ABSTRACT
Bruce Kapferer, an anthropologist, revealed that the Galle Sinhalese scientific practice of diagnostics lights up the demon palace, thereby altering the possessed ones' perceptions of their suffering; rather than banishing the demonic, it places the demonic in context with the divine, illness with health, disorder with order. Michel de Certeau, a historian, emphasized how, in making their diagnosis, the exorcists at Loudun framed the suffering they were seeking to alleviate; the language of the Malleus Maleficarum, their main diagnostic tool, condemned certain experiences of the possessed and powerfully endorsed - yet distorted - others. Does the contemporary Western psychiatric assessment also work like this? How effectively does psychiatry's discourse illuminate the disordering effects of mental diseases? To what
extent does its vocabulary approve yet distort certain kinds of suffering at the same time that it disallows others? Could possession provide an idiom through which psychiatry might reflect upon and rectify its diagnostics?
