ABSTRACT
Forget the drama of a succession of Hollywood films with their rather specific idiom of demonic possession. ‘Possession’ is arguably the most common culture-bound psychiatric syndrome, and the experience of its converse, ‘soul loss’, perhaps more common internationally than depression (Shweder, 1985). The term possession denotes a local belief that an individual has been entered by an alien spirit or other parahuman force, which then controls the person or at least significantly alters their actions and identity to a greater or lesser extent. This would usually be manifest to the observer as an altered state of consciousness.
