Jung's concept of possession and the practice of psychotherapy

C. G. Jung's concept of possession is etymologically and imagistically precise. It speaks of personhood sitting in its own seat, and it addresses how to accommodate the suffering that occurs when personhood experiences itself as unseated, overthrown by tyrannical Otherness. Jung's concept of possession challenges theories that imagine personhood defined by consciousness alone, positing instead a much more fluid, pluralistic and embodied notion. Enriched with imagery from medieval Catholicism, ethnographic description of possession in other cultures, current cognitive and neuroscientific research, the complementary psychotherapeutic practices of Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Jacob L. Moreno, and especially John Cassavetes's film Opening Night and Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre, Jung's concept of possession has much to say about important contemporary problematics of presence and embodiment, dissociation and self, Eros and power. Images from anthropological investigations into the phenomena of possession enrich, extend and challenge the implications of Jung's concept of possession.