Paradigms of Madness and Meaning

A conversation with myself (and maybe with you) on possession, madness, and the ontologically amphibious human

Dear Living Dark reader,

For years I have been witness to extended philosophical and spiritual dialogues unfolding in my thoughts. These are mostly or, on occasion, wholly spontaneous. That is, they drive themselves. I don’t so much compose or articulate them as observe them, like an eavesdropper listening in on someone else’s conversation. Sometimes there is an external stimulus that sparks one of these conversations, something that I have seen, heard, or read that kick-starts my internal dialogic engine. At other times the reasons are more obscure. A mental voice starts speaking, another answers, and almost before I know it, they have taken positions and are debating vigorously.

And sometimes—perhaps the most interesting times—one of these private mental dialogues emerges into the outer world of my interpersonal relationships to manifest as a conversation with someone else. This happened recently in connection with the subject of demonic possession and the question of the competing accounts of it that have been offered by psychiatry and psychology as versus religion and spirituality. I share the following account of the matter here, with you, for whatever interest it may carry, both the sheer fact of it and its actual content.

Madhouses and possessed souls

To begin with, here is the proximate cause of the whole thing: a passage from Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions that I shared last month on social media, both Substack Notes and X/Twitter. I prefaced it with the following descriptive note:

“Huston Smith—arguably the most widely respected English-language scholar of religion in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries—on demonic possession, including the possibility that modernity’s mass madness has camouflaged it.”

The passage runs as follows:

Mindful of the psychic plane and the way the human is lodged within it, traditional societies tend to regard the insane with a species of awe and respect, seeing them as caught in psychic vortices that work at cross-purposes to ours while possessing something of the autonomy and coherence that ours exhibit. Our madhouses, too, may contain souls that are ravaged by principalities and powers on the psychic plane; in a word, possessed. The phenomenal response to a recent film, The Exorcist, shows that our unconscious minds remain open to this notion, but current psychiatric theory is . . . opposed to it. . . .

[C]lear cases [of possession] appear to be less common today than in the past. This may be due in part to the fact that persons tend to be receptive to what they believe—Freudians have a disproportionate number of Freudian dreams—and possession does not square with the modern scientific outlook, but there is a supplementing possibility. With genocides and the use of nuclear weapons to mash entire countrysides, the demonic may now be so diffused on the terrestrial plane that it has no need, one almost says no time, to put in many “personal appearances” in single individuals.

(Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, New York: HarperCollins: 1992, 43, 43n11).

I’ll pause here to say a bit more about this book and its author. As I already said, Smith, who died in 2016 at the age of 97, was one of the most widely respected religion scholars of the past century. Though he is probably most known for his book The World’s Religions (originally published in 1958 as The Religions of Man), which was for decades the most widely used college introductory textbook on comparative religion, I first came to him when I stumbled across a used copy of his 1982 book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind at a discount bookstore in Branson, Missouri. The year was 1993, I was fresh out of college, and the book set off an internal explosion that unlocked many mental doors and thoroughly transformed my perspective.

After that I progressed to The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth. Smith described the latter book as a companion to the former: Whereas in The World’s Religions he undertook a detailed examination of multiple world religious traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and primal or indigenous religions—and tried to convey to the reader the view and feeling of each one’s perspective “from the inside,” in Forgotten Truth he set out to articulate what he, as an exponent of perennialism, saw as the underlying unity within all such traditions.

My purpose in sharing this biographical, autobiographical, and bibliographical information is simply to deepen the scene. When I publicly posted that passage from Smith, I was sharing the words of someone whose ideas and outlook have profoundly shaped my own intellectual and philosophical furniture.

Paradigms of possession

A number of people who read the post found Smith’s words interesting. Some of them left comments. One commenter in particular took issue with Smith’s point. I replied. A conversation started. It quickly became apparent that this was one of those situations where an outer conversation was manifesting an inner one.

Here is the dialogue that unfolded. Instead of simply pasting the actual words of my external interlocutor, I have massaged and edited them to reflect the tone of his counterpart, my internal dialogue partner. Note that the disagreement arose from a starkly literal reading of Smith’s words, which elicited instant disagreement from this Other Me:

Other Me:

Wait, are you kidding me? Today we know much more about supposed “demonic possession” than pre-scientific people did. We have modern medicine and psychiatry, so we’re able to recognize and understand mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Throughout history, people who suffered from what we today recognize as mental illness were horribly mistreated in the name of religion. They were locked away, punished, and made to suffer through nightmarish “exorcism” rituals. Many were killed. Huston Smith may have been a brilliant religion scholar, but his fatuous comments about exorcism are an example of what happens when otherwise intelligent and educated people stray from their lanes and try to talk about matters where they’re ignorant.

Me:

Actually, present-day psychiatry and its conceptual world with its formal diagnostic categories represents just another interpretive lens to apply to the total field of phenomena as given, no less than religion and its associated field of scholarly reflection and inquiry.

Other Me:

What? That’s just an evasion. What we’re talking about is more than a simple matter of considering different viewpoints. The crucial factor is evidence. When we talk about mental health disorders like schizophrenia, there’s a wealth of scientific, concrete proof out there. A mental illness is really real, regardless of whether some people choose to “believe” in it or not. Remember Occam’s razor. Simplicity is usually the key to understanding complex things.

Me:

Okay, let’s talk about evidence. What are the assumptions or philosophical axioms that determine what counts as “evidence” for a given claim or belief? What is the ultimate warrant for a self-contained system of seeing and interpreting that both adduces evidence from the total field of phenomena and provides rules for how to interpret and understand it?

In the case of what have traditionally been regarded as possession phenomena, at what point in history was it “discovered” that these phenomena have an entirely different and, as it happens, mutually exclusive explanation from the religious one? What is the basis on which to argue for the truth of the naturalistic/materialistic paradigm of modern psychiatry over the supernatural (for lack of a better word) outlook of religion?

No phenomenon, no fact, no unit or collection of observed data, ever compelled anyone to understand anything in medical, spiritual, natural, supernatural, or any other terms. The universe presents itself neutrally, without any assigned labels

Regarding Occam’s razor, what underlying principles determine what counts as simplicity in a given situation? The principle of parsimony rests on prior assumptions about reality that determine what seems simple and what seems complex. The direction that will result from applying it to a given question or situation depends on those starting assumptions.

Other Me:

You’re just complicating things and putting up a smoke screen. This isn’t rocket science. As I said, it’s all about evidence. We’ve got concrete scientific evidence supporting the reality of disorders like schizophrenia, whose symptoms might strike some people as a bit like “possession.” Shift the frame and think of it this way: If you came down with COVID-19, would you go to an exorcist? Or would you choose a medical doctor? The answer is clear. This all boils down to real, practical choices in the world.

Me:

It’s critically important to understand that “evidence,” and what counts as it, is the very thing that’s called into question when we really start to grok how this all works. Scientific evidence, for instance, doesn’t exist outside a philosophical scheme called “science.” Nothing in science or any other philosophical scheme was ever “discovered” outside the framework of that scheme itself. When modern science arose in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the same observed phenomena that had always been around in human experience, and that had usually been labeled and interpreted in terms of “possession,” were subjected to a different interpretation, that’s all. Nobody “discovered” that spirits are false and that the outward behaviors and subjective experiences that had traditionally been ascribed to them are due instead to other—to purely material/biological—causes. Instead, a different frame of reference subsumed the interpretation and understanding of these things—and not just of possession, but of everything else—for the newly dominant intellectual culture.

No phenomenon, no fact, no unit or collection of observed data, ever compelled anyone to understand this or anything else in medical, spiritual, natural, supernatural, or any other terms. Rather, the universe of observed phenomena presents itself neutrally, so to speak, without any assigned labels, and we through our sense-making efforts divide it into discrete chunks and assign interpretive and interpreted understandings to it. Our very words and concepts thus “create” our world. Schizophrenia didn’t exist until it was named. Nor did possession. Prior to the names, there was just a set of uninterpreted phenomena. It still exists today, outside the conceptual cages.