged as

unofficial discourses and heretical discourses, ―such as political parties, trade unions and

other social movements‖ (Ibid). Also, official and unofficial ideologies are never separate

things because they intermingle and are dependent on one another (Bakhtin 1986; Bourdieu

1991; Volosinov 1986). Burkitt (1999) sees ideologies as world outlooks comprised of

(sometimes) internally contradictory discourses; that is discourses in the Foucauldian sense

that they ―are tactical elements or blocks operating in a field of force relations... usually

centered on the construction of some object of knowledge, such as the population or the

human body‖ (Ibid). The composition of the ideology is dependent upon power relations of

the groups holding different discursive knowledges (Ibid).

Bio-power, as Foucault has claimed, takes life itself into the ―realms of power and political

calculation‖ (Ibid). However because, bodies are constituted ecologically our bodies do not

conform strictly to the dictates of modern power relations, meaning that they are not

controllable at the level of everyday consciousness (Ibid). Death for modern humans

becomes then ―the most secret and private events for modern people‖ and the very limit of

bio-power‖ (Ibid).

Thus filtering these themes through the relational perspective

―the embodied location of the individual, in both its spatio-

temporal context and within social relations, can be regarded as

the person (McNamee and Gergen 1999), upon whom is

conferred rights and duties, along with individualizing marks,

names and numbers (Ibid).

It is around theses symbolic markers (including ethical codes and norms), as well as through

our own sense of bodily location, that we identify ourselves as a specific person (Ibid).

Against Descartes, then, it can be argued that the body is central to the identity of the person

and that personhood does not simply reside with the 'mind' (Ibid). The person has a fairly

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stable identity that changes only slowly with place and time; ―like the body itself, it has an

enduring, though not unchangeable quality, a bit like the image of a person's face as it

gradually ages‖ (Ibid).

―In contrast to the more stable aspects of a person's character there are also the various selves

that develop which are more context dependent and can change from situation to situation in

the space of a day‖ (Ibid). The perspective we have on our own embodied person can change

as rapidly as our view point changes, creating the impression of a variety of selves, or

different ways of viewing and presenting ourselves in different social contexts (Ibid).

Like the person to whom they are related, the various selves only emerge through the ethical

relation we establish with ourselves, and so they configure around a relationally and spatio-

temporally located body (Ibid: 62-3). Therefore Burkitt (1999) insists that

―while persons and selves cannot be reduced to the body,

because they have their origin partly in the symbolic realm, nor

can they exist without their embodied location. The difference

between persons and selves is that the latter allow for a degree

of reflexive distance from embodied personhood and for the

ability to take a more universal, although partially situated,

towards other people and things‖ (Ibid).

It is the attitude of self-discipline, developed in the ethical self-relation and the emergence of

the Other within the self, which has, from the Renaissance period onwards, alienated

Western selves more and more from their bodies (Ibid). The body is thought of as a machine,

rather than the basis of a sentient, thinking being (Ibid). ―Instead, the self is intensified as the

realm of inner experience, the deep subjective 'interior', which is experienced as the very

essence of the human soul‖ (Ibid). The self is expressed largely through text or in symbolic

communication and so many contemporary social theorists speak of the self as a purely

textual construction (Ibid).

The carnival was in some ways a reaction to the violent and dogmatic authoritarianism of the

feudal, ecclesiastical orders and early state formations (Ibid). However although ―reflexive

modernization‖ (Ibid: 64) brings with it doubt, anxiety, uncertainty and individual isolation,

it has also brought many freedoms too (Ibid). Heidegger (1977) for instance has pointed out

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that when there is a division between the individual and the collective that a positive aspect is

that the collective is recognized as having worth (Ibid). For the individual, the rights of the

collective still hold within them the possibility for the individuals to distance themselves for

authority, which is the possibility for maturity (Ibid).

The problem of wishing to return to earlier forms of close-knit communal association is that

they can be highly exclusionary, so that they involve not only the desire to belong together

―but the pursuit of identity through 'burning others together'‖ ([Mellor and Shilling 1997: 27]

cited in Ibid).

So because the dualisms seem to have worth and problems, Harraway (1991) for example

introduces the notion of living in the border lands through her notion of hybridity, which,

―translated to humans, would mean that we no longer maintain

the rigid dichotomies between the human and the non-human,

society and nature, mind and body, demanded by the classical

canon, and instead focus on the areas where these categories

fuse... [;]we need to focus on the relations rather than the duality

of things to understand what binds people and things together

and, at the same moment seek to draw differences between

them‖ (Ibid).

Overcoming the dualism is not, as Heidegger suggested, to critique being, ―but to understand

how we are constituted and divided relationally‖ (Ibid). ―Relations and the inherent

ambivalence of things then become the main tools of analysis‖ (Ibid).

Therefore with the rise of ―the closed, communicative body where the signifying surface of

the body expresses but at the same time conceals part itself behind its armouring[,]...

individuals then become the watchers and the watched, surveying others as well as their own

selves‖ (Ibid). This is how ―norms... [came to be] applied to the self in the process of ethical

self-formation and this creates the appearance of a spatial distance between thought and

active, sensate, emotive being, which is associated with the body‖ (Ibid: 65-6).

The self then comes to ―associate its existence with the cognitive rationality that seems to be

central to its very being, and with the text through which it narrates its own biography and

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reassures itself of its own identity‖ (Ibid). This is what Heidegger called the self which

experiences itself as the relational centre of all that is (Ibid).

In the relational approach, humans, like other things in the world, are the ―non-central points

in the networks of relations‖ (Ibid). The experience of the division between the body and

mind is therefore formed as non-corporeal relations of power and communication (Ibid). As

such, they are not universal and inevitable phenomena, but totally dependent on their social

and historical context‖ (Ibid).

25. Modernity

Burkitt (1999) insists that positivist and constructionist theories (including post modernist

theories), don't overcome the Cartesian dualism, and so fail to challenge the central problem

of our (Western) society, which ―is the integration of classical and romantic understanding,

the rational and the sensuous ... which is experienced as the fragmented bodies and divided

selves‖ (Ibid). I suggest that this can be seen in the plethora of alternative healing therapies

as well as the 'wellness revolution' which actively seeks integration of ‗body, mind and soul'.

From a historical vantage, as I have discussed earlier, this problem is partly due to the

'closing' of the body in modernity during which time the body came under stricter social and

personal control (Ibid). The cost of this extended control is fragmentation in which the

experience of the wholeness of the body is lost to ―feelings of a mental or personal essence

divided from the automaton it must inhabit‖ (Ibid).

Burkitt (1999) suggests this desire for the recovery of some permanence or wholeness (which

at this stage can be glossed as healing) in an increasingly heterogeneous world through a

quest for further control is paradoxical because this only tends to entrench the ―modern

mechanical, rationalized forms of control deeper into society and into the body‖ (Ibid).

This would only make sense for the modern self because if we consider Gergen's (1991)

claims seriously, when he states, contrasting so called post modern selves (or in Gidden's

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(1991) terminology 'late modern') with modern selves, that the modern self ―was said to

exhibit essential qualities, such as measurable traits that made up the personality‖ (Ibid). The

so called post modern self, on the other hand, is a reaction against rapid change because

persons exist in a state of ―continuous construction and reconstruction ... each reality of self

gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another

reality‖ ([Gergen 1991: 6-7] cited in Ibid). Self and reality therefore come to be constituted

and reconfigured within relationships and not inner essences because relations are the source

of identity and feelings during this time (Ibid: 131-2).

Although relations are now argued to be the source of identity and feelings, this positioning

of persons within relations is not, however, unproblematic, especially when the body is taken

into consideration because as I will show shortly it does not always obey the controlling,

Cartesian self (Ibid).

Expanding on this issue of control, Giddens (1991) asserts that modern individuals are

deskilled with dealing with that which is beyond their control, as can be seen with death

(Ibid). Giddens sees this as a confrontation with 'original nature' – here death ―is 'sequestered'

away from everyday routines and confined ... to particular spaces where experts can deal

with them‖ - such as the hospital and the hospice (Ibid: 141).

Giddens (1991) sees this as a confrontation with 'original nature' – here death is 'sequestered'

―away from everyday routines and confined ... to particular spaces where experts can deal

with them‖ (Ibid: 141). He sees a need for body controls and disciplines, which are part of

the very style of modern living, because they are necessary in order to create ontological

security, to stave off ‗existential fright‘ at the possible intrusion of 'nature' into the highly

protected modern world (Ibid). He also sees narratives, which are highly textual and

cognitive, as binding a person's identity by weaving them into a ―protective cocoon of bodily

control and socially warranted knowledge claims‖ (Ibid).

Furthermore, following on from this, Gidden's (1991) understanding of 'life politics' as ―a

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form of politics which is common only in late modernity‖ which focuses on the ―body, self-

identity and the environment,‖ revolves around those areas of social life which are

designated as 'natural' and ―involves the collective reapropriation of institutionally repressed

areas of life – such as birth, sex and death – which become moral-existential questions to be

addressed politically‖ (Ibid). Therefore these new social movements refuse to focus solely

upon inequality and injustice but incorporate other issues such as environmental concerns

and 'life politics' is meant to indicate the interest in so-called 'original nature' (Ibid).

Martin (1989), for example, powerfully details the fragmentation of the female imaginary

body in her study of women's experiences of the medicalization of their body process, in

which a desire to be whole was expressed so clearly (Ibid: 102). This clearly shows that

―the body is becoming an issue because, in an increasingly

fragmentary world, there is a growing desire for wholeness, for

integration and for healing. It is not a reactionary tendency, nor an

inability to cope with the excitement and possibilities presented by a

fractured world, but a critical stance which refuses to take at face

value division, rupture and, behind this, various forms of domination

and exploitation‖ (Ibid: 145 [emphasis added]).

Burkitt (1999) goes on to suggest that alternative ideologies, such as those Claire has used

during the course of her illness, open up a new space where creative practices can be

explored and developed (Ibid: 145). In resisting forms of domination and dividing practices,

the body becomes a point of focus because it is around the body, as it is located in relational

networks, that individuals can integrate the various aspects of themselves into a whole

person, and demand to be treated as such (Ibid).

This is not to say that these are the only influences, Mellor and Shilling (1997) point out the

decline of the Protestant religion with its strong ascetic control of the body, and with this

decline, the rise once more of a modern form of counter-reformation spirit, in which

―'baroque modern bodies' seek out opportunities for fleshy pleasures

and sensuality: they call this a ―Janus-faced- modernity‖ because the

old cognitively based forms of social control are still in place, with

their contractual mentality towards social associations, while, at the

same time, we witness the rise of other forms of social bonding based

on emotional, bodily and sensual forms that connect people to one

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another‖ (Ibid).

Burkitt (1999) suggests a Romanticist reactionary tendency can be felt at this present time in

the ―rise of tribalism and the desire to swathe oneself in the protective bonds of the emotional

community‖ (Ibid: 150). Claire's recent adventures with Neo-shamanism could be indicative

of this.

Burkitt (1999) concludes by stating that ―all politics, then, is life politics, where we recognize

our connections to `other life forms and to things, seeking not the eradication of difference

but the necessity of relatedness across boundaries and across borders‖ (Ibid). It is from this

sense of relatedness, he suggests, that ethics grow and flourish (Ibid). In the ethnographic

account I address Claire's so called life politics as indicative of this.

Burkitt (1999), however, in his study suggested that the current relations between people are

based (mostly) on normative forms of control rather than ethical considerations. That is,

through the application of norms to the behaviour of others and to ourselves, we seek to

control and police activity rather than to realize it in an ethical form. In this sense, then,

Burkitt (1999) suggests, ―the modern subject is still in a sense of immaturity, [in that they]

tend... to look to external authorities for the validation of behaviour and apply... norms

created by hegemonic powers‖ (Ibid: 150- 1). He goes on to state how

―in the West, our moral codes have become focused more on a

concern for control than for care, for regulating one another rather

than for caring for each other[,]...the effects of normative control on

the body are ones of armouring, where vulnerability and openness

become dangers that need to be closed off behind layers of

defensiveness‖ (Ibid).

26. Neo-Shamanism

Claire's ongoing searches for healing and meaning have led her to the Neo-Shamanism of her

teacher. She was drawn to this through her ongoing life politics journey which was in its

latter stage influenced by Eco-psychology and Arnold Mindells' Process work (which is

93

based upon and developed from Jung's imaginal psychology which prioritizes the soul‘s

journey in the quest for integration and meaning). A proper introduction to this area of

investigation is beyond the scope of this paper.

The Teacher:

―[his] journey to becoming an empowered teacher began with studies and

practice in Yoga, natural healing, Macrobiotics and Taoism while completing

a Philosophy degree at University. During this time, he made initial contacts

with Sangoma [African healer/diviner). For the following 4 years, he studied

Kabala and other disciplines at a Rabbinic College in Israel.

For over 12 years, he traveled in the deep bush throughout Southern Africa,

where he was taught various skills and given many gifts by numerous

Sangoma. He participated in rare initiation ceremonies and rituals, all-night

drumming and Trance dancing. Personal studies in Taoism, Tantra and

Shamanism continued.

Subsequently, he studied Breathwork methods, regression therapies and dream

analysis. At the same time, he enhanced his work in massage, oils, crystals and

other ancient healing methods. He then consolidated extensive studies in

theoretical and practical contemporary therapeutic techniques, which were

then integrated with traditional teachings. In 1994, he began to do his current

work full time.

In group and individual therapeutic work, [he] uses body-conscious therapies

and Mindell-type deep process-work, together with Jungian analysis and

Hillman's Archetypal-based Soul work.

Individual therapeutic work includes dealing with family-of-origin

dysfunction, dream analysis, substance and process addictions, sexual and

relationship issues and difficulties, depression and the psycho-spiritual crises

that often accompany the emerging true Self. Group work also includes

exploring the peri-natal realms as well accessing expanded states of

consciousness and transpersonal realms and integrating the insights gained

into everyday living. Advanced group work includes teacher-training

programs and advanced practical workshops.

[His] work extends beyond the boundaries of the contemporary therapeutic

movement. He also continues to create original workshops that challenge both

participants and consensus.‖

94

References: Publications:

Aggarwal R. 1997. ―Review: Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in

the Nepal Himalayas by Desjarleis R.R.‖ American Ethnologist 24(2): 497-497.

Burkitt I., 1999. ―Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity.‖ London: Sage

Publications.

Connolly M., and Craig T., 2002. ―Stressed Embodiment: Doing Phenomenology in the

Wild.‖ Human Studies, Vol. 25, 451-462.

Desjarleis, R.R. 1989. ―Healing through images: the magical flight and healing geography

of Nepali Shamans‖. Ethos, 17 (3), 289-307.

Desjarleis, R.R.1996. ―Presence‖. In Laderman, C. & Roseman, M. ―The Performance of

Healing‖. New York and: London: Routledge.

Good B. J., 1994. ―Medicine, rationality, and experience: An anthropological perspective.‖

Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.

Jensen D., 2004. ―A language older than words.‖ New York: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Lester R J. 2004. ―Material Bodies and the Transformation of the Social‖. Theory and

Psychology, 14(3), 409-419.

Lincoln, B. 2001. ―Revisiting ‗magical flight‘‖. American Ethnologist, 28(4), 778-802.

Reina R. E., 1976. ―John Philip Gillin, 1907-1973‖. American Anthropologist, New Series,

78(1), 79-86.

95

Appendices:

Appendix 1: An extract from Claire’s personal diary in 2003

11th of March 2003

I'm going off my head! I had a rehearsal [for an honors play at the University Drama

department] this evening. We read over the play. I am struggling with the accent. She wants a

kind of Liverpool sounding accent. You know ―sorry luv or loov. I can't do it.

[later] I can't sleep. Too self-conscious. Can't breathe through my nose at all. Need to go to

the acupuncturist again.

I feel I am owned now... because of the play. I need to try not to go beyond myself.

13/03/2005

I am in agony. My whole body hurts. Joints aching. Really hurting. My throat is swollen and

sore. FUCK!!! I CANNOT BE SICK NOW!! I think, no I know, this is about the play. I DO

NOT WANT TO DO IT. I've been overextending myself. The play requires more than I can

give without hurting myself. I don‘t know what to do. I need to find a way to pull

out now! It‘s the girl's director‘s piece and marks so she needs to find someone to replace me

now.

I want to cry. I want to fake a crisis. I want to get on the bus and go to The city. I need to get

away right now!

I have my first essay due on Monday [for the English Honours that I have registered for at

University]. Its Thursday now...about three in the morning, I can't sleep. Hectic day to come

[tomorrow] and I am sick.

I can't be sick now. It‘s going to add more stress than [it will] remove.

I'm praying. To God, to the earth, to my own body... [―] please don't let me be sick now. Help

me heal fast[‖].

96

How do I do this? I don't want to lose the outing next week [which is with my entire English

Honours Class. It‘s so important to me. That‘s number one. Then number two is my essay.

Number four are my [English] tut[orial]s tomorrow. No. five is the play. No. six is the Video

Shop [where I have a part time job]. Maybe I should quit [my job at the] the Video Shop.

More stress!

I think I have a fever.

I am going to [the director of the play I have a part in] and say I am sorry [but] I've

overextended myself and I'm starting to get sick. [―]I see where this is headed and I think it

[is] best to call it off while you can find a replacement [‖].

All the voices in my head are yelling at me. Like [―] I'm a failure[‖]... [―] You did this with

the choir[‖] [―]You won't be able to audition there again!‖

―Come on, you can do it!‖

My body says no! I can't because I don't want to. I didn't feel comfortable in the audition, and

every rehearsal has felt like that. No I must end it. I knew it wasn't right from the beginning.

It was about 44 degrees [celcius] today. It‘s fucking hot now too. I was actually cold and

sleeping under a duvet. I went and put water over me and [then] stood in front of the fan...[it

was then] when I realized I must have a fever. I feel the heat now.

You know, maybe acting isn't for me. I have a talent, but...[in original]. No, this part isn't for

me. These circumstances aren't for me.

I just drew the 'ten of wands' [from my tarot cards. It said:] ―Exhaustion. Being

overburdened. Taking on too much responsibility. Find peace within by making way for new

passions. Release responsibilities from the past that no longer seem valid for they are

encumbering further growth. Rest in tranquil surroundings‖

Perfect.

97

I think I have underestimated the effect of this heat. It is like a furnace. I bet nobody can

sleep tonight, which means I won't be the only overtired person tomorrow.

I feel better already. Just knowing I am allowed to quit [the play] honorably.

If I am sick at least I'll have time to rest and heal this weekend. I can borrow a computer

screen from [a friend] so I can work here [instead of in the university computer labs]. [My

maid]... is coming tomorrow or today ...so I'll be able to ―Rest in tranquil surroundings.‖

I'll be fine.

I got my period two days ago and I hardly had any pain. I am sure it is because of the

[vitamin] B-complex I am taking.

I am going to make an appointment with [Dr] D (acupuncturist). I've heard he is great with

flu. Maybe he can help me with my fatigue and lack of energy.

I know what I need to do is learn how rest. It‘s fine being busy if I know how to really take

some time out. But I don't seem to be able to. I just gogogogo.

It‘s got a lot to do with liking myself. Knowing I deserve rest. I'm so hard on myself. Yelling

at myself for not working hard enough.

I think I am worried about losing that satisfaction of having the voices shut up. If I quit the

play I am no longer being a ―good girl‖ (i.e. someone who is hard working and reliable, and

committed and successful...with a smile on her face).

I have to find a way of accepting and appreciating my own way of being in the world.

Acknowledging that ―time out‖ helps me digest things and actually do better.

[later]

I'm wide awake. As soon as I lie down my nose blocks up and I can't breathe comfortably. I

eaten raw onion, a teaspoon of masala powder, two teaspoons of curry paste and it is still

blocked.

98

Maybe I am not supposed to sleep tonight.

Nose, why are you so blocked? Don't you know you're supposed to clear yourself. I'm angry

with you.

My top lip burns from Vicks [eucalyptus cream]. This is unacceptable! I have a nose to

breathe with dammit!

[next day, later]

I did it. Canceled. Pulled out [of the play].

[After seeing Doctor D] I may have glandular fever. Watching video tonight.

17/03/2003

Still sick. It‘s been three days. I'm pondering ideas for a long essay [for my English honors

course]. [I] need to get my thoughts in order.

[In Lord of the Rings] Frodo's journey. He is an orphan like so many heroes. He is

afflicted with knowledge of evil that separates him from his peers. He must leave

Middle Earth with wise men who can love him because they too know evil. NB:-

[This] brotherhood [is] based on deep love and respect, [and] yet is born out of

pain... [they are] mourners [as] they have seen both worlds [I presume the good and

evil sides].

[Ursula Linguine‘s] The Dispossessed [in which [a man leaves his own planet to go

to its neighbor [and afterward] can never ... truly belong to either.

Super hero orphans. Superman, Batman, Harry Potter, Frodo [...this is] the Western

condition. We are orphans. No culture, no stable system. [I am thinking of the]

Continuum concept. How the mind takes over. [In Collin Wilson's] From Atlantis to

99

the Sphinx [he explores] right brain versus left brain societies. [Western culture has

been affected by the] rise of the machine ... [as] Lord of the Rings [describes].

[I can also include] descriptions of this [so-called] Western society [as is described

in] [Bret Easton Ellis's] American Psycho, Raymond Carver's Mediated Desires.

[They talk about the] empty self [, in which people are] slaves to the media [and they

are] immature beings controlled by the state. [They also speak of the] break down of

community. [The 'advertisers'] build up the artificial and through [their] advertising

[use] mind control to make money.

The super hero searches for family, finds [a] community and power to overcome evil.

[the next day]

Gosh, this music is so soothing. Dead Can Dance, Aion. I've been dreaming that music is

very important. Its balance seperates good from evil. I feel much more centered with it on. It

takes me to a good place. A place I feel I belong [in]. A very sad but warm place. Deep and

wise.

I've been weeping about the African Rainforest. [I] saw a National Geographic special on the

Ba'Aka of Cameroon, They are Pigmys ... their rainforest is being killed. They are so

innocent. They went into a logging town where they were cursed at by all [those] they

passed. They found the top Government official who promised them their land 'won't be

hurt'. The next day the loggers came.

I wept when I told [my psycho therapist] the story. A part of me felt silly. I heard my mother

saying ―what are you really crying about?‖ She always did that. When I cried about doggy

dying in the movie she said I was crying for me. After a while I stopped crying other things

and only cried for myself.

She actually told me I was unable to really feel anything for the dog, [the] orphan, [or the]

chopped tree – that all emotion is projected. I'm sure it helped her to believe that. I'm sure it

made her lack of empathy easy to live with.

100

People care. People hurt for each other. People feel deep, deep sadness over things that do

not directly affect their lives. [I should tell my mother] Don't tell little girls with big loving

hearts that there is something wrong with them for caring. Don't fuck with their minds and

make them doubt themselves...Don't pathologize little healthy children with your

psychobabble. Don't experiment on your kids.

Frodo joins a brotherhood of people who have seen evil. Who have felt it. Who know the

sadness like I do. He finds his family.

Frodo is twice orphaned. He loses his parent but Bilbo [Baggins] Steps in. Then he is

orphaned from the world as he knows it. A world to which he cannot return. He is stolen in

fact by the ring. Harry Potter is wounded as he is orphaned, but in a display of strength.

Frodo does not gain power from [the] quest.

I'd like to write about [the work of] Raymond Carver. Particularly looking at the ―missed

connection‖ with the ―other‖. [The] inability to hear/see or communicate. A barrier is up

around the individual that separates him from his community. In a way this is what happens

to Frodo. But Frodo can communicate and share, just not with his peers. It‘s a matter of [his

peers] not understanding that isolates him.

In Carver the inability to communicate is lacking. [Carver] creates a world of outsiders who

are not even connected with themselves. Where Frodo hides his pain from his friends,

Carver's people struggle to name it in themselves. [In] Mediated Desires the characters have

no self. Evil... I would like to explore the continuum concept as the fall from Eden. I would

then like to bring Collin Wilson in [with his theory about right and left brained societies and

how industrial societies are disconnected]. This could lead to a discussion of Bret Easton

Ellis's American Psycho [where the protagonist has to mutilate people to 'connect' with

them... he wants to see what is 'inside them' but can only conceive of this in violent physical

way]. I could say this [thesis] is about evil versus the acceptance of pain, and the sadness as

[a] healing power.

101

Surfacing {by Margaret Attwood) would be an illustration. In this novel the character

searches for her parent. [She] goes into a shamanic experience. [This is about] regression

[and] reconnection.

[Next day]

There are times when I feel so warm. Such a deep sense of something amazing and beautiful.

Something so personal. Like someone reaching out to me. I'm listening to Dead Can Dance

again. It‘s amazing music. It‘s from a world I want to be in. Something Pre-Western yet

Western. My tribal ancestors. It also contains many ―religious‖ sounding songs. Chanting

like monks do. Yet there is a fiery edge, something whirling and wild. It‘s sad but free music.

I see deep colors of brown and red. Ochre. I see myself in a thick peasant‘s shirt with long

walking boots. I feel fresh and strong. Happy.

When all the layers peel off I come down to this dark well of sadness and mystery. I can rest

here. Yet before I allow rest I mark out a map, some way to keep this passage open,

available. The fear that I may lose the peaceful beautiful feeling eats up the peaceful

beautiful feeling.

No. I must find my way down into the dark watery cave over and over again. I want to set

my life by this. I want to yell out NO! To so many things. My head! My head must go!

[Later]

How very ironic! Just as I wrote the last line Mike arrived needing a lift [in my car]. Despite

the fact that he said he can walk I offered to drive [him]. I've made a pact with myself to stay

in bed for the rest of the day. I decided to drive him halfway only.

I needed to say NO NO NO. I am so easily intimidated. Not that Mike did that; it‘s just that I

felt it was the right thing [to do]. His car is within [easy] walking distance.

[Later]

102

My mother phoned. She's been worried about me. [She] knew something was wrong. [She]

says she has a secret relationship with me. It ties into what I said the other night. About the

pact. Thorny love.

She said everything I thought today. About needing to find a sacred space inside me in order

to heal. She said ―the world is wrong‖. She talked about the coming war in Iraq and I cried.

My rainforest. She said I need to take things slowly. [My mom's friend] recently took some

crew up a mountain during a [film] shoot, and said look, it‘s just a commercial, so it doesn't

matter. My mother told me to go and touch some grass.

I told her I miss her. She told me about a woman who died and her spirit looked down on the

room and saw her dog watching, breathing faithfully next to her body. She realized she

couldn't leave her dog and went back to her body. I cried. She said my body is like that dog.

Faithful, patient and willing.

I'm sorry body! I'm sorry for wanting you to conform to the shapes in my mind. For dragging

you into my sick games. I need to go slowly, to cut corners where I can.

[Later or the next day]

I actually feel quite a lot better. I realized today that I've been in mourning. I haven't really

allowed it.

I call on my [spirit] guides. I wish to enter the cave of sorrow and holiness. I wish to be

bathed in blue-black waters that do not break. So clear and so deep. Inside I shimmer, naked

little fish. There is no bottom here.

[I imagine a story:] I have a wife and child. Hurt and stolen. I have a sacred place burned and

desecrated. I have an ancient forest, the face of my mother, shorn and broken. Dead in the

sand. I have a sun that bakes and bakes as it always has on an empty land now a dying land. I

have a child twisted so that it cannot love. A child who loves only pain. I have the eyes of the

pigmies so round. I owe. So whole and honest weeping in shaking heads. I have the last

minute shouts, appeals banging on double glazed windows. I have unformed heads turning

away on shrugged shoulders. I have heart hearted boys with orthodontist smiles. I have

103

Mercedes. I have a video of the city. I have tiled concrete floors. I have a Zen garden. I have

an au pair. I have a closet full of shoes. I climb in the closet. I close the door. It‘s quite. It‘s

dark.

[Later or the next day]

I am gonna quit [my job] at the video shop. Tomorrow.

18/04/2003

Because Frodo knows the source of his pain he can leave the place he does not belong to.

Carver's do not and cannot.

[Later]

No wonder I get sick. I feel totally invalidated when I am out in the world. Like a little kid

whom everyone thinks is naughty. How on earth do I cope?

Retreat can be an act of strength and power.

I wish to wear white.

I really want to retreat. But not into despair or depression or isolation, but into my more

intuitive realms. I want to make a larger space for it in my life. I want to retreat from ―head‖

space into ―heart‖ and ―body‖ space. I've often felt this need. I've always seen it as some kind

of failure on my part. A need to escape. An inability to deal with reality.

Yes, I wish to escape the Apollonian reality and seek our Artemis. In Dr D's acupuncture

room there's a painting of a big moon behind a peak which is surrounded by water. It‘s a

murky green so you can't make out too many details. I love it. It‘s so feminine.

The world is wrong, I'm not going to stress out about the demands it makes.

Every time I dismiss this side of myself in any way, I am killing off my life force.

I've quit [job] at the video [rental]. I'm so glad.

104

I don't want to know other people's business. I want to keep my life simple. I don't want to

care about things other people value. I don't want to justify my own way of being.

[Later]

OK back to my thesis.

Carver and Ellis present Hell. Actually Carver presents reality, Ellis takes it to its extreme –

alienation in acute form (i.e. total lack of humanity; inability to desire or feel anything

outside the program). Complete materialism [where] connections can only be physical...

[here] intimacy is dismemberment; there is no social cohesion, [or] a psychological net to

contain the individual.

Frodo is a prototype. The hero's journey seen at the turn of the century. But is such a journey

possible. [It is possible] only if the source is found. Frodo is hurt in adulthood. Postmodern

man is hurt in infancy. The wound is hidden.

[There is a] preoccupation with Fantasy. [This is] the quest for major inspiration. [In this,] 1st

the hero is recognized, His orphanhood is ended by this recognition. But then there is a quest.

A talisman of power, something must be found.

I believe for me and for many others the quest is for the source of pain and joy.

I would like to explore some fantasy works too [in my thesis]. Particularly clichéd ones. [In]

the medieval setting. ―Olden times‖ - time before industry. Connections are still viable. The

world is safe and evil is identifiable. I want to look at Calesture by Storm Constantine. I like

the floating cities. A bit of modernity disconnected from the real world, but totally dependent

on it. A man who is alone in his own city creates the fantasy out of loneliness.

Fantasy provides an escape from the emptiness of Craver's realm. We are looking for 1)

community, 2) for a mirror, 3) for an explanation. 1) [looking for community] is inherent [I

would link this to the] (Continuum concept). It is a natural genetic expectation. 2) the mirror

this is part of [the search for community (no. 1)] but it also helps to rectify [things] if no. 1)

is not met. 3) [Is the] last resort.

105

[The] Orphan is about broken connections.

[Later]

I really healed myself yesterday. So much badness came out of me. I haven't been able to go

there today. Having work to do puts me in ―head‖ space.

I'm rebelling. My essay is due tomorrow at nine but I am going to hand it in later. I am not

prepared to hurt myself more to write this essay. I'm at that point where I'm overcome much

of the illness and feel so relieved that it‘s easy to jump too far too deep too soon. I'm gonna

take things slowly. Very slowly. And no one will rush me. If Prof wants to penalize me.

Fine! It will be spiteful because he knows I'm sick and I'm gonna bring another note.

Tomorrow I will finish off the essay, go to the doctor, hand in my essay, pick up my tutorial

paragraphs and come home and mark them.

My gums are infected. It‘s never been so bad. I flossed and they just swelled up. Now I have

to floss to keep them clean.

I really don't want to push anymore. I don't have to.

Appendix 2: An extract from Claire’s personal diary 2004

One Year later...

20th April 2004

Dizzy, weak, numb hands. Managed to [just] avoid getting a migraine this morning.

Promised myself I would work on connecting with my emotions today. They are so far back

and locked up.

Thursday night's [psycho therapy] session with [my therapist] was hectic. I fell right through

the block[age]. [I] had this picture of myself having a beautiful little house full of mud and I

am living on the roof. I need to excavate, wash clean all the rooms, open doors and live down

there in my house.

106

I'm very far from that right now.

I'm hurting I think. [Its] because of my mother...because she understood me on Saturday

night, because she cared. Because I opened up to her. Because I realized I don't want to let

her go. I don't want to make this change.

And then I saw I had to. That I have to cut loose. And then [I] saw that she'd withdrawn her

love of Saturday night.

And now I'm ashamed of how I was with her. I'm running from my vulnerabilities. I can't

allow myself to feel like I did when I spoke to her ... and she was kind. It hurts so much. It

feels like [I'm] breaking. I could go crazy over this. [My therapist] was right. I can only

handle so much at a time. No wonder the numbness has set in.

I feel endangered. I feel as if I have to disappear for a while. But my body isn't allowing it' I

can't zone out because I start feeling 'migrainy'.

So I promised to make contact. It‘s already helping a bit to write. I feel emotion for seconds

at a stretch. If I try to push – to feel more – it is as if something catches in my throat and

chest – like dry retching. I've actually just got to let go of the feelings when they go.

It‘s terrible that I have been going around for so long with this ability to disconnect. To be

smooth and calm. To 'live on top of my house and forget that it exists'.

Poor me. Poor me, poor me. I really deserve a lot of sympathy.

I've been aware of my disconnecting for ages but I think I've only now seen just how drastic

it can be. I went from one way of being into another in one day on Sunday. From being

convinced that I should keep the loft [which is part of my inheritance for when I turn twenty

five in August] and be supported by my mom; to knowing the only real choice is to take what

I can and leap into the unknown. I watched myself going through that process. I watched as I

struggled to make a choice. I realize why it was so hard. I couldn't feel anything. I had to get

[] to help me talk my way into the emotional aspects of the decision. And then I knew. I

could see that not selling was a symbol of wanting to hold onto a dream of my mother's love.

107

If I don't take her money I have nothing to prove she loves me [with]. And I am afraid of

taking the money from the sale because it is a kind of payout to make up for what is missing

[i.e. My mother's love]

Money + love...so complex. If she could really parent me it would be safe to accept her

support. But she gives money instead of love. I must take my own money and be left with

nothing.

No wonder that now, now that the mandate is signed and the sale [of the loft] is on, I can't go

back to feeling vulnerable. To craving my mother's love. I am too angry. Too stunned by

what I've done. Especially I phoned her on Sunday morning and said maybe we shouldn't

sell. Maybe I can let her help me out [with money instead of selling the flat].

I have to reject her offer of money and let myself still fell a need for her. That‘s the pain. In

her eyes it must seem like I'm fucking with her. [―]Mommy please give me love (money),

mommy I don't want your money (love) [‖].

No wonder I woke up in the middle of the night [after our talk] so adamant that I must not

sell [the loft]. I was an extension of her reality that I'd [unwittingly] stepped into while we

talked. Her presentation of how things could be. ―Come home and we'll look after you, we'll

wrap you up nice and warm in a straight jacket‖. I don't doubt I would have been mentally ill

if I had continued to live with them.

[Later]

It‘s hard not to hope that having this cash will sort everything out. I know it won't. I have to

heal. It may make that a little more possible. It‘s hard not to think of all the things I'm going

to do with it. Thinking about it is a nice kind of escape.

[Later]

I'm watching TV, if I do it for too long at a stretch my fingers start to tingle. Then I switch it

off and focus on my body. I try to feel a sensation of downward flow into my legs. Try to get

grounded.

108

I don't deserve a migraine. I'm doing my best. Tomorrow I'm going for a massage. Tomorrow

night I speak to [therapist] on the phone.

Please, dear body, warn me in other ways. I will listen. I'm trying to stay centered.

I need to talk to someone. All this silence here by myself. It‘s easy to just switch on the TV

for company.

I'm scared to open up. I keep thinking of talking to my mom, being so real with her while

being so unsafe. I knew it too. [I.e. Claire felt betrayed by confiding in her mother].

Body, please just know that I'm not abandoning you. I'm trying to get back to you. I'm trying

to heal you.

[Later]

I feel frustrated. 'What must I do?' I should have gone for a walk. Sitting in my house all day

is not good. I can force myself to feel. I can force myself to be grounded.

[Later]

I'm tired. Exhausted. Can't get comfortable. My back hurts and I need exercise but I just want

to sit down all the time.

Is this ever going to go away?

I'm not sleeping well at the moment because of anxiety. [I] don't want to get a migraine.

21/04/2004

[I had a] weird dream. Especially the part with [my friend]. I've been thinking about her.

About how much she helped me. What could it mean?

I went for my massage. [I] felt more vulnerable than I have before. [I] felt panicky for a

while too. I really relax more when there is pressure and a little pain.

[I] felt great afterwards. Much more grounded. I had more energy too.

109

Appendix 3: An extract from Claire’s personal diary 2005

23 January 2005

[English Professor] has informed me that there is a lecturing job I could take at a University

in Costal City. [The] jury is still out about whether I really want it.

I phoned [my brother]. Feel drained and insecure. He's so pumped up and motivated after his

trip [abroad]. [He] was giving me advice about getting out of my comfort zone etc. etc.

Felt invalidated. Like my whole life is a waste. I began ruminating about the money I've

spent [, money from my inheritance which I have spent on medical therapies]. I felt like I did

after speaking to my father.

NO

My family does this to me. I must recognize that this is how I feel about myself in their

presence. Like a miserable failure who just floats through life with no direction and no real

hopes.

It‘s so hard to know what I want with those feelings. I'd come very clearly to the knowledge

that I want to pursue music and that I'm not that keen on Drama. I drew a [tarot, asking] ―Is it

in my best interest to do Drama 1 at university this year?‖ I got: ―Judgment‖ which seemed

to indicate a resounding yes. But then I heard from [English Professor] and it perhaps refers

to that?

I played [my brother] my song. He seemed to like it. I enjoyed it but by the end of the chat I

rejected it.

I need to hold onto myself. I feel like I have no space – like I'm being crowded. The criticism

has started up.

I think I got sick so that I could do precisely that. [That is] hold onto myself. I need a long

time.

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I see what [my therapist] means by differentiation. I need to know my own life and worth no

matter what my family projects onto me.

[I have] been doing Vipassana meditation. [I] need to be in my body even though it feels

very uncomfortable. It‘s who I am. I realize how hard it is for me to listen and let my body

have its say. It‘s from doing that, that I came to the sense that Drama isn't quite what I want.

Depression and retreat is my way of validating myself. I've always felt more real in those

spaces. I could retreat and tell myself that one day they will know.

God! It's still so important for me to keep away from them [my family].

I just sat with that feeling of indecision and confusion left from that chat with [my brother].

And I see how that is how I've felt most of my life. There is such a feeling of being in

danger.

Tuesday 25th

January 2005

[I] went for UBI [treatment], after first canceling again [because it is so expensive]. I wanted

it. I wanted it to let this thing [this treatment] be done to me.

It's so clear why I feel like I've been raped now. [Dr] UBI is awful. He cannot make the

experience less invasive, more calming and sacred as it should be.

I feel raped. I felt the urge to let it happen even though I knew I had a problem with its

invasive[ness].

[My therapist] made a connection between the needs of babies being breastfed and sexual

abuse. I didn't understand it but now I do. A baby wants to be embraced and enveloped. It

need[s] the total blur[ring] of boundaries. [My therapist] pointed that this becomes

increasingly so as they [start to] make eye contact.

The willingness to surrender in sexual abuse comes from the same need, [it is] an urge to be

overpowered, to give in.

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I have that urge, in an ugly, bad situation I get ―hooked‖ on one pleasant or comforting thing

and allow the rest of the situation to engulf me.

My illness is like that.

My whole approach to the world is like that.

Like my fantasies as a child of being strapped into a sex machine that would do things to me.

Inhuman, uncaring, unnurturing but embracing nonetheless.

This is difficult. I'm barely processing it all. I've just come back from UBI. I've been trying to

contain myself. I feel physically violated.

And when I think about this job I get the same sense. I wake up in the middle of the night

with this intense physical horror of that job. Of packing up and leaving [here]. Fulfilling

some expectation. The pull – the candy – is the actual work. But the rest is not comfortable. I

feel pressurized to go for it – especially by myself. I want to prove myself. I want to be

something.

God! I have an awful time making decisions. It‘s because I cannot allow a full body/being

response to the presented situation as a whole. It would mean breaking the habit of allowing

myself to be raped. It would mean feeling other horrors.

I wasn't aware [the] last time, of DR UBI affect on me.

Last night‘s horror was a childhood feeling. Just like my past UBI feeling. [A] deep loss of

something very personal. Something precious thrown away. It felt like I had already accepted

the job and thrown my life in my University town away. Thrown away my young, sacred,

tentative self who needs to take things slowly.

Thursday 27th January 2005

I told my mother how I felt when I went [home] for Christmas [last year]. I told [her] how

angry I am. I told her that [if] she [had] not caused so much shit then I might not have stayed

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so ill for so long. They could have helped me. Instead it was like people just rolled their eyes

and dismissed me. I've paid dearly for that neglect.

She said that she got flack from my dad and my gran, and that my gran said some things that

I might not like. She said ―You don't stay with Ouma and lean on her. You just don't. She's a

selfish woman!‖ I said yes. I felt like she thought I was crazy. My mother said [my gran had]

said something about my mother needing to take me to hospital.

[My mother] also mentioned that my attitude on arrival freaked her out. My aloof

friendliness. Like I was hiding my anger.

I explained I was hiding nothing! I tried to make her see that I was being true to mixed

feelings. How can I hide something that is supposed.

Friday 20th January 2005

Feel tired. Bone tired. My brain is jammed. Not foggy, just too tired to think.

I'm not going for UBI. I'm not going to look for work. I will take things very slowly. I'm

going to get in touch [with my body/self]

I realize that it‘s my driveness that makes me ill. I still don't feel I have a right to rest. I've

been tackling this illness with all my strength and I can't keep doing it that way. I have to

stay with myself no matter what.

I just feel so very strange. So ungrounded. I feel myself standing in one spot for ages. [I]

can't make up my mind what to do.

I need to rest. Really rest. But I don't know how to let go. I don't want to be in my bedroom. I

feel stuck in there. I think I should change it around a bit. Clear it of bad energy.

I've been pushing myself so hard for so long. It‘s got to stop. It has to stop now.

[Later]

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Drivenness = me = lack of replenishing energy. [It‘s also an] urge towards something

partially satisfying, partially destructive.

There is some energy released when I run into or collapse into one of those bad addictive

situations. Disconnection from myself. Running on adrenaline. Like the high when I get

dressed up and look good. Or the frenzy of finishing a painting that‘s purely done to impress.

The way I went to see DR UBI.

It‘s not sustainable energy. That‘s why I haven't quite been able to follow through on things I

enjoy. That adrenaline (over stimulation) is just too exhausting to maintain.

When I am driven I am denying something in myself. I am overriding some signal.

Like being molested. Overriding the signals that say get out.

Appendix 4: Interview July 2005 - Chronology of the Illness

27/06/2005

Stuart: I would like you to discuss the chronology of the illness.

Claire: I was quite well at the end of 2002. I was running and exercising for the first time

ever – consistently. I started honors [in English at University] in 2003. It was quite

stressful. In first term, about March 2003, I became ill. [The illness, as I now know it

was]…glandular fever, [it lasted]… for about a week. [Although] there was no

proper diagnosis… Dr D [, a medical doctor and acupuncturist] said it was Glandular

fever. I had acupuncture and he was quite sure that it would cure me, and that I

would be fine. I don't think [the acupuncture] … helped at all. I did get better; like

recovering from flu but [the illness] became a constant thing … my heart had a tired

beat. I would be lying down and felt as if I had run a marathon – not palpitations

[yet]. [During this time I experienced recurrent]… bouts of glandular swelling and a

feeling of being generally tired. [At the time I couldn‘t connect the] … persistent

tiredness …with this particular illness. It was only towards the end of the year, after

exams in November…when I was planning to leave for overseas, that …it …

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[became] really bad [or chronic]. [It was then that I]… I knew something was really

wrong. That December I went to the city [to see my parents] and [while there I

experienced]… incredible stress. [This was directly linked to ongoing issues

surrounding my relationship] with my whole family. …I knew [internally at that

time] that this [illness] was a big problem [but did not consciously link it to my

relationship with my family to a great extent]. [I knew then however that] this wasn't

just going to go away.

Back in my University town I was stuck with it for a while, and it wasn't getting

better. It was then that I consulted a homeopath [in a coastal town nearby]. I worked

on it to a point where I could function OK and almost feel like it was just about to get

better. I would [however] … [experience] relapses. This went on for a long time. [I]

then I broke my left ankle. [This was directly after standing up to my mother and

demanding that I receive my trust money because I was twenty five years old]. I

didn't really notice the illness so much [while I was recuperating from my broken

ankle]. [This is because] I was immobile for about three months…and ME

[consequently] took a back seat. I still … [experienced] the heart palpitations… [and

my symptoms resembled] …having [influenza].

[When my] inheritance [money] … came through in October 2004 …I thought OK

lets nail [this disease with medical treatment]. [I started by having]…my fillings out.

[This was because I believed that my symptoms were partly due to mercury toxicity

from fillings] – [as it turned out this was] not such a good idea. It made me much

more ill than I had been [before]. The [experience of the] metal detox[ification] was

very bad. I had mental problems: [such as] …[lack of] concentration, I was

incredibly moody and [even] suicidal. I've been depressed before but [at this time] I

had days of [being seriously preoccupied with] contemplating suicide. The intensity

of [the effects of the metal detoxification] wore off by about January [2005]. [It was

at about that time that] I went to see Dr UBI for UBI. [The UBI treatment]… seemed

to work [at first but] it was very expensive. I went for [treatment for] four weeks in a

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row. It helped a lot, I felt lifted out of a slump and I had the sense that ―OK I am on

the road to recovery.‖ This lasted for about two months and I started planning my life

again. I wanted to go back to University and do [either] Anthropology or Drama. I

was trying to find my passion. It didn‘t seem to come so easily. [It was at about that

time that]…I went away [on a trip, alone,] [in]to the Karoo – [it was meant to be] a

kind of spiritual journey. I found that incredibly difficult, [perhaps because] I hadn't

been away for a long time.

[This Desert rip brought up my recurrent]…issues about being alone [to the surface].

[While there I experienced how when I was alone my consciousness seems to get

stuck] in my head, [so while] sitting with my own thoughts [my experience was that I

could not experience] just being in my body – it really showed me …[my]

mind/body split. [This helped me realize more profoundly]… that I have a serious

desire to work …with spiritual and environmental [healing], [and finding] sacredness

[in my life]. But it was after that that I had my relapse. [I had a] [s]erious [relapse of]

glandular fever (or viral attack) … [which] I sat with [in my flat at University] for

the last 2 months. [It was very frustrating because] I would have two good days [in

which I would try to get my life back again] and then [I would] become sick again.

Appendix 5: Interview July 2005 - Honours Year

28/06/2005

Stuart: When you became ill, it was in that post grad environment [of your English honors

degree at University. [Of h]aving to prepare for seminars and perform in front of

people.

Claire: So true.

Stuart: [Do you think that] maybe moving to that next level caught you out.

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Claire: Ya that was a huge issue during honors, of not feeling like I could go in there and be

who I was. I had to constantly prove myself and pose.

Stuart: You were in quite a brilliant class too, I thought anyway.

Claire: Ya, we were, [there was] a lot of pretentiousness.

Stuart: And lots of fragile egos. Artistic competitiveness?

Claire: Snobbery, particularly in this department.

Claire: There was a lot going on. I thought how can I be real in this environment – I felt like I

was posturing, even when I was at home alone reading the books. I was so out of

myself – I felt like I was playing a role [even] while I was reading. I hated that, I felt

split. It‘s all about the ‗Canon‘, society and the institution, you are being initiated,

you have to prove yourself. It was not about my education. Many of the novels were

about the rebellious spirit and the wakeful soul, but they were presented in such an

inaccessible way. When I think about honors and let myself go back there I just want

to cry, I am angry for pushing myself to keep going – again it‘s that idea of ―I am so

pathetic‖, ―if I stop now...‖ ―my wanting to stop is a sign of my weakness‖. So this

need to push through it [was a big issue for me], and I definitely wanted to stop. I

thought about [pulling out] a lot. Sure it‘s given me something, it‘s useful but it‘s

also – I don‘t think I would have been so ill if I had pulled out. I mean that whole trip

to [a remote coastal village] was like – huh – I could breathe again – I felt like there

is a bigger world – I'm taking this knitty gritty seriousness so seriously, and I just

want to get out. I was trying too hard to make friends with people who are just [not

worth it for me because they are operating on different assumptions about the world]

- I wish I could go back there and just hug myself – I would say: ―Claire, pack your

bags and get out of here‖.

The head of department wants people to prove themselves to her. You‘ve got to

always be sharp and witty and clever – even if you are, she can feel so threatened by

you, she misunderstands you and pounces on you. It‘s this game of trying to please

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her all the time – you've got to really suck up to her – cower a bit before she takes

you seriously – but not if you are a boy, if you are a boy you can say anything you

want and she will like you.

Appendix 6: Interview July 2005 - Parents

Stuart: I would like you to expand a little on your past, on your parents' and your experiences

during childhood. And how you moved from one school to another snooty, snobbish

school. It‘s known throughout the country that upmarket city dwellers can be [the

biggest] snobbs, [it can be] very cliquey [down there and you went into one of the

cliquiest schools in the city, in the country.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: A little girl from a working class neighborhood at the time].

Claire: It was not cool [for me].

Stuart: Both of your parents are not native English speakers, yet you have a more proper

English accent than I do [coming from a self consciously English background].

[Getting back your experiences at school,] I saw a program about an Australian girl‘s

school, which was about how vicious girls can be at school, especially to the odd one

out. Even when they were caught on camera the girls denied being nasty, and it was

very nasty, symbolically. They were so sassy… onto it. Now you were thrown into a

school, with all the little rich kids. This vulnerable, emotionally sensitive ‗little

thing‘…

Claire: Jesus

Stuart: So do you think that your experiences there reinforced what your mother had said to

you, namely ―that it s not safe out there.‖ What I saw on that program seemed to

show that some children can get beaten up, literally but albeit symbolically, everyday

at school.

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Claire: Precisely. I mean I needed school to be a safe place and I was also – looking at the

[shaman teacher]'s thing: puberty is a key time – things that happen then [can] really

imprint on you because things are happening at that point [of one‘s life]. [I think]

that‘s how I was imprinted [at an ego level of being able to cope] - on how to relate

to groups. [The rules that I learnt there are:] ―You fuck'n check out who is the power

player in the group. You make sure you keep them in your eye at all times and then

check how the people rank. Where do they rank, what are the energy exchanges.

When I am sitting with a group of people I want to know exactly what‘s what at the

table and it‘s only when I know where I stand with every single person that I can

relax and come out of myself.

Stuart: [That (knowing where you stand) is something] you can't know [and] so you never do

[come out of yourself].

Claire: Ya. You know I felt angry because I got a lot of flak for my poor behavior in this

[Tantra] course. But you know Jees, how are you supposed to behave when you...are

under threat, but I think they do that on purpose as well, to see how people behave

under stress. That‘s what they want to see.

Stuart: Ya. That‘s the whole point, they want to push your buttons...and then see [what

happens]. You have also mentioned about being the 'go between' between your

parents. As the eldest (not even any older cousins) ...well the oldest [child] takes

most of the flack and you say [repeatedly] how they [, including your father],

―fucked up on you‖ [with regards to their parental skills]. It‘s a terrible thing to say.

Now your parents got divorced and your were the one in between them trying to

maintain order. I am thinking of 'Absolutely Fabulous' where the daughter rebels

against the mother's rebelliousness. So were you the serious one…

Claire: True. I am trying to think where the illness comes in because I was sick all the

through my childhood.

Stuart: [getting off] school.

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Claire: All through, even before [school] I was always the sick one. I had asthma, allergies,

pneumonia, flu – I kept going in and out of school [because of my illnesses]...You

know it was [hard] and I am trying to think how that relates to all of this.

Stuart: Who treated you when you when you were sick?

Claire: I went to doctors, my mother also [treated me] for various things. But it was also just

a need to opt out of being so stressed most of the time. The incredible tension of

having to be so alert and so tuned into what is going on around me. Being sick is an

incredible relief. It‘s like I can just ... [or rather] people can just leave me alone. I

won't get a lot of flack when I am sick, I'll just be able to turn inward and shut the

world out for a while. That was mostly the feeling then.

Stuart: [So it is] almost as a counter [measure] to your mother's terrible threats. You told me

[earlier] that she breaks the [sacred] rules [of motherhood]; [she] goes too far.

Claire: Ya. {quietly}

Stuart: To make that threat unreal, [to make your mother] not [to] have crossed that

boundary, you become ill and say...

Claire: Will you take care of me.

Stuart: [or] ―I am being taken care of [while] I am not performing [as a good girl should and]

so [I am] breaking down the fear of the 'unrealness'.‖

Claire: Also when I think of, again…Ya, I mean if my mother is constantly, like trying to get

[inside my head]....fucking with me and playing games with me, and you know

putting me in these different roles. Even at six [years old] I was apparently really –

well she accuses me of being so cruel. Maybe six is too early, perhaps a little older.

And [she was] never really engaging with me. Getting sick is the same as shutting

down – that might happen during sex or when I get into a rage. It‘s like, nuh, it‘s a

power thing - ―you can't budge me.‖ Kind of like a catatonic [person].Its ―I‘m taking

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my power here‖ [in being non-cooperative]. ―One thing you cannot do [is] you can't

actually make me better‖.

Stuart: [You mean you are saying (metaphorically)] ―you can't move me.‖

Claire: Ya, ―you have no control over me being sick or getting well‖. It‘s very interesting.

Stuart: So. It‘s like from a personal perspective, [because] I've never really been sick...just

one of those people who has never been to hospital, I've had appendicitis ...it healed

itself, my doctor gave me orange juice [liqui fruit was quite a treat back then] and

bad tonsillitis but it healed itself. I tried, like shit, to get out of school when I was

younger. My mother would come in with a thermometer… she was a nurse. I tried

very hard to bullshit her and every single time - [she would say] ―No, you are going

to school.‖ I couldn't ever – even when I didn't want to go to school, even when I

made myself believe I was ill [and] made myself feel sick – but my mother wouldn't

believe me… and so five minutes later would be feeling fine again.

Claire: I just had an interesting thought. Maybe I got sick to frustrate my mother because it

made her feel weak. It was like she, Ya...With my shaman teacher when I went into

shut down and he was like ―stop doing this to frustrate me,‖ I actually felt quite a lot

of satisfaction by the fact that I was frustrating him.

Stuart: Really?

Claire: You know that‘s it, it‘s a punishment.

Stuart: Ya?

Claire: It makes my mother...my mother keeps telling me [that] as a child ―Oh I'm [i.e.

Claire] so much stronger‖ and that ―I am actually fucking with her.‖ Ya ... So, there

is this total disbelief about myself. I can't....All the power that I might have in my

own life gets used against me. So in a sense I need to be in a space where I no longer

have power, and that‘s being sick. [Its] like my body takes over my choices for me.

Because when I make the choices my mother uses them against me. This is a choice

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she can't use against me. But then obviously the sickness is against me. Sorry this is

new, now is the first time I've thought about it. This is interesting...

Stuart: Very

Claire: Ya.

Stuart: Related to this, how in the social context (family, neighborhood) when a child is ill

there is an implicit notion of so called ―bad motherhood.‖ There are certain socially

embedded rules or laws about how a mother should treat or deal with a sick child.

Now what I am thinking is that as a child you were angry, you have no other

appropriate way to express this so you become ill, say, and your mother freaks out

because you are ill. Your mother had issues because of her mother‘s silence with the

child abuse (incest) – so when you are ill it is a way of getting back at her. And at the

same time it may also be a cry for help that extends outside the family. It made your

mother angry because there is, perhaps, implicitly something wrong with a mother

with a sick child.

Claire: You are saying it was just a way of expressing how she was hurting me.

Stuart: Not only between the two of you but to everyone else…

Claire: Ya, a way of communicating that I was being hurt. Ya, I mean that‘s really where I

started from. In terms of ―Oh, I‘m being hurt.‖ And so I get sick to express it because

I can‘t express it in another way. But I think Ya, this aspect of control… - because I

have been trying to work out what I understand about being sick, being a victim of

being in control. I haven‘t been able to work it back to my childhood –but now I

think I see it.

Stuart: OK….Your frustration with the Shaman teacher on the course; was that [frustration

from] controlling yourself or someone else.

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Claire: Someone else or taking my power. At least having some sense of power when I feel

like I am being controlled… Sorry this is bringing up stuff for me…Sorry I‘m going

into therapy mode…but this is new. I don‘t know if you want to skip it.

Stuart: No, it‘s OK [carry on].

Claire: I was just recognizing if I had to get sick just to stop the process that was going on

with my mother, it just brings back the incredible frustration and tension that I must

have been living with…That was the only way I could say stop…or gain some sort of

foothold. Jees, it must have been hectic mmm …huh.

Stuart: You are doing very well Claire.

Claire: it‘s just like VVV…energy moving through me….

Stuart: [a short while later]… Now… there are some say if you don‘t play sports that it can

hurt or damage your confidence. Just to add onto all the rest [of your childhood

woes].You never played sports – [I mean] interaction in that game setting – that

experience. Almost all your experience has been interpersonal [as opposed to being

part of a group interacting with another group as you would get in sports].

Claire: Ya

Stuart: Even this [shamanic] course (besides everything else) it is a kind of social

intersubjective, a verbal eye to eye [kind of] communication scenario, not expressing

yourself with your body through netball, running, swimming…that kind of physical,

organic game with someone else, [with you] its always intellectual or the

interpersonal side [of interactions that you partake in].

Claire: you are talking about having my body in the social sphere. No I haven‘t played

sports. The only time my body was out in the social sphere was in drama – so there is

always that thing of acting and how I am being seen. It‘s an external relationship…

Stuart: you loved [drama] and you were brilliant [at it]

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Claire: Loved it.

Stuart: But you were the one in your class who got the roles.

Claire: I don‘t know if it was talent or just enthusiasm. It was just acting out the games I was

already playing [anyway].

Stuart: It also expanded your network of friends?

Claire: Ya...It was a lot of fun – it allowed me to experience dialogue, the dialogue I would

create on my own would not have been so fluid. Whereas on stage its set up, you

experience, by acting, by staging what I should be experiencing in life anyway. Now

that I think about that, it might also be the case. I can play with you, you can pretend

to love me, and see how it would be like to be in a real exchange which on my own I

still [even now] struggle to do.

Stuart: Outside of drama, what was your network [of friends] like? Your personal network

[of friends.]

Claire: Ridiculous, because I moved around so much – my parents were coming and going.

Stuart: How many times did you move …?

Claire: So many times, before the age of two I had moved three times, two crèches, five

schools… I usually moved school because of the fact that I was not very happy in the

school…I was having issues…the stress was obviously just because of stuff going on

at home.

Stuart: When I was at school I never even knew I had a choice…

Claire: But you have to understand my parents were like these liberal funky…

Stuart: New Age?

Claire: Ya, they were completely rebelling against anything conservative, no matter how

good or bad it was… they threw the baby out with the bathwater…completely.

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Stuart: No structure?

Claire: No structure.

Stuart: And your parents thought that because ‗we‘ live in such a bad society – any structure

is bad.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: Therefore you could push and there would be no boundary

Claire: Ya

Appendix 7: Interview September 2005 - Claire’s Literature Review

The Last Taped Interview with Claire before she leaves for the city (this is after her return

from the Tantra course).

Stuart: My aim today is to go over the last month or so, starting when or rather after you read

the three important books. I would like to briefly review them, and then go onto how

you found the course you have been on etc. It‘s a loose interview and I think now is a

good time because you are still fresh for your course. I think let‘s start with Derrick

Jensen which for you I see as the end of a process which began with making friends

with [] and loving your lecturer‘s [environmental and materialist] History course

Claire: Ya, exactly it was excellent

The door that opened for me was: the idea of illness being more than an individual

process – it being a kind of societal thing. It seems clichéd but [No] – the illness of

[Derrick Jensen's] father being the denial [inherent in Western] culture. The same

violence that his father acted on him [as a child], is the violence that is acted on the

environment… [it is] by the same process of denial.

Stuart: Denial of...

Claire: Denial of self, of one's own pain...I can't remember the book so well.

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Stuart: [So] pain and illness has a larger function in an environmental global view – we need

to feel pain – we need the people [of the world] to feel the pain [for Gaia].

Claire: In order to stop the behavior.

Stuart: Pain and illness as...

Claire: A warning sign [that] abides changed behavior or to unfold new behavior.

Stuart: So do you think that there is anything in Derrick Jensen's book that allows you to

express...

Claire: Derrick Jensen..., the idea of pain and illness as guides to stop, to change the

situation, to change the world...

Stuart: Behavior...

Claire: Ya, to affect change on an external level. To recognize violence on an external level –

whereas [Arnold] Mindell is more pain and illness as creating change on the inside,

more of an internal unfoldment of the soul, the process of dreaming and... they are

two sides of the same coin.

Stuart: Ecopsychology, especially the one reader you read...you have a bachelor‘s degree in

Psychology, which were the specific readings in that reader that enticed you.

Claire: It was actually...that book was an extension of Derrick Jensen. It was very much the

world crying out in pain through our illness. The disconnection with the world

resulting in illness, and also being used as a means of reconnecting with the

environment.

Stuart: These books don't really speak about friendship networks – it‘s about healing the

world but in the little I read of Derrick Jensen's book, he is ostracized by society. He

works through it, he has some theories that illness is not and individual problem,

only for me there seems to be a contradiction because if your group is part of the

illness and [Derrick Gensen] criticizes [them] from the point of view of the

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environmental perspective...if he doesn't believe they are right, and then he

verbalizes it he gets ostracized himself. Isn't he isolating himself again? Does he

replace the social with the environment of 'Nature' itself?

Claire: Ya you may be right...

Stuart: Is sharing experiences with fellow travelers very important to you... [I am] not

[talking about] just anyone. For example you found it difficult to connect with your

old friends from your undergrad days. They were so mundane and profane to you.

Claire: I think for me the issue of connection... [is a big one], I struggle to connect [with

people]

Stuart: To whom.

Claire: To anything, to everything. I struggle to connect with work, with life, with particular

people, with anything - with the environment – with my body – with my emotions. I

need to re-establish that [connection].

Stuart: Arnold Mindell...the process work is almost, for me [anyway, about going] past being

afraid to express yourself through being ill.

Claire: It is interesting it is almost like through [Arnold] Mindell it gives [me] permission to

connect with the illness. If I can't connect with that experience...

Stuart: Experience is important?

Claire:… and let that experience be my guide. So I am not running, I am not disconnecting

further from my illness experience - [by saying OK lets] see what 'it' wants to do,

where it is taking me?...What is it about?

Stuart: Finding meaning in the body? When you are in denial, you just want to

[recover]...[you think] if you can just connect with consensus reality, everything

must be 'well', 'the wellness revolution' [implies] you have to medicate [even when

you are not ill], you have to be proactive etc. or else your body will become out of

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line with what is normal and therefore you have to apply remedial remedies to bring

the body back into line, whereas Mindell [starts from the position] of saying no – the

body is 'out of line' because it wants to express itself and [by not listening] you are

just trying to stonewall it...How does that work for you?

Claire: that's right, I don't know

Stuart: You mentioned that you were reading all these books but you have read a lot of other

books before this, so these were rather part your long term process of trying to find

meaning [in general], through all the books that you have been reading, all the

alternative, pluralistic things that you have been doing (sorry too academic). You

were ready to understand the books you read in your way. I am sure that you had

heard of shamanism before, but it is interesting that you were saying that you had a

talk with your grandmother and then you opened up a path there before you found

your shaman teacher's site on the web.

Claire: Oh right, Ya. I said ―help me find‖ [to my deceased grandmother]....I was thinking I

was interested in this stuff, reading ecopsychology and Mindell, [I was thinking that]

this is what I would love to do. Then I just thought, you know I can't be the only

person in my country who is interested in this, surely more people – who are older

and wiser than me…are doing this [neo-shamanistic/process orientated work]– [my

country] can't be that backward. And so that's when I said to my grandmother: ―Fine,

OK, help me to find the people‖ and then I found it on the net.

Stuart: Besides that, the fact that you actually asked was important because you had had

unresolved problems with her.

Claire: Ya, I didn't really feel comfortable with my grandmother, I had this idea that she was

around and uh, ya I have been tense around her [presence], so I suppose again it is up

to a connection… ―OK allow life in, open up, just open up to possibilities, don't

[hold onto the] need to control so much, [thinking] is this appropriate or isn‘t this

appropriate or whatever‖.

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Stuart: In other words an either or mentality…

Claire: Yes I'll take this risk [I thought to myself].

Stuart: [You mean that you decided to] take the help from grandmother even though her

actions [with regard to not protecting your mother from your grandfather‘s sexual

abuse] have had fucked up consequences [for your mother and yourself].

Claire: Ya

Stuart: What do you think about family constellations...

Claire:....

Stuart: Is it mostly an unformulated idea...sorry I am sweeping through things here, I have

been talking too much...

Appendix 8: Interview July 2005 - Food and Categories

Stuart: What about the food regimen and the strict categories.

Claire: It is an artificial sense of control, an artificial kind of feeling of ―this is who I am, this

is what I stand for because I am so afraid of losing myself‖, [of being] afraid of the

threat of being flexible in the world. Just before the workshop I realized how [I had

reached the stage that] every food [group] was poisonous – I can't eat this because it

is full of chemicals, this food is grown in this part of the country, I must rather eat

the organic, mustn't eat meat because it is really morally unsound...in the end the

world is just this dirty polluted scary place and I am probably better off if I don't eat

at all. ―Don‘t drink water, breath the air‖. That is how it was starting to go. Ya it is

all the same idea.

Stuart: [What about] when you became a vegetarian? Well when I became a vegetarian I was

trying to escape the society‘s [white male] stereotype and the ideals [bound up with

that identity]. I needed that then and it cut my circle of friends down. That‘s when I

met you. [What you eat] here [in the university town, in our country tends to]

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…‘group you‘ [into] ‗veggie‘ vs. ‗meat-eater‘. Eating with people can be interpreted

symbolically as taking energy with them [don‘t you think?].

Claire: Ya, for me it was a way out of my family – [looking back it could be interpreted as:]

―I am not going to be part of you guys‖.

Stuart: I didn't drink tea for ten years [when I was young because I was singled out as being

too young to drink coffee while my brother (only 13 months older than me) was

allowed to drink coffee]...

Claire: this illness has been a separating factor, something that has pulled me out of my

family, I blamed them for it and I still kind of do. I'm still angry with them. But it‘s

shown me, God, that I don't really want to be separate from my family. [Being apart

from my family] doesn't make me happy. [I have decided that] I can't live in

resentment always, [but until recently] I haven't understood how.

It‘s how my shaman teacher – his whole thing is about adulthood – [is that] sure you

have got to go and retrieve the inner child [as I have been doing with my therapist to

a large degree], [to] look and see and find the original wounds deal with them and

experience them, and all of that but the point is not to recover the inner child. It is to

grow up, to find the inner adult because that‘s what you are now. I have not wanted

to grow up, because growing up means entering this harsh world.

Appendix 9: Interview July 2005 - Visualising the Body

Stuart: how do you visualize your body – i.e. as a picture? Chinese doctors see a flow of chi

or energy, Homeopaths are electrically orientated and doctors are chemical...could

you expand on this.

Claire: Both the western and the alternative medical therapies I have chosen have based their

views on the idea of the body needing to be controlled. Of some will that needs to be

acted upon the body. So it is like this thing that is not behaving well and needs to be

managed – so that it will fit again [into the consensus].

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Stuart: Can you quantify or qualify that statement in terms of what is done or said in that

regard.

Claire: I [have] completely avoided Western Medicine, in particular because it isolates parts

of the body, breaks it up into pieces and they almost seem uninterested in the rest of

you. So that if I go to a doctor now with a urinary tract infection, they will give me

an antibiotic for it. Go back two weeks later with a chest cold, they will treat it and

not look at the bigger connection. Whereas homeopathy, the image is more of the

body being off balance or out of kilter...and by giving the body back the thing that it

is seeking in the unbalance – the disease itself – [the body is healed]. So the

homeopath will give you the thing that makes you ill in a certain dose to, kind of, get

the body to pull itself into the opposite direction. It is more geared towards health. I

also use herbal stuff, which is on the same principal as western medicine.

Stuart: but it has fewer side effects.

Claire: but they do have side effects, it is different from homeopathy, it is a chemical thing.

Homeopathy, [like the other two] still treats the symptoms. This is frustrating

because every time you treat the symptoms, it‘s just this endless pursuit of the right

remedy and this gets treated, then something else flares up, it just goes on and on.

Stuart: Am I asking the right questions?

Claire: Acupuncture is about opening up blockages. It seems to work for me, when it is

working on an organ, but not so much on a general condition. When the liver is not

in sync acupuncture challenges the energy to flow again – it encourages the flow.

Stuart: Have you used massage treatment.

Claire: A little, I find it too gentle, I felt I needed something more drastic.

Stuart: What about [your kinesiologist].

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Claire: She does Kinesiology, which is based on muscle testing. She has lists of issues and

illnesses, parts of the body, how things work and then you set particular intentions to

shift this. Then she tests you whether it has changed. It is like working precariously

with the body. Using words and gestures but it doesn't enter into the conscious and

logical mind in any way, but it is still verbal and somehow that is supposed to have

an effect on the body. Frankly I didn't feel like it did anything. It didn't work for me

because, particularly with my illness, I need to grapple with it logically and I need to

... it is an emotional expression that needs to happen. Whereas that doesn't encourage

that sort of thing.

Stuart: So what you are trying to say is that your body is trying to speak to you and you are

making it unconscious instead.

Claire: Ya and also kinesiology is about trying to get it back in balance. Whereas if I look at

Mindell, the idea of rather extending the imbalance to understand what [the body] is

trying to say so if the body is achy in this spot then you say – make it more sore –

just extend that pain, go into the pain – exaggerate the pain, speak the message of the

pain, pull your body into the position of the pain and then the whole picture comes

out. Whereas kinesiology and all kinds of other medicine is just about shutting that

message down.

Stuart: So how does this fit into the wellness revolution.

Claire: It might not be your body, your mind, your soul for it to be in a position set for that

ideal.

Stuart: I still don't see where Mindell fits into the Wellness revolution.

Claire: OK a quote – health (good physical health) might not be the best thing for the soul,

curing the body...

Stuart: Wellness assumes peak health at all times – that is what we are supposed to be –

illness is when something is wrong, Mindell therefore has a new way of seeing

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illness, illness is a challenge for the soul, in the bigger scheme it is not necessarily

wrong.

Claire: Nothing is 'wrong,' just uncomfortable. It‘s painful, it‘s in discordance with maybe

your environment but it is something new, it is a creative thing that is happening.

Stuart: Do you remember your own metaphor of having to 'work on yourself' all the time,

what do you think about your shaman teacher's koan about the working twice as hard

can sometimes cause you to take twice as long.

Claire: Ya, exactly because I really believed that there was something wrong with me. It was

like I was different from other people and I had to catch up with the rest of the world

and the standard they had set.

Stuart: That is what I have found so frustrating about my stammer, if I work more

consciously with it, it normally gets worse.

Claire: Try making it worse, play with it, exaggerate the feeling of it.

Stuart: If you can't control your body, like me with this speech, the way it is supposed to be

controlled – if you fight, you are working against it all the time...maybe you are

creating the problems by pushing yourself away from the body.

Claire: [My therapist] said this thing to [my friend] - ―why don't you give your body its own

autonomy‖ - both us were like ―huh? No! You can't just give the body its own

autonomy – it‘s like – it will want to just eat and I'll get fat or it‘s like a child that

needs to be roped in.‖

Stuart: Ya women's relationships with their bodies and consensus reality. Just think about

period ads ―now I can swim when I want to.‖

Claire: Ya, now women can be free because they have found a way to control their periods,

which means you can only be free if no one knows you have your period.

Stuart: Only if you can hide all the symptoms are you free.

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Claire: Freedom is becoming more androgynous.

Stuart: Think about men for a while, ―man is a machine,‖ our bodies are pushed to excel.

Claire: We have performance anxiety, when we consider it a performance- they consider it

life. Everything‘s about how well I am performing in relation to other people

Stuart: Moving between practitioners, how do you speak about your body?

Claire: Dr UBI annoys me, he knows too much – because he knows too much, you know, he

is an expert – he is not interested in my body – he is interested in 'the body.' 'The way

the body works' and he knows exactly, statistically if it does not respond within so

long then, within three weeks then it means that I have got this problem or that

problem. Then you get the bad news because it hasn't responded. He just makes it

feel as if everything is so set and structured – there is no fluidity and you are doomed

or you can be saved. He is just a medical doctor – the machine [i.e. The body] is

working or it isn't working.

Stuart: So male, western – the idea that he can fix it. Finding the Holy Grail, that missing link

that will solve everything.

Claire: It made me so depressed when it did not work, he said it would – when it didn't I felt

like a complete failure. And that is why it has been so important for me to find the

way that I am not a failure. He doesn't understand the deeper level of what is

happening. He never made any promises

Stuart: He has to believe in his own remedy to be able to do it in good faith.

Claire: He has holistic ideas but… [still conforms to the orthodox medical viewpoint].

Appendix 10: Interview July 2005 - The Victim

Stuart: OK. Please go through the initial problems you had when you spoke to your shaman

teacher. There was the money issue, you were uncertain of him at first and you

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pulled out of going. How did you finally decide to go? Was it a cathartic thing or did

you just say ―fuck it‖ [because you were desperate for anything], how did it go...

Claire: Well speaking to him on the phone, I saw this course and I thought, after I read the

web site, that there were things there that looked interesting. But there were other

things that I wasn't so sure about. I thought let me try – it‘s appropriate, it‘s soon, its

close by, and I can do it – let me try. Immediately on the phone I sensed something

quite scary, I felt, immediately, a bit threatened and at the same time fascinated. Like

I want to do this but I was already quite sacred. He said [later] that was probing me

on the phone.

Stuart: What type of things were you talking about?

Claire: He wanted now who I am, what am I doing. Where have I been the last year... [I told

him] I've been sick, chronic fatigue. This immediately put up a flag for him. OK, he

has his categories of what is connected to chronic fatigue...Ok so probably home

issues with relationships, and that kind of thing. I said ya its true. He said ―I'm just

checking, I'm pushing you a bit, I want to see how far you can go.‖ I said ―Fine.‖

Then he said ―how have you been able to support yourself.‖ ―Well I've had some money that

I inherited.‖ ―Ya, he said sometimes more of a curse than a blessing.‖ And I said

―YES‖ and he kind of kept pushing me a bit and

Stuart: He seemed to hone in on a few things quite quickly.

Claire: Ya he does- very quickly. He's very smart... [but] he doesn't stop talking [its]

annoying, he doesn't really listen...he just kind of [talks at you]

Stuart: That pisses you off about people

Claire: Yes it really does...After talking to him I couldn't sleep that night, I felt very tense,

like ―what the hell is going on‖, I felt really shaken by the conversation.

Stuart: Did you have any dreams related to that.

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Claire: I can't remember, I'll look it up. I kind of sensed that this was going to be about –

almost remolding the ego.

Stuart: How do you define the ego?

Claire: Ego is defenses. How you learn to cope with the world… sometimes not very well.

You can kind of attach to certain behaviors and feelings.

Stuart: Your preciousness?

Claire: Ya, my preciousness. I immediately phoned him the next day and said that I get the

sense that this is going to be an emotional boot camp...And he said ―no, no don't

worry about it‖ – but it has actually turned out to be quite hectic. And then I got

really sick. The fear, the fear I think of knowing that I am going to an initiation of

some sort. Knowing that this is going to shake me up. It‘s going to rearrange the

circumstances that I have set up for myself. And really wanting to be all that but also

feeling quite daunted. And [as] you know I started to have quite serious thoughts

about pulling out. And I got very ill. I phoned him about it and he said ―I've heard all

of this before‖ - he said ―take heart and just come along‖. Ya so I did. I just threw

myself in there. And when I arrived I was like ―What the fuck am I doing here.‖ It

felt like death.

Stuart: How was this compared to your other trip into the Karoo when you wanted to

commune with nature. You are [in my opinion] still very people orientated [and] you

thrive on interaction.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: But [till now] you haven't been able to get what you wanted.

Claire: It‘s this ambivalence I have about being close to people. I get so lonely and I want to

interact and I know that there is this really spontaneous engaging part of me – I want

to have fun and just play with people – but it comes to a point and then I go into a

block – I just can't push past that block and I just withdraw. It‘s this

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ambivalence...Like I really want to be with you then I really don't want to be with

you at all and ya I feel...

Stuart: Is it part of your illness, you feel ill, you can't hang in there and put up with...

Claire: Well what‘s come up for me about the illness is, its… my mother has this attitude

about herself and about everything that she has been through in her life – its she's a

victim and she's um – 'this is just the way she is' – she is like forever going to be like

this – and everyone around her must just accommodate her and everything just kind

of gets fed into that persona. So even the work she does is just feeding that image of

herself.

Stuart: The fact that she is the victim [is a paradox] because she is the bread winner and the

sick one [at the same time while your father is the healthy one who cannot work].

Claire: Ya

Stuart: It makes it tragic.

Claire: Ya everything is tragic, and I think I have held onto that, that idea of being the victim

and being so sick and so sad. And I see how that is a measure of control in my life –

being the victim – is... ―Oh look at me, Oh I must be handled so carefully‖. It allows

me to handle my environment. It means I never have to surrender anything because I

have to be dealt with so carefully – so it allows me to stay in control a bit. I can say

―oh, you can't do that because I'm so hurt‖; and I think that‘s where ―being precious‖

comes in.

Stuart: If your mother is the bread winner and the victim how do you think that would make

you think about going into the bread winning role for yourself. Taking on her role as

breadwinner means then also taking on that illness too – it‘s a paradox if the strong

one [compared to your father] is the victim too.

Claire: Week no, the paradox is that if you are the strong one, no one will love you. Its only

if you are you are the weak one that people will take care of you and will love

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you...so I think [in that way] it is part of it. But I just want to get back to the victim

thing because it‘s subtle but it is so important. I don't want...I mean run back into

―Oh but I'm so hurt‖ because I don't want to be with life in its own creative way, so I

don't want to interact with another that is unpredictable. As soon as something is

unpredictable I get scared and I withdraw. And that is what really knowing someone

is about; it‘s taking that risk to be with something unpredictable. If I am sick I can

more or less control my environment. So it‘s odd that being the victim is actually a

measure of control.

Stuart: On this [Tantra] course you have been challenged as far as people accepting your

victimhood.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: And normally that is how you structure your relationships – in a way. You go out

there and if people don‘t see you, then you can think this or that person is a real

bastard...

Claire: Ya

Stuart: So in this, game, this sacred space, people really take you on...

Claire: Ya

Stuart: It‘s hurtful but...

Claire: It‘s funny what happens because [my shaman teacher] wasn't taking my victim thing

seriously. I saw then how the control then expanded. I got into quite a power struggle

with my shaman teacher. That became an obsessive power struggle that I often get

into. [When I was there] I couldn't even take him saying anything to me about what

he has recognized. I would always say ―oh yes I know that‖. Ya I really picked that

up. In fact [I thought] ―you can't teach me anything... I am already on top of it.‖ It

was coming out in ways at dinner, lunch, picking up trays... [once [something

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dropped onto the table and I was ―oo I saw that coming.‖ You know I'm always

actually in control, on top of things. I can't bear to let go.

Stuart: When we had dinner in the city with your family, my brother and his friend...you like

to place people at the dinner table.

Claire: Ya [laughs] but that worked nicely didn't it.

Stuart: [So you think that only] ―If I can control everyone, everything will be OK...then I can

relax‖

Claire: Ya...It‘s exactly the case. I mean it‘s this thing I have noticed – where if I am sitting

in a group with four other people.[If] two of the people get a little tense [with each

other]... [if] they are not really understanding each other, Yo! I get scared. It‘s like

my whole body starts to burn and I want to jump in and start explaining what‘s

happening...And this is just my parents.

…continuation

Stuart: OK let‘s get back to the present. From the moment that you decided to pay for the

course. Tell me about the pre-course work, the quest…

Claire: Talked about it. What is it you want…?

Stuart: OK I was talking primarily about making the decision to go on the course, it is an

expensive course and I know how freaked you have been about spending money on

your treatments before. Take the UBI treatment for example. You had the idea when

your money came through that you should throw your money at the problem of your

illness. The other expenses were for physical treatments, the UBI was on the physical

plane. At the time [I presume] you were thinking, get the body ‗right‘ and everything

else will flow. But that didn‘t really work for you…

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Claire: You see in terms of this one [i.e. the shamanistic course] it was exactly – it was

working in a completely different way. And I was basically suicidal [before I

decided.]

Stuart: I know, I remember – I was here and said that we would do whatever it takes…

Claire: Ya, it got to that, I mean the desperation just to reconnect to people, to be engaged

with something that I enjoy. It really looked like something I could enjoy.

Stuart: How did you compare that to having your fillings pulled out and the UBI? You were

in a different [space]

Claire: I [thought] I was on top of it, I felt like I was in charge, and I could decide to apply

this…

Stuart: You were going to choose your experts, use your power [which] you had gained

[through inheriting your trust money].

Claire: It was different; this time around it was much more about surrendering. Before the

other one‘s were much more about control.

Stuart: Could you explore the two modes of treatment through your breakthrough [which you

had earlier concerning] …control. There are essentially two modes of treatment that

you [have] had. Well three with your psychotherapy.

Claire: OK…I have a problem with surrendering; this is a block that I am encountering with

interacting with people. The moment it gets to the point when I have to surrender I

have to let somebody in and I have to start accepting gifts and I have to accept

potential – what I was saying – unpredictability. That is when I back off. So with

being sick I think it was also a sickness which requires a measure of surrender …

[surrender] that I haven‘t wanted. And the illness and the treatments have all been

about control and about getting more on top of things, whereas the choice to go into

this experience; A) I didn‘t quite know what I was doing. I was really putting my

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body and mind – my being into a space that I knew was going to require things of me

that I would feel uncomfortable with, and that I need at the same time.

So I was really opening up and taking a risk, more than the other ones were.

Stuart: When did you decide to move to the city? After, during…

Claire: Just before – I realized on my homework assignment – the drive out - I realized that I

am not engaging – how closed my life has become. How by exercising so much

control, [my life] has become so narrow. And I realized that in my university town it

is difficult for me to step out of that narrowness. I need [more]…its hard in my

university town to generate the stuff that I like – I know a lot of people too [in the

city] – you can make a life for yourself. I am not in a space where I can really do that

yet – I need to go to a place where things are already happening – when I realized

that – I started thinking about going to the city. The course just brought that [to a

head]. I talked to people doing cool stuff, living lives, doing amazingly interesting

things. That was like, OK, I‘ve got to do this.

Stuart: The world had called out to you. Pulled you into it.

Claire: Ya, also I‘ve had so much doubt about myself. Before I went on the first course, it‘s

like [I was] really in victim mode. Like I‘m so sick, I can‘t do it. Why would I be

able to do it? That‘s what‘s been changed on this last course. It‘s like I‘m actually

much stronger than I think.

Stuart: Can I ask you about your web research. What kind of information did you get from

other M.E. patients – blogs, work groups – what was the general prognosis. What

was the difference between web research and meeting people on the course who had

M.E...? And to you what was it like for you to hear their own experience, through the

course, and seeing how they were managing to deal with it, versus your private web

research, which I presume was primarily based on the biomedical paradigm at the

time.

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Claire: When I spoke to people on the course, they weren‘t that different from me and from

people I‘ve read about – I actually felt Jees, I‘ve done quite a lot better than they

have. I‘ve kept up my energy quite a lot compared to the way they describe it, One

woman even on the course felt like she couldn‘t get up, so I gave her some of my cell

food and she was [snaps her fingers] like that …better. Another girl was going

through Chinese medicine [treatment] and that was helping her. So just in terms of

M.E. treatment I don‘t really think that the course offered that much.

Stuart: You realized how empowered you were with your pluralistic...understanding?

Claire: I don‘t care what my shaman teacher says about throwing out the medicine. I actually

know quite a lot, I know how to manage my body through all these things but at the

same time [the course] gave me a sense of my own purpose. I can‘t really compare

myself to other people. I will not sit with M.E. for much longer, I refuse to, as much

as that sounds like more control. It‘s like I am willing to go into whatever I need to

do.

Stuart: So you are willing to open up now.

Claire: Ya I am terrified but…

Stuart: I can still remember when you had that saying ―To endeavor to let the world change

you‖ a theme which you revisit. You know these things along time ago, but it takes a

long time to clarify it.

Claire: Ya, I wrote it on my mirror, but I took it off because I no-longer agreed with it. Ya I

stopped. That just indicates how much of a ‗wuss‘ [softy] I am about being pushed

around, I need to be strong. Which is true but you have to do both.

Stuart: I like the martial arts metaphor of accepting your attacker energy instead of pushing it

away. As long as you are flexible you can get them off balance while moving into

your power. To flow and to change yourself, once your enemy is off balance they are

spent and you leave them behind.

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Appendix 11: Interview July 2005 - The Shaman

Claire: [Talking about post modernism] The Shaman is quite a post modern figure (with

reference to my shaman teacher's course) the shaman is the technician in terms of

culture, he knows the discourse, and he knows how to change the particular things

through entering the realm of undifferentiatedness – there aren't the categories of

specific culture, you realize that the shaman is aware that the culture crates

categories for things. And by going into realms that don't have categories he can see

how culture creates itself and therefore he can function as a tool for changing

mythologies or bringing in a new discourse.

Stuart: So you can go outside of the parameters that define the characters and return.

Claire: The shaman lives in the post-modern state where everything is equal, where there is

no dogma. But he delivers his message within the culture he is talking to. And

because he understands, like this example said, the young shaman in training might

see an animal or a person with an animal head – it is not a monster – what that does,

it defines categorization – and then teaches the shaman about categorization, not

necessarily about the act of categorizing, so that he becomes aware that those are the

artifacts of culture. So that's how it ties into post modernism.

The Shamanic workshop has been quite a big deal for me, when I went there I was

very ill, I sat with the illness and found my energy again. Actually I realized that I

could work, almost that there was energy there was energy behind the sickness. I can

just sit and boost that energy. And I found that‘s how I would like to work with it.

Now I am not brilliantly healthy, but my outlook is better, there is light at the end of

the tunnel.

Stuart: You had a break through before you went there; you were looking for something and

felt excited about it. Process work, ecopsychology (Mindell, Jensen and

ecopsychology)

Claire: Big ones

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Stuart: It seems to have galvanized you into action.

Claire: Jensen stirred me emotionally. My illness and discomfort and terrible unhappiness

with the world is not a consequence of my own weakness or my own illness or

pathology – rather it is something that is part of being in a really difficult place in the

world right now. In terms of the environment, in terms of our western culture and the

denial which is inherent in it. It was the first book which made me feel, maybe my

illness is really just something sane in an insane world and I could go with it and let

it be what it is. Then I stumbled onto Arnold Mindell who takes it so much further in

terms of the body's illness being part of the soul's dreaming and illness being

inherently meaningful in itself – it being some way (albeit uncomfortable) of

unfolding a message and trying to reach out with some sort of creative act. That

really...

Stuart: Gaia to Self

Claire: I suddenly thought ―fuck it‖, I am not crying for me, because my mommy was shit to

me, I'm crying because there is pain in the world and we are all sharing it, um, which

is interesting in terms of this shamanism course. Because he talks about the shaman

as the one who does the dreaming for the world. That society need the shaman to do

the dreaming but at the same time doesn't reward the shaman because the shaman can

do what the rest of the world has been too afraid to do. So, that has been useful, it

makes me feel special. Instead of something I constantly have to fix.

Stuart: [What about] wildness [and] allowing yourself to be sick?

Claire: I can see now that after finishing my Bachelor degree, I was entering the honors

course and then entering the world as a working adult was all a part of this terror of

losing my soul in consensus reality, of the death of the sacred. That is what it felt like

to me. It felt like the big wide world would swallow me up.

Stuart: I am thinking about lord of the rings, the machine has no feelings.

Claire: Ya

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Stuart: And your mother as this polar machine [who had to go into the world of terror and

then return home]...

Claire:[My mother‘s story is that] when we go into the world we have to wear this mask and

please everybody, work hard (fingers to the bone) and then go home and crash and

hide all the pathology, all the illness. The distress is left to the bedroom where you

stay for weeks and weeks and weeks – that's how my mother handled it and that‘s

how I saw it in my childhood – I was raised not to offend, and no matter what was

being done to me I had to not be offensive. To offend other people – the world – a

sense of them, their agendas and issues, not to step on peoples toes. Ya.

Stuart: I have just watched the aviator, Howard Hughes‘s mother told him, you are not safe.

Claire: My mother told me once, when I was a little girl [when it] felt like we were always in

a war zone together, she told me that ―we are going to fight… get through‖ – but it

didn't come out that way overtly – for me the message was more – ―not, come, be

strong in yourself against the world‖, it was – ―you‘re shit… prove yourself and

never let anyone see who you are‖. Yes there is unsaftey but there is this constant –

strain – to be constantly pushing against the world. If you are going to crash you

have to make damn sure nobody sees you. So for me M.E. is great [laughs] it hasn't

been an illness that [I could say:] "OK I can go to hospital, get really sick have tons

of operations come out and go back into the world again.‖ It‘s like: ―I'm OK enough

to be in the world with my defenses on. I can't be the perfectly masked smiling girl.

M.E. has been very good in [the sense of] breaking that down… I can't wear the

mask when I am just trying to get through the day.

Stuart: So you have to learn to go slow and it‘s hard to explain yourself to the world.

[Especially when some people think M.E. suffers are malingerers.]

Claire: That is the thing, it is about reciprocity. I was not or have not been in a reciprocal

relationship with the world on an ongoing basis – that is what this shamanism thing

has really been about – ―stay moist‖ – ―stay flexible‖ – ―be with the moment‖ and

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that is exactly it – you have to be in a constant negotiation between your body and

the world – it's not like I can shut my body down and do what the world tells me.

Stuart: Accepting gifts as part of the world. What would you like to get out of this project?

Claire: It is nice for me to formulate it as a whole experience.

Stuart: Someone else to textualize it, what I see, not psychology that makes you sick, what's

the world like, a body being sick, a person, what are the rules out there

Claire: The consensus world – and the fact that my body has stopped wanting to cooperate

with it, it is just saying no!

Stuart: It seems a very reflexive view of being sick, most see it as being attacked by a virus.

Claire: I feel it is an initiatory illness, just something inside me forcing me onto the path that

I always wanted to be on and that I felt I couldn't follow.

Stuart: How long have you felt that way for?

Claire: The whole time I have been sick it‘s been, as soon as I am better I am going to go and

do this, take on the work. It‘s this exhaustion, I have to get better to go and do

something I really don't want to do. And

Stuart: Not being able to trust the one thing that everyone trusts – their body – You can't trust

your body in the illness – you have no pint to push off from – you just feel like you

are sliding.

Claire: My shaman teacher said… how he put it is the souls battle with the ego – the soul

wants to move but the ego has worked for years... just to function in a way that it

does. It is not prepared to give that up and so there is a war going on inside and I can

feel myself in that war. I mean the safe space that I have created in the last year and

half is just safe in a completely cloistering way but it fed my ego and I just became

more and more controlling of my life. And more and more restricted and ya ... [it‘s

been] such a battle. So that thing about having to break down the good things, I'm

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pretty sure that that is the same ego battle - yes I get excited - yes I'm going to take

on my life, really shift inside and the ego just takes over and says NO! You can't do

this, you‘re too... [weak?], this is threatening.

Stuart: And there is no rite of passage for western culture, so when you went to the Karoo on

your own, it was meant to be a rite of passage – but you can't do it on your own.

Claire: No you can't

Stuart: You can‘t expose yourself to nature...

Claire: thank God actually.

Stuart: Nature is too wild. On your course I imagine you exposed yourself to 'wild people' –

that was sacred space.

Claire: Ya. It's great that, a relief to me, I mean [my therapist] has been going on at me about

―one has to be alone‖. I actually got angry with her because, fuck it, I have been

alone and I know, yes existentially we are all alone and your personal journey is

your own but I need to get into feeling that you don't have to be alone and what My

shaman teacher says is that what you gain on this journey is travelling companions.

Stuart: That is something you have been bleeding for.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: For the kind of travelling that you are interested in you cannot just choose those

around you – you have to move to where they are. You've lacked that group – it‘s

about not having to pretend.

Claire: It comes down, again, to the same issue, of being too afraid to interact. About holding

back. That thing about the Karoo trip, again, it was ―oh I can do this by myself‖, it‘s

like it‘s all happening on this strict little boundary of myself. And with the incredible

exhaustion of that.

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Stuart: When you first became ill – you had a big battle with [your head of department]

Claire: Ya, I couldn't be real there.

Stuart: So she was the Gatekeeper at the door of the academy for you.

Claire: Travelling companions: I had to accept that my honors class were not going to be

travelling companions for me. It only came to me at the end of the year – like what

am I trying so hard for these people, they are not worth it.

Getting back to Sacred and Profane space. My shaman teacher was saying that the

gift of the Shaman is the ability to move between the sacred and the profane space,

but if you blur the boundary, life gives you a slap. And I think that I have been

blurring that boundary, I have been trying – desperately – because there hasn't been a

kind of contained sacred space. I think you need other people to teach you that. You

need that with people, if you don't know how, you can't create it for yourself.

Stuart: Initiates are taken by the men.

Claire: Ya, you need to be initiated into it. And maybe that is it. I have been crying out for

initiation into sacred space, but I have also been looking for the sacred in the profane,

that‘s why everything becomes so precious, like I can't eat this because its messed up

and because everything is so dirty because I am trying to find goodness and even

with people – like making friends with really silly shallow people and trying to find

depth there. [My therapist] mentioned my family as well, how I have been doing that

with them, and it is true. I always try and make this sacred space with them and they

betray me in it.

Stuart: So true. Because they are not really interest [in what you are interested in], so you get

angry that they will never move into your world.

Claire: Ya

Stuart: They say ―Claire is just difficult‖

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Claire: Ya

Stuart: I was there. Their world carries on... [they see things] totally from their own point of

view.

Claire: My father almost has me on a pedestal, it‘s almost like, I represent the sacred to him –

but he doesn't know how to take part in it.

Stuart: How do you delineate the boundaries, now that you have…?

Claire: Experienced something...I feel completely able to enter the world because I know

that, the world is profane. It is just what it is -its money, living, eating, and getting

through the day – and I can do that because there is a place for it. Because there is

also a place for something sacred. I feel like my life is possibly set up. When I need

that sacredness, I know where to go.

Stuart: Such a big shift.

Claire: Ya and I am eating meat and loving it! I had ostrich steak for breakfast the other day.

Stuart: You've done it, found, achieved...

Claire: Just before I found the web site, firstly I watched John Edward for like two weeks

solid – every day – I have been sort of having this argument with my grandmother,

who is dead, not really arguing but kind of working out my feelings toward her. You

know she was really a mother to me and really loved me and ...but she messed up my

own mother so badly- she really fucked up there. I know she watches over me, I

know she is deeply concerned over me. I can just feel it, but I have been just kind of

pushing her away – ―what the fuck do want woman‖ - I would say to myself - ―you

messed up so badly.‖ And then just before I found this website I said OK – just take

me where I need to go. It was like a few days before.

Stuart: White noise interlude.... [amazing]

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Stuart: Being in the world now … you have to be a trickster because the world is not run by

sacred people on a passionate journey but by profane…

Claire: Absolutely

Stuart: it‘s a mundane world...

Claire: I feel so much better about – like I used to feel like I need to be pure, good, never lie

and now it‘s like fuck it, now I am swearing a lot more.

Stuart: Ah, the fairies were always naughty little shits, trying to fuck up what the 'plodders'

are doing – they are the wild ones.

Claire: What was such a relief to me as well, I can see it now, is just to be mad, to be allowed

to be mad [on this course], to let your imagination go and to let my body go – to just

play. It was fantastic.

Stuart: Sounds a bit like Mindell's Process work, allowing the body to be sick.

Claire: [To let it] move as it wants to.

Stuart: [That] you were sickly [on the course] was the right way for you [to be then].

Claire: Ya, one guy told me that I seemed pathetic, it was quite hurtful. But he got a lot of

flak for being hurtful in general – so it was OK. But there was something I actually

wanted to say to them. ―Like guys, you don't understand what a big thing it was for

me to come into this space and be me, and to be ya, not so keen to impress

everyone.‖

It was quite cool, like right in the beginning my shaman teacher pulled me aside and

said – ―take part, you are part of the group, you are playing quite small. You are

being like a little college student, you have to accept that these are your

peers.‖ Again on the same issue he said ―you are actually more advanced than a lot

of the people in this group.‖ It felt really good, I realized that the work I have done is

actually ....I have gained things.

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Stuart: Nothing is in vain; a lot of men in their middle age may have never stopped to smell

the roses.

Claire: Manhood is a big issue. One guy [was] talking about his penis, this big phallus – he

has always looked at his penis as this thing that hurts – then my shaman teacher

talked...women don't realize what issues men have with their penises. Claiming

manhood was about turning the penis into the phallus, for womanhood it is about

turning the vagina into the yoni: the woman's inner phallus. It‘s cool.

Stuart: The course seems...well when you arrived you told me that you skinny dip to enter

into the [sacred] space. I have dreams when I need to let 'others in' of being naked in

public, of allowing people in, to see me. Now it strikes me that as this is the first

thing you do ... and you said ―Fuck it‖ [and went ahead with it]. It was a risk, a big

risk ... we have this kind of feeling they will all start laughing and say that they were

only playing.

Claire: Exactly, but I just want to get back to the pain, how OK is it to cross the boundary,

how OK is it to let myself out. Shoo what a big terror it was.

Stuart: Don't you think a lot of people try to achieve that with alcohol and drugs to numb

themselves.

Claire: Ya you don't really have to expose yourself when you don't have to...

Stuart: Feel?

Claire: Ya, alcohol and drugs create a new boundary.

Stuart: No alcohol or drugs.

Claire: Fudging the transition so I don't have to consciously cross that boundary, something

else pushes me over, then it is OK, the painful transition of it is avoided.

Stuart: Like your varsity mate Fred,

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Claire: When he drinks he is someone else

Stuart: ya, a ―babe puller‖.

[Break]

Claire: When you do breathwork your hands go numb, they tingle a bit like a migraine

experience.

Stuart: and the paranoia?

Claire: Not paranoid, just my lungs couldn't do it. My lungs shut down.

Appendix 12: Interview July 2005 - Sociability

Stuart: How do you use your space? In the university social scene you say that you used to

get too ‗hyper‘ [active].

Claire: ‗Hyper‘ is associated with my mother's ―pleasing the world‖ kind of face.

Stuart: When you got sick were you forced to pull out of that, I am thinking of Cheryl and

Kathy.

Claire: I've got it. It is like I was saying about M.E. I can't wear the mask. If I am going to be

in this world and be sick, I can't hide my sickness – it's so obvious. I am not sick

enough not to be in the world, so it‘s a way of bringing myself and my vulnerability

into the world and yet this last year that has been my big problem – that I have not

wanted to be in the world – even though I probably can. And so by continuing to

want to hide my illness and myself – and maintain that mask, I have withdrawn and

cut myself off. And so I sit and I am incredibly bored and lonely and frustrated but

that seems to be preferable to actually taking the risk of exposing myself -which I

had to do on this course. I had to just let myself be seen – however inelegant.

Stuart: This last year you had Carey as a friend, she wants to change things... [in the world].

Claire: She's a warrior [unlike my other friends], who were consumers of consensus reality]

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Stuart: You had a dream before you went on the course. You told me you were standing up

and telling it like it is. [i.e. taking on the banal discourse of commercialism].

Claire: Oh ya, I remember.

Stuart: You spoke about being able to play the guitar and sing [beautifully]. You [seem to]

have withdrawn yourself from inauthentic relationships [which seemed to have

previously] – has the illness weaned you off of them.

Claire: [My other friends] weren't really friends, those weren't soulful or meaningful

friendships...I want to go back to this issue of crossing boundaries – of at least

exposing myself. That was at least, on this workshop, was the big issue for me. My

mother taught me never to expose myself and that that is the last stand – no matter

what happens. In our fights, arguments – she would cross sacred barriers – the rules

of mother daughter relationships – like you do not threaten your child with, you

know, kicking her out of the house – you don't tell her that you didn't want her and

run at her with a car – my mother‘s last stand – those were not it.

The last stand was not ever being vulnerable and making that final closed space

around her – this will not be transgressed, no matter what, no matter who it is and

here I am having to go into the world and risk being vulnerable and risk being judged

– having to open myself to just, both trusting that other people have good intentions,

even though they can be shit – but also that I am strong enough to handle people's

bad intentions. Um and the whole time on this course I was just so paranoid because

I just couldn‘t figure out that boundary ... and another thing that came up was that

before I want to get into something I want to feel completely prepared – like one of

the journeys was going into heaven – we had to find heaven in the woods and I

couldn't go, I couldn't find heaven because I didn't feel like I was worthy. Until I

realized that I have to go into heaven being unworthy, being exactly who I am. That

was the most difficult thing for me to do on that course. I could go into the

underworld, I could face my pain, shit – but couldn't go into heaven with who I am,

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that is it, I have to go into the world, I have to engage with people and allow myself

that fluidity of boundaries.

Stuart: Do you remember your own saying: To grow you have to...

Claire: Let life change you, ya a scary thing.

Stuart: So is the [so-called] shamanic way of life about building that bridge from the ego or is

it the soul? Is it about flowing, you mentioned staying moist earlier, well water is a

very good conductor, heat transfers from the world.

Claire: Ya, you have to dance with the world. I grew up in a home where I was being messed

with psychologically, like there were mind games and so just holding onto reality,

thinking what is reality – what is real and holding it tightly was very important for

me to survive. Like just to be able to say: ―No! This is who I am‖, and strengthen and

fortify, and say – ―because everything was so messed up when I was a child, my

mother was crazy, I couldn't figure out who I was and the way things were.‖ So the

idea of being fluid is incredibly frightening to me. I feel like I am going to go crazy

because what if I lose that grip on reality that I had to fight so hard to find.

Appendix 13: Interview July 2005 - The Sacred and the Profane

Stuart: Please elaborate about the sacred and the profane...

Claire: The illness is the body's wish to transgress over the categories and the boundaries of

the consensus world and it‘s a frightening, ego threatening experience to let go of

those categories and say OK maybe I am not just Claire: post-grad stuck in my life.

It‘s like there is something else and if I allow my body to live itself completely out

there – clashing...

Stuart: A wild body

Claire: Ya, to be a wild body in this tame world, maybe a new message will come out that is

quite shaky; that is frightening. That is a threat to the consensus structures. But can

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ultimately create something new. That‘s how I understand the shamanic process. The

understanding of the initiatory illness - well that‘s how I reread it.

Stuart: Darwin was fond of saying that every new theory when first postulated – in a shaman

like fashion – is most creative, pure thought, when it first arrives on the scene. From

there it gathers belief and solidity. Is your process a creative act – must you listen to

it.

Claire: You have to listen to it without preconceptions.

Stuart: without structure?

Claire: Ya – you just have to let it speak its own language and hopefully, in some way, you

will be able to understand. You should be able to understand because it is your body,

it‘s a personal message. But if I am stuck in one structured view – even the simplistic

psychological view: my liver is sick because I was wounded as a child- and so my

liver is trying to make me remember that wound. You know it‘s more than that

because in looking at it like that I am still structuring it. Instead my liver is sick, I

feel pain of lacking love, I want to be more creative, and I want to feel more. You

know I haven't figured it out yet but you know, a much bigger thing.

Stuart: Let‘s get back to the sacred and the profane distinction that seemed so important

when you first arrived back from your course. You spoke about sharing space with

people; staying alone too much; staying in your head; food taboos: all of which have

been reinforcing the illness. Now what about sharing sacred space? How important is

it to have a community. You said that if you bring the sacred into the profane you get

rebuffed, it‘s really tough [in the so-called profane world].

Claire: To me it goes into a different plane when there are other people around. Its huh, just, I

am still trying to figure it out – I was arguing [with my therapist] about this thing:

―one has to be alone‖ [my therapist would assert] – but it is not true – there is a space

where there is cooperation...the world engages with your dreaming and your....know

what I mean...

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Stuart: Well I have this idea that who we really are is made up not inside of us but through an

engagement with the world. So to be alone and reflect is fine – important – but to

engage with the world is living, creating. That is how you become who you are and

so to become more yourself, you must engage more with the world – to withdraw (I

do it) is to in some respects to lose your identity.

Claire: I was talking more about performance, it‘s almost like I have been seeing interaction

with the world as a performance for which I prepare myself in isolation – I am

myself when I am by myself.

Stuart: I remember the drama thing that you were keen on in the beginning of the year. It

freaked you out. Was that the ego creating the expression?

Claire: The point is if it is not a performance it‘s the real thing, the interaction is me...see

that's the thing I've always felt like, I am only me when I am by myself. I lose myself

when I am with others – bits of me disappear and I have to go back to gain myself

again. It all comes back to the idea of being able to be to be fluid – which I struggle

with – being able to dance and not stop being myself when I am dancing. So that it is

not a performance, it‘s the real thing, like you are saying, you are who you are

through interaction – that‘s new for me, I have to work on that, I have to play with

that.

Stuart: China?

Claire: I didn't want to do it – there wasn't anything I really wanted to do but through the

illness and through exploring it a little bit more I've managed to find what I have

always wanted to do but which I didn't think was available to me – through these

people that I have met now. And this kind of spiritual, physical healing work.

Stuart: Would have been harder?

Claire: If I hadn't been sick?

Stuart: no trust fund?

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Claire: Oh

Stuart: [Being] tied to your mother, having to explain yourself all the time.

Claire: My shaman teacher, talks about nine month cycles, none months ago I got that

money, so a step into independence, this is kind of the next step.

Stuart: Nine months, China and exams?

Claire: Or rather my leaving my family in such an abrupt way – that was January – just over

nine months ago. It‘s such a shift, I have formulated new ideas.

Stuart: During my June exams you were so excited. You did this on your own.

Claire: Yes I had a breakthrough, this is something – but at the time I had another complete

breakdown and I am still sitting with that – this feeling of wanting to give up. How can I

continue in this absolute loneliness – feeling a sense of the world not cooperating? Ya it‘s

something I have to work with because in the end whether the world cooperates or not it has

so much to do with perception. I dunno, my shaman teacher said that I am maybe a bit

pessimistic – that I can expect miracles. It‘s scary not being able to trust the good things – to

constantly be checking – ―is this real‖? So ya, that‘s something [my therapist] said that I have

this habit of unmaking the good; I work, work, work then I completely break it down into

nothingness so it‘s meaningless.