Psyche & Imagination - Online Abstract
Academic Presentations

Ann Casement

Witchcraft: A Psychic Category of the Imagination

Belief in witches and witchcraft is archetypic in that it exists in every culture overtly or covertly through time and space. Amidst myriad cultural variations, the usual form it takes is that some individuals are recognized as being witches in possessing qualities which make them powerful and dangerous. In this way, witchcraft is a manifestation of the mysterious powers of humans (Mary Douglas 1970).

The modern anthropological concern with witchcraft is generally acknowledged to have begun with Evans-Pritchards Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, and subsequent anthropological studies on the subject pay tribute to this original work. His study of what the Azande call mbisimo mangu, the soul of witchcraft, is psychic in action and bridges over the distance between the person of the witch and the person of his victim (Evans-Pritchard 1976:10). This is echoed in Rudolf Ottos The Idea of the Holy a penetrative imaginative sympathy with what passes in the other persons mind (Otto 1958:60). Jung calls this phenomenon participation mystique, a term he took from the anthropologist, Lvy-Bruhl, which denotes an unconscious identity in which two individual psychic spheres interpenetrate to such a degree that it is impossible to say what belongs to whom鑒 (Jung 1964:452).

Lvy-Bruhls re-working of Durkheim钒s concept of collective representations and Hubert and Mausss categories of the imagination influenced both Jung and Evans-Pritchard. This paper aims to illustrate the relationship of witchcraft to categories of the imagination and collective representations both closely related to archetypes through Azande witchcraft beliefs. Lvy-Bruhl revised his own conception of participation mystique though Jung continued to use it so that he tended to see primitive鑒 society as being only prelogical in comparison with a scientifically based civilized world. However, witchcraft is to be found in both spheres. Amongst the African community in the U.K. there are periodic outbreaks of witchcraft accusations related to children with recent ones involving desperately poor asylum seekers from the Congo Basin ( Kinshasa , Brazzaville , Northern Angola ). Their practices and beliefs are a synthesis of traditional and new amongst the latter being possession by evil spirits accompanied by exorcism through corporal punishment.

Witchcraft belief is also a phenomenon amongst migrant town workers in Africa who ascribe falling into debt to having their credit cards bewitched by witches back in their home villages. Furthermore, AIDS workers have to assure people that HIV is not spread by witchcraft.

The West has seen an increase in witchcraft beliefs and conspiracy theories that may be compensating for the loss of the numinous in Western religion. David Taceys book, The Spirituality Revolution, has drawn attention to this lack, which is accompanied by an abandonment of the reality principle that could help ground and constructively shape these beliefs. Until attention is turned wholeheartedly inwards to the categories of imagination in the psyche, these will continue to be contaminated by power and express themselves in malevolent ways swamping the much-needed consciousness that must accompany such an inner quest.

Bibliography: Post-Jungians Today: Key papers in contemporary analytical psychology, 1998, Routledge, London ; Carl Gustav Jung , 2001, Sage: London ; Who Owns Psychoanalysis?, 2004, Karnac, London .

Ann Casement is a training analyst at the Association of Jungian Analysts which she represents on the IAAP Executive Committee. She is a New York State Licensed Psychoanalyst. Her forthcoming book with David Tacey is The Idea of the Numinous: Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Brunner-Routledge: 2006).