The Possession Syndrome: A Comparison of Hong Kong and French Findings

Abstract

The phenomena of “spirit-communication” in mediumistic trance, of “spirit-possession” and of “demonopathy” are closely related, and known to both East and West. Clinical psychiatrists, however, have taken little interest in them, with the exception of some French and a few Spanish authors. These conditions nevertheless do present themselves to the psychiatrist in many countries and it is misconceived to think that they are to be found only in outlandish cultures, the preserve of the field worker in ethnology. It is true that M. J. Herskovits (1951, 1958) has argued that certain kinds of behaviour categorized in terms of culture-bound concepts cannot be applied to other societies, so that African and Afro-American spirit possession, for example, cannot be compared with apparently similar “psychopathological seizures” in the West. No doubt such behaviour receives different cultural definitions according to their respective backgrounds, but this does not exclude the possibility of a specific psychological mechanism being common to them all.