ABSTRACT
The author shares a personal experience of participating in a cleansing ritual in Kibola, Guinea, led by a village elder, which sets the stage for a discussion of the lessons of the mask and their relevance to both traditional drum and dance and traditional Jungian psychology. The author, who has spent decades studying and teaching Guinean drum and dance alongside her interest in Jungian psychology, reflects on how the two began to crumble as her interest in psychology as the “Discipline of Interiority” expanded. She discusses Giegerich’s essay, “Lesson of the Mask,” which shows how the mask dance sets the performance of the psychological difference into motion. The author suggests that every topic and subject matter for psychology has a mask character, and that implicit in the lesson of the mask is the need for psychologists to put on the mask of whatever phenomena lay claim to their attention. By doing so, psychologists set themselves up as, enact, and become the psychological difference, the difference between themselves as individuals and themselves as soul, spirit, or divinity. The author concludes by suggesting that the lessons of the mask are relevant not only to traditional drum and dance, but also to the discipline of psychology, and that a disciplined approach is necessary for any learning endeavor.
