ABSTRACT
Anthropologists investigate and interpret a conglomerate of phenomena to which they apply the word possession. Many Western anthropologists attempt in their writings to describe possession in non-Western settings without lending it a psychological description, because they find a tendency to pathologize inherent in psychological language. Anthropology was conceived as a formal study of human beings in the eighteenth century, and early on, it set out a generalizing theory that proposed a psychic unity of humankind. Carl Gustav Jung's psychological concept of possession is located in the religious context and the historical continuum of the Loudun literature. Jung also attempted to describe the psyche and, specifically, the experience of possession in terms of consciousness, identity and the experience of another without pathologizing these experiences. His notes on Kundalini yoga demonstrate that he was also asking how to develop a cross-cultural comparative psychology of inner experience.
