Public Anxieties and Projective Identification: Therapeutic Encounters Between Danish Clairvoyants and Their Clients.

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  • Vibeke Steffen
The capacity to receive occult messages and look into the future is claimed by individuals in most societies and probably always has been. In Denmark, clairvoyance is a popular service offered at the alternative market for counseling and healing. During my fieldwork among Danish spiritualist mediums in 2007–08, I was often puzzled by the way in which clairvoyants and clients seemed to share the same kinds of problems. This observation steered my interests toward understanding how personal sensations and feelings are exchanged in therapeutic encounters and raised questions about who is doing what to whom. Drawing on Jung's concept of the wounded healer to highlight the clairvoyant's role as a channel for societal anxieties and Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification as a framework for understanding the defense mechanisms at stake in object relations, I argue that psychoanalysis may add an important critical dimension to the anthropology of therapeutic encounters.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEthos (Malden)
Volume44
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)485-506
Number of pages21
ISSN0091-2131
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2016

ID: 166872175