ABSTRACT
The use of psychotherapy-based psychodynamic theory in the study of ritual is justified primarily by the common observation that psychotherapy itself is a very ritualistic process. Quoting Lvi-Strauss, for example, medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman observes that successful psychotherapy is very ritual-like and has key features of rituals worldwide, including the doctor making a myth of the patient's pain and making sense of "the inchoate". According to Kradin, images become linked to emotions early in development, in such a way that emotional attachments with important others are encoded first with images rather than words. Kradin discusses further psychoanalytic case reports of ways in which psychological pain and physical pain interrelate, and many theorists see psychosomatic symptoms as a failure of symbol formation. Such suffering continues unless symbol formation is facilitated by ritual and narrativization. Manipulating them in a ritual manner is a way of accessing deep emotional issues in physical, embodied way that cannot be duplicated by mere verbal discourse.
