ABSTRACT
The religious, psychological, intellectual and political complexity of the demonic possessions at Loudun still has not been fully explored, even after almost four centuries of scrutiny. From before those possessions in the 1630s to the present day, the phenomena of possession have preoccupied thinkers in many fields, especially, in the past century, anthropologists and psychologists. In the first half of the twentieth century, Jung developed a concept of possession that was both deep and broad. Anatomizing it today in terms of temenos, personification and synthesis reinvests Jungian psychotherapy with its positive potential for practice. Analogizing it - lining it up comparatively beside fragments of late medieval theology, anthropology, psychiatry, critical theory, film criticism and theatre history - leads, not to a naive syncretism,
but to possibilities for illumination along the borders of these disciplines. lung's concept of possession, refreshed with new insights, offers a conceptual bridge between psychology and anthropology, it supports psychiatry's recent shift towards a culturally contextualized classification of disorders, and it carries important implications for psychotherapists who want to improve their work with their patients and enhance its meaning in the professional field.
