ABSTRACT

The possessions at Loudun occurred just as the study of the mind began to draw away from the context of European Catholicism. With its roots in the Age of Discovery and the Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century science of anthropology prompted the study of the mind in a different way. In lung's time, anthropology and the new discipline of mind called psychoanalysis parted ways. There were good reasons for this: anthropologists were already discarding notions ofprimitive versus civilized mentality while lung was wanting to read anthropological literature in essentialist ways in order to legitimize his psychology as science. Nonetheless, anthropological argument clarifies my own critique of lung and indeed, in my view, it improves lung's theorizing. lung's concept of possession, viewed beside late twentieth-century anthropological research on the phenomena of possession, can facilitate a rapprochement between psychoanalysis, psychology and anthropology, and this is a rapprochement which many anthropologists are currently seeking.