ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to social and aesthetic fabrications of therapeutic spaces and aligns with phenomenological approaches addressing the question of effectiveness, embodied experience, and sensory aspects of healing. It shares autoethnographic data and focuses on the training and transformation of mediums from afflicted individuals to caregivers. It describes mediumship practices to support mental health patients, as well as afflicted and afflicting spirits held responsible and in need of treatment themselves. Along with the ethnographic examples and their sensory shaping where voices (of participants, mediums, and spirits) play a significant role, this chapter develops a theoretical model of the Aesthetics of Healing both for the specific example of Brazilian Spiritist mental healthcare and as a general theoretical approach and tool in medical anthropology that integrates the importance of working with the senses in therapeutic contexts and (from a psychological perspective) alternate concepts of self and personhood. Specific questions are 1) how mediumship practices are skilled and scaled in Brazilian Kardecism, 2) how they integrate with mental healthcare and self-care, 3) how they frame perception and experience, and 4) how far they produce distinguished notions of a healthy self in the therapeutic process.
